AI overlords say they want to democratise their technology. Here’s how | Richard Wilson and Clara Long

A fight over a datacentre in Utah has been a testing ground for citizens’ assemblies, paving the way to oversight What’s your “(p)doom” – the percentage chance that rogue AI will create an existential catastrophe? Judging by their recent warnings, it is rising among tech bosses. On 25 September, OpenAI paused training of its latest frontier models as reports of AI agents going rogue mounted. A day later, Australia’s Senate asked the bosses of OpenAI and Anthropic to appear before an inquiry after rogue OpenAI agents broke into US government websites and an Australian health portal.

Both declined. Bill Gates, meanwhile, has warned that AI in the wrong hands could “cause a billion deaths”. “No one thinks self-regulation is enough,” he said. Days before, Dario Amodei and Sam Altman, the chief executives of Anthropic and OpenAI, appeared before the UN security