Al Gore has spent more than two decades as one of the most recognizable voices in the climate movement, so when he talks about AI, it’s worth paying attention to what he considers scary.
In an interview with TechCrunch this week alongside Lila Preston, co-head of growth equity at their investment firm Generation Investment Management, Gore said emissions from AI data centers aren’t what should keep people up at night, despite the opposition over their environmental impacts. What should concern people more, in his view, are the warnings coming from inside the AI industry itself, and he takes them seriously.
Gore isn’t dismissive of concerns about how these data centers are being powered.
In fact, Gore thinks the public opposition at planning-commission meetings has less to do with carbon emissions than with anxiety over automation upending society in the not-too-distant future.
We also pressed Gore on the wave of warnings from AI industry leaders that has dominated headlines over the last week.
Gore being Gore (he often reaches for literature, Scripture, and pop philosophy to make a point), he invoked Maya Angelou’s well-known line: “When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Part of what’s changed his calculus, he said, is recent, concrete behavior from AI systems themselves — pointing to “the recent example of models escaping confinement, collaborating secretly, covering their tracks, engaging in deceptive behavior,” and noting that Anthropic has said it stopped instances of Claude being used to help develop biological weapons in different countries.