Artificial intelligence could lead to the extinction of humanity, experts have warned.

Dozens of boffins – including OpenAI chief Sam Altman and Google DeepMind boss Demis Hassabis – have supported a statement saying the technology is one of the biggest risks to the planet.

The Centre for AI Safety said: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

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Former Google bigwig Dr Geoffrey Hinton and Prof Yoshua Bengio – often described as two of the “godfathers of AI” for their groundbreaking work – signed the stark warning.

Fears of the “existential” threat from artificial intelligence have snowballed since March when experts, including Tesla boss Elon Musk, signed an open letter calling for a halt to the development of the next generation of AI.

It asked if we should “develop non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us”.

Arvind Narayanan, a computer scientist at Princeton University, said the fears have “distracted attention away from the near-term harms of AI”.

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