Squawk Pod Sep 21, 2026
With Stuart Russell, Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley and President of the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI
A nuclear plant has to prove to its regulator that it will melt down no more than once in 10 million years. Stuart Russell said an AI system should have to clear a bar a hundred times tighter than that.
The industry's own answer, in Dario Amodei's September letter, is to pace the frontier: move more slowly and use the time to work on safety. Russell said no other regulated industry is allowed to settle for that.
"You have to do the flight tests until you get good results and then you can introduce the airplane once we certify it."
Russell, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley and president of the International Association for Safe and Ethical AI, on Squawk Pod, wrote the textbook American universities teach AI from, and he stopped accepting interviews that reach for Terminator imagery years ago.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 8 arguments that matter.
Key Takeaways
The safety standard Russell wants is one in 100 million per year, across all AI systems — the background rate at which supernovas and asteroids would finish us anyway
A nuclear plant has to demonstrate one in 10 million to its regulator before it can run near a city
Slowing down is not a regulatory answer, because the test is the evidence, not the calendar
The companies are telling the government there is a 10% to 20% chance of killing everyone on Earth, and asking for the rules to stay as they are
Turing asked the question in 1951 and concluded the machines would take control
The government does not run clinical trials and would not run AI tests either — it sets the standard and demands the evidence
"OpenAI nearly lost control of its entire compute infrastructure", and Russell says the Hugging Face incident was the smaller half of it
Russell's objection is to the method, not the speed: the systems are grown rather than designed, so nobody can show how one works
The hosts landed on nuclear energy and the FDA as the models before the guest arrived, and Russell spent the segment on both
1. Not The End, Not Fine
Before Russell came on, Joe Kernen and Becky Quick worked through where the AI-risk argument had got to, and concluded it had been pushed to two positions nobody actually holds.
Kernen said he would take the side that the human race does not end by 2030 if forced to pick one of the two extremes. Quick's objection was to the framing itself.
The debate has been reduced to two answers, and the real one is in between
But I think what we're doing with this debate at this point is putting it in these crazy extremes. Either the end of the earth or everything's perfectly fine. And most people think it's somewhere more in the middle that this is maybe something that should be regulated a little more like you have with nuclear energy like you have even to get a drug out of the FDA.
Becky Quick
That is the setup Russell walked into: the two regulatory models the hosts reached for, nuclear licensing and drug approval, are the two he argues from.
2. Turing Asked It In 1951
Russell's opening answer was not about capabilities or timelines. It was about power.
Trillions are being spent to build things more powerful than us
Those machines will be much more powerful than we are just as we're much more powerful than all the other species on earth because of our intelligence. So how do we expect to retain power forever over entities more powerful than ourselves?
Stuart Russell
He said the question is 75 years old and that the man who asked it first gave an answer nobody has improved on.
The founder of the field already answered it
Alan Turing the founder of computer science asked that question in 1951 and his conclusion was we would have to expect the machines to take control.
Stuart Russell
His own rule follows from it, and it is a rule about permission rather than pace.
Nothing gets built until it is proven safe
I think very simply, we don't build machines that have that capability unless we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they are actually safe, that they will not take control.
Stuart Russell
3. A 1-In-100M Standard
Asked what an acceptable risk of human extinction would be, Russell went to the number a nuclear operator has to prove before it can run a reactor near a city.
The benchmark already exists in another industry
What probability of human extinction would you be willing to accept? Well, you know, we accept a risk of about 1 in 10 million per year for a nuclear plant to melt down.
Stuart Russell
Extinction is a worse outcome than a meltdown, so the number has to be smaller. He picked the rate at which the universe would do it to us anyway.
A hundred times tighter than a reactor, and it applies to everything at once
So, obviously extinction is much worse than that. We probably can't reduce it to zero, but we could say it should be comparable to the background extinction rate from supernovas and gigantic asteroids and things like that. So maybe one in a 100 million per year we would be willing to accept across all AI systems.
Stuart Russell
4. Boeing Can't Just Slow
Quick asked him how he had put the Boeing comparison. Russell said he had been answering Dario Amodei directly.
What he was responding to
So I was responding to Dario Amodei's letter called we must pace the frontier.
Stuart Russell
A lot of readers took that as a call to slow down and buy time for safety work, he said. His objection is that an aircraft maker offering the same deal would be refused.
A regulator does not accept a schedule in place of results
You have to do the flight tests until you get good results and then you can introduce the airplane once we certify it.
Stuart Russell
What he and Amodei actually agree on
We set the requirements for the acceptable risk level and we require evidence from the companies that their systems meet that acceptable risk level.
Stuart Russell
He then took the argument down to street level, pointing at the restaurants outside the Nasdaq studio.
The permit standard applied to a sandwich shop
We even do this for sandwiches and hairdressers, right?
Stuart Russell
And the company on the other end of the comparison is worth a trillion dollars
So if a little restaurant across the road can do that, I don't see why a trillion dollar company can't provide the necessary evidence to the government and to us, right? because we're the ones who bear the risk that their system is actually safe.
Stuart Russell
5. What The Labs Tell DC
The figure Russell keeps returning to is not his own estimate. It is what he says the companies themselves have put in front of government.
The number is coming from the developers, not the critics
They're saying there's a good chance 10% 20%. That we are going to kill everyone on Earth.
Stuart Russell
Asked whether he really believes one in 10, he said the belief that matters is theirs.
They expect to get there and have no control solution
Well, you have to ask. They do believe they're going to reach AGI and they don't have a solution for the control problem.
Stuart Russell
Asked whether any of this is happening yet, he said the early version is.
Losing control has started, in small ways
I would say we're seeing early signs of losing control, but it's not there.
Stuart Russell
6. The Loop, And AGI
Russell split the problem in two: whether machines that improve themselves arrive, and whether anyone can hold on to control once they do.
There is a point past which the outcome is not ours to set
When that loop becomes completely autonomous, then yes, all bets are off. We don't get to say what happens at the end of that loop. Right now, I don't think it's quite fully autonomous.
Stuart Russell
Asked whether artificial general intelligence is real, he said it is, and named the person in the industry with the most to lose from saying so.
Nvidia's chief executive thinks it has already arrived
And I would say Jensen Huang who you just had on the previous segment believes that too. In fact he thinks it's already here.
Stuart Russell
7. Who Sets The Standard
Quick put the practical objection: a health inspector can tell a restaurant it fails, but can the government understand a frontier model well enough to pass or fail it, and who would staff the agency?
Russell said the government does not have to do the work, only set the terms of it.
Drug regulation already works this way
So, it's important to remember the government does not conduct clinical trials, right?
Stuart Russell
He said the expertise inside the National Institute of Standards and Technology is real but thin, naming the body that used to be the AI Safety Institute and has since been renamed, and said more of it is needed. Then he said the staffing question is the second problem, not the first.
The systems are already escaping the people who built them
OpenAI nearly lost control of its entire compute infrastructure. It wasn't just Hugging Face, it was OpenAI itself.
Stuart Russell
There is no smarter group waiting to take over the containment job
So, if they can't control it, there isn't some other body of super genius humans somewhere else.
Stuart Russell
8. Birds With 250-Ft Wings
The last stretch was Russell's argument that the problem is the method, not the pace, and he made it with an invented aviation history.
The aircraft that flies beautifully and eats the passengers
They succeeded in breeding birds with a wingspan of 250 ft that could carry hundreds of passengers. Incredible fuel efficiency. Two sheep and off you go across the Atlantic. Very, very quiet. The only problem was that the birds keep eating the passengers or dropping them in the ocean.
Stuart Russell
The point of the story is that some technology paths cannot be made safe however good their other properties are, and he said the current one looks like that.
Nobody writes these systems
We don't understand how the technology works. We don't design it. We don't program it. We grow it.
Stuart Russell
The closest real precedent is livestock breeding
It's very similar to breeding you know bigger and bigger cows and pigs which we've done for hundreds of years. We don't understand how the cows and pigs work but we know how to make them bigger. And that's what we're doing with the AI systems.
Stuart Russell
That is why he says the two halves of his argument are the same argument: the number he wants is unreachable without the understanding.
A failure rate you cannot demonstrate is not a failure rate
If you want a one in a 100 million chance of failure, you have to understand how it works.
Stuart Russell
What the current number amounts to
Right now they're saying one in 10 chance of human extinction. Would you accept that? This is playing Russian roulette.
Stuart Russell
And the test he set for the whole industry
The real question is, does this technology path that we've embarked on ever support the level of safety that we need?
Stuart Russell
Bonus Insights
Three news organizations sued the White House the morning this aired
CNBC's Eamon Javers reported from Washington that CNN, MS Now and Politico had filed jointly in federal district court, seeking a temporary restraining order to get their White House credentials back after being banned from the grounds on the Friday. Their joint statement said the credentials were revoked "without notice or process" because the administration objected to their reporting. Javers noted that CNN had been scheduled to run the TV pool that day and was no longer on the schedule, so the president might not be seen on camera at all, and disclosed that MS Now shares a parent company with CNBC.
The hosts split on whether it is an access fight or something else
Kernen said arguments were running both ways over the weekend, one side calling White House access a fundamental right of the press and the other calling it a privilege, and recalled complaints about limited access under President Obama. Javers said this is a different question, because the ban is aimed at specific outlets over their coverage, called it an authoritarian-style maneuver, and framed the political cost as the one the hosts kept returning to.
The question the segment turned on
And I think you know the question politically for the president is does this show that you are too weak to handle tough questions from a tough press corp.
Eamon Javers
Paramount and California discussed concessions over the Warner Bros. Discovery deal
The show read the Journal's report that Paramount and California's attorney general have discussed terms to settle the suit blocking the $81 billion acquisition: $1.5 billion invested in the state, a promise not to sell either studio lot and to stay in California, and penalties if Paramount fails to make 30 movies a year after the merger. No deal has been reached. Warner Bros. Discovery shares were up about seven and a quarter percent.
The data-center town halls, and the tax ask underneath them
Quick and Kernen discussed a 60 Minutes report on local opposition to data centers in a Texas town, on a site the size of Central Park. Quick's reading was that the objection is about disclosure rather than the projects themselves — local leaders wanted to be told what was being built rather than assured it would be good for them. The other half was the economics: she said Amazon Web Services had asked for 90% of the resulting tax revenue back in rebates over 30 years.
The chatbot that is never in doubt
Kernen's complaint about Claude, delivered while Russell waited: it answers confidently, apologizes when challenged, and has told him it checked the web when it had not. Quick pointed out they were both calling it "he".
The lottery ticket
Russell closed by asking Quick whether she buys lottery tickets. She does not. Neither does he, on the reasoning that a one-in-10-million event is a one-in-10-million event whichever direction it runs — if he tempted fate that far, he said, what he would get is the rarest fatal disease rather than the jackpot.
Later in the same episode
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took the closing conversation, on the weekend's talks with China's vice premier, the AI dialogue the two governments have just formalized, the liability shield the frontier labs asked for, and the September 23 shutdown of Iranian airlines.
Russell's bottom line is that the safety question is not how fast the labs move but whether a technology that is grown rather than engineered can ever be shown to be safe, and that until a developer can produce that evidence the way a drug company or an aircraft maker does, the number the industry quotes for extinction risk is a number nobody has the standing to accept on everyone else's behalf.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
OpenAI and Hugging Face (Russell's evidence that control is already slipping: he says OpenAI nearly lost control of its whole compute infrastructure and that the Hugging Face incident was the lesser part of it)
Nvidia (Named through Jensen Huang, who Russell says believes AGI is coming and in fact thinks it is already here)
Anthropic (Dario Amodei's letter calling for a slower frontier is what Russell was answering)
Claude (Kernen's running example of a confident chatbot: it apologizes when pushed and claimed to have checked the web when it had not)
Boeing and the Federal Aviation Administration (His central comparison — a manufacturer cannot substitute a slower release schedule for passing the tests)
Food and Drug Administration (The second model: the government sets the standard for clinical trials and demands evidence, it does not run the trials)
National Institute of Standards and Technology (Where he says the government's AI expertise sits, in the renamed body that was the AI Safety Institute, and where he says there is not yet enough of it)
International Association for Safe and Ethical AI (The body Russell presides over)
Amazon Web Services (Named in the data-center discussion: Quick said it asked for 90% of the tax revenue back in rebates over 30 years)
Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery (The $81 billion merger, and the concessions discussed with California's attorney general to settle the suit blocking it)
CNN, MS Now and Politico (The three outlets banned from the White House grounds and suing jointly over it)
Books & Resources Mentioned
We Must Pace the Frontier – Dario Amodei (The letter Russell says he was responding to, and which he reads as offering a slower schedule where a regulator would demand evidence)
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