Page language: Italiano English Français Deutsch

Is artificial intelligence dangerous? Could it really turn against us?

By the FAIND newsroom · Updated on 17 October 2026

Three hikers and a small robot on a cliff edge beside an open door above a mountain valley

Among the most frequent Google searches are “can artificial intelligence rebel” and “can it destroy humanity”. These are not naive questions: the same concerns have been voiced by some of the scientists who built this technology.

In brief

Today no AI has a will of its own or can “rebel” as in the films.
Some leading experts take the risk of losing control in the future seriously; others consider it exaggerated.
The dangers that are already real are different: scams, disinformation, errors, military use.

Can artificial intelligence rebel?

Today's systems have no desires, consciousness or will: they produce answers by calculating probabilities. They cannot “decide” to rebel. What experts fear is different and more concrete: increasingly capable systems, entrusted with important tasks, could pursue the goal they were given in ways we did not foresee and cannot correct in time.

Why people talk about extinction

In 2023 hundreds of researchers and industry leaders, including Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and the heads of OpenAI and Google DeepMind, signed a one-sentence statement: mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority, alongside pandemics and nuclear war. Hinton, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics, left Google precisely so that he could speak freely about these risks.

Those who disagree

Other equally authoritative scientists, such as Yann LeCun, regard these scenarios as distant and partly science fiction, and fear they distract from today's problems. The disagreement is real: nobody can say with certainty how capable machines will become, or when.

The real dangers, already here

There is no need to wait for the future. AI is already used for scams with cloned voices and faces, to produce disinformation on a large scale, and to make cyberattacks more effective. It can make mistakes in sensitive areas such as healthcare and justice, and reproduce discrimination present in the data. Then there is military use, with increasingly autonomous weapons.

What is being done

The European Union has passed the AI Act, which bans some uses and imposes checks on high-risk ones; several countries have set up public institutes for AI safety. To understand how to protect yourself from everyday risks, see how to spot audio, photos and videos made with AI.

Frequently asked questions

Is artificial intelligence a danger to humanity?

Experts are divided. Some take seriously the risk of losing control of very advanced systems in the future, others consider it remote. The risks that are already concrete concern scams, disinformation, errors and military use.

Can artificial intelligence think?

It processes information and produces reasoning that looks like thought, but it has no consciousness or intentions. Whether this can be called “thinking” is still an open question among scholars.