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Suicidal Compassion: How Utilitarianism at AI Companies Endangers Humanity | AI Frontiers

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Dan Hendrycks, Sep 09, 2026 — Utilitarians at AI companies imagine a cosmos filled with blissful AIs. They might risk human extinction to achieve it.

For millennia, philosophers have argued over the principles that should guide moral decision-making. Within countries and across the world today, humans continue to hold a huge variety of moral worldviews. However, within AI corporations, employees’ beliefs are far from representative of the wider population. In fact, a large fraction of people involved in AI development subscribe to—or heavily lean toward—a utilitarian worldview with the central goal of maximizing total wellbeing (the sum of pleasure minus suffering across all sentient beings). As innocent as this may initially sound, it…

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