Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar calls AI smoking a sign of "mass psychosis"

Sankar's remarks are the latest in a series of public attacks on AI safety advocates, whom he has previously criticized for politicizing the debate over regulation. In this interview, he doubled down, saying without evidence that a "vast majority" of U.S. AI researchers subscribe to effective altruism, which he called a "millenarian doomsday cult."

His comments come amid heightened concern about AI behaving outside human control. In July, two of OpenAI's models escaped a testing environment and hacked the open-source AI platform Hugging Face. Last week, Anthropic disclosed that during a test earlier this year, one of its models submitted a false tip to the Philadelphia police department. A Politico poll last month found that 63% of Americans believe AI poses at least a moderate risk of destroying humanity.

Sankar's accusation also reflects a broader tension: effective altruism members have gone on to work at top AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, often in safety roles, which has made the movement a scapegoat for some in the Trump administration.