Altimeter's Gerstner blasts researchers voicing AI extinction warnings, questions 'political agenda'

Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner took aim at heightened warnings from AI researchers, describing this week's discourse surrounding the technology's ability to cause human extinction as detached from reality.

"What I didn't like this week is these hyperbolic scare tactics, which I think are hiding behind a political agenda," Gerstner told CNBC's "Halftime Report" on Friday. "And we ignored all of the extraordinary steps already being taken unlike in the age of the internet, unlike with social media, to get ahead of these downsides."

Gerstner's firm is an investor in both Anthropic and chief competitor OpenAI, as well as other notable artificial intelligence companies like enterprise search startup Glean and software and data analytics vendor Databricks.

His comments came after a researcher quit his job at Anthropic earlier this week and, in a post on X, accused AI companies of "gambling with our lives" in the race towards superintelligence.

"I don't think we've invested this much time and energy in safety before a new technology in my 25 years in Silicon Valley," Gerstner said. "If you listen to the echo chamber this week, you would think that we were hurtling ahead with total disregard to safety, and it's simply not true."

The post from the former Anthropic employee, Jacob Coxon, ignited a social media frenzy, as more researchers joined the fray to express their concerns around the rapid evolution of AI. Even before the latest outcry, the AI industry was facing a growing public backlash across the country tied to the buildout of massive AI data centers.

As it pertains to the risk of dire outcomes with self-improving AI models, the discussion isn't entirely new. But Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI governance researcher and executive director of the AI Futures Project, told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" on Friday that the model improvements now are moving in "a very concerning direction."

"It seems like a year from now, two years from now, three years from now, they really will be able to have AIs that can do the entire research process themselves, that will be autonomously self-improving, and that could go very badly," Kokotajlo said.

WATCH: CNBC's interview with AI Futures Project's Daniel Kokotajlo