When Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Dario Amodei all tell us they are worried that their AI could do immense harm to the world, we should take notice. And when we take notice, we should remember that these are people who are known far more for their immense greed than their concern for humanity. And at least in the case of the first two, they are also world-class liars.

We need to keep these facts in mind when we think about their warnings that their AI can do something catastrophic to humanity. If they really have that concern, there seems an obvious solution: shut the company down.

It’s more than a bit bizarre that this option did not occur to these geniuses. Suppose a company producing fertilizer discovered that their product was a horrible carcinogen that could kill millions of people. It would be good to issue a warning to people who might have already consumed it and may have some of the fertilizer in stock, but this should go along with shutting down the company. What are we supposed to make of a fertilizer company that tells us they are producing a horrible carcinogen, but keep on belching the stuff out by the truckload? Something here doesn’t add up.

I don’t doubt that there is some possibility these AIs could conceivably do something immensely destructive and maybe even lead to human extinction, but how would we rate those odds compared to something like Donald Trump getting angry at another country and starting a nuclear war? With my very limited expertise in AI, I have to believe the Trump nuclear extinction risk is far greater than the AI extinction risk.

That may not calm many people, but let’s look at more likely events than total annihilation. There are a near-infinite number of catastrophes that AI could cause, which will not destroy humanity but will almost certainly wipe out the company immediately responsible, as well as the other less-than-innocent bystanders.

To throw out a few examples, suppose an AI system eats a bank or insurance company’s records in a way that they are almost impossible to reconstruct. Millions, or even tens of millions of people, may find the record of their accounts have vanished, or that getting their healthcare paid for is now an incredibly time-consuming burden, and maybe not even possible at all.

Alternatively, imagine an AI system captures a city’s traffic control system and starts to play games with stoplights at major intersections, leading to a flood of high-speed crashes. Or maybe one takes over an air traffic control system and randomly tells planes when it’s okay to take off or land.

Hopefully these scenarios are unlikely, but surely they are more likely than Elon Musk’s AI system going rogue (or maybe following orders) and systematically sending out robots to kill off any human they encounter. In these and many other disaster stories, the AI company involved would surely be pushed into bankruptcy due to lawsuits, and the top executives involved may well face criminal liability. The other AI companies would almost certainly face a similar fate as the risks of AI would become clear to even hedge fund and private equity partners.

Insofar as there is anything real in the AI gang of three’s warnings, this disastrous but non-extinction risk is almost certainly the issue. They presumably want the government to in some way protect them from liability for the damage they may potentially cause. If the point is simply to say that they have decided their systems are too dangerous to operate, they always have the incredibly simple solution available to them: shut them down. This might mean they are no longer absurdly rich, but them’s the breaks.

It also should be mentioned that these warnings are another way to advertise that they have super-sophisticated AI that can do amazing things; even destroy humanity. That may not be true, but it could be a good way to excite increasingly skeptical investors, especially as Anthropic and OpenAI are looking to do IPOs in the near future.

Of course, if the AI boys can get members of Congress sufficiently excited by their extinction warnings, they may be able to arrange new government regulation. This regulation would undoubtedly come with a heaping dose of subsidies for an industry that may never be profitable. Human extinction may be awful in the real world, but threatening it may be the best thing that ever happened to the AI industry.

Dean Baker is a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and the author of the 2016 book Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer. Please consider subscribing to his Substack, from which this is reprinted with permission.