It’s not hypothetical: the dangers of AI are already here | Granate Kim and Mohamed Hussein

In recent weeks, concerns about AI have forged unlikely alliances in the tech and policy worlds. Tech moguls such as Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis joined Dario Amodei, Satya Nadella and Bill Gates in sounding the alarm about the dangers of AI and called for a slowdown of the technology’s development despite years of racing for dominance. The senator Bernie Sanders teamed up with Steve Bannon to urge Congress to regulate AI, which has become one of the very few issues to unite Americans across the political spectrum.

The latest moves were sparked in part by the AI researcher Jacob Coxon’s warnings on Twitter/X that AI companies are “gambling with our lives” and believe that the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade”.

The reality is, we don’t have to wait to see how AI will bring about unprecedented death and destruction, because we’ve already witnessed its unleashing.

Bill Gates’s nearly 6,000-word essay in late August warning about AI and its potential harms to humanity doesn’t come as a surprise. One of us has been a Microsoft employee for nearly a decade, witnessing all the dangers unfold in real time. Together, we’ve spent the past two years organizing with other Microsoft employees and activists to uncover the company’s role in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. We have collectively called on Microsoft to cut ties with the Israeli military.

But it’s not just Microsoft that is involved in AI-driven destruction.

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza was a testing ground for the use of AI in warfare and the results were deeply disturbing. Israel’s military used AI to identify people to kill, with 12,000 targets generated and bombed in the first month alone. This was done with little to no meaningful human oversight, as documented in an investigation by Oscar-winning Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, whose latest film NAZA, a Guardian-produced film, includes chilling testimonials by the soldiers involved.

Earlier this year in Iran, the US military launched an AI-involved airstrike that hit Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, killing 156 children, teachers and other civilians. The strike that caused what is almost certainly the worst incident of civilian casualties in the war was, most likely, the result of a “targeting mistake” that relied on faulty data.

The horrors wrought by AI aren’t limited to people overseas – they’re already being felt by vulnerable communities in the US The Department of Homeland Security is using AI tools – including Microsoft’s Azure – to monitor, arrest and deport immigrants at a massive scale. Law enforcement agencies nationwide are deploying facial recognition technology despite evidence of algorithmic bias that has led to the wrongful arrest and incarceration of Latino and Black Americans. The NYPD also partnered with Microsoft to build its Domain Awareness System, using Azure to connect to 18,000 security cameras, according to the New York Daily News, creating a mass surveillance system that has expanded to Georgia and other parts of the world, including Brazil and Singapore. Datacenters that power AI are being built in rural and low-income neighborhoods throughout the US where many are living under the poverty line and are now facing significant health threats from air pollution caused by these facilities.

Though many of these harms have been documented over the years, rightwing government leaders are continuing to shut down dissent through dishonest and draconian measures. Donald Trump has called AI risks a “hoax” and said any attempts to limit the power of the technology were part of a “sick conspiracy”. House Republicans have dismissed the public’s concerns about AI, blaming Chinese government disinformation for public opposition to datacenters. Israel’s culture minister, Miki Zohar, has threatened to revoke the citizenship of NAZA film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, accusing them of “treason against the state”.

One thing is clear: the dangerous future that Gates, Amodei, and others are warning us about is already here, and we must act now to prevent further harm. Those of us with families in Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and US neighborhoods terrorized by ICE already know people living through the nightmare.

In the last few weeks, we’ve seen promising efforts from US policymakers attempting to curtail the potential harms of AI technology. The House recently proposed the Frontier Act to embed third-party evaluators within tech companies to conduct safety assessments, and earlier this month, Sanders and the representative Greg Casar introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act to stop tech leaders from building and developing technologies that humans cannot control.

These bills are a good starting point. But they could take years to pass and don’t address the devastation already being caused. Frontier AI companies and governments must act now to ban the selling and use of AI technologies in military targeting, autonomous weapons systems, and mass surveillance. This is what employees from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google DeepMind are calling for.

We are living through a precious and fleeting moment when we can still confront the harms AI has already caused to the most vulnerable and course-correct before they become irreversible, spreading into more communities. We need to establish clear guardrails right now and shape the future of AI so that it protects everyone, not just a privileged few.

• Mohamed Hussein organizes with No Azure for Apartheid, an employee-led movement calling on Microsoft to end its involvement with the Israeli military. He is also a leader in Palestinians and Allies at Microsoft, an internal employee group.
• Granate Kim works with No Azure for Apartheidand is theCampaigns Director at MPower Change, an organization that mobilizes Muslim communities in defense of human rights.