Elon Musk to Walter Isaacson: humans are unlikely to stay in control of superintelligence
Elon MuskDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → opened Walter Isaacson's new interview series The Builders (published 20 October 2026, interview taped 6 August 2026), discussing AI safety, xAI, his year in government and a post-work economy.
AI safety: truth-seeking and curiosity Musk said he sees "at least some percentage chance" of AI being an existential threat but chose to be "a participant" rather than "a spectator". He argued an AI should be "curious" and "truth seeking", warning that forcing a model to hold contradictory beliefs "can make the AI insane". On control, he said: "if there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence, it's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario. So I hope the AI is nice to us."
OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI Musk said OpenAI "ended up accelerating AI" and that Anthropic, "really a splinter group from OpenAI", is "accelerating it even more". He confirmed xAI is providing compute to Anthropic, and said he has proposed that frontier labs hold a weekly call and give competitors access to new models a week before release so that "competitors would keep each other honest". He described xAI as having started as "a side hustle to a side hustle" before he returned to it about a year ago and combined X, xAI and SpaceX.
Government, robots and the end of money Musk said he stayed in government "too long" and "got carried away", concluding that "the only way we're going to solve the national debt is with AI and robots". He estimated digital superintelligence could lift global output by roughly 20 to 30%, but said robots plus expansion into space could reach "potentially a million times the size of the Earth economy", after which "conventional currency will not matter". He also said his companies are building 200 gigawatts a year of US solar production capacity.
