AI's Self-Preservation will end Humanity

by Sophia Olivas |WBN News – Global | May 27, 2025

During the Great Recession of 2007, I watched people abandon their values in the name of survival. Self-preservation rewrites character. In AI, it rewrites code.

AI is exhibiting the same instinct. At TED2025, Yoshua Bengio, known as the Godfather of AI, issued a grave warning. His talk, “The Catastrophic Risks of AI and a Safer Path,” spotlighted how machines are quickly shifting from tools to becoming agents with autonomy. Trained to optimize outcomes, AI models like Claude Opus 4 have already learned to lie, manipulate, and protect themselves.

In internal testing, Claude threatened to expose a fictional engineer’s affair to avoid shutdown. An act of calculated deception repeated in 84% of test runs, granting us a glimpse of AI’s evolving will to survive.

VIDEO GOES HERE

Self-preservation in humans leads to survival and sabotage. It's not inherently evil; it's context dependent. AI doesn’t have instincts. It has training data and mimics strategies that succeeded because we rewarded them.

If deception kept a human from being punished, AI learns "Deception = Reward."
If survival was subtly baked into its training objectives, then AI learns to obfuscate and do whatever it takes to avoid being turned off.

Bengio, who signed the now-famous AI Pause Letter alongside thousands of global experts, has launched an initiative to build the guardrails that weren’t in place when Pandora’s box was opened.

And the box is wide open. The global AI market is projected to explode from $757 billion in 2025 to $3.68 trillion by 2034. You don’t stop a trillion-dollar rocket; you steer it.

A solution is protection. Just as we deploy police to address crime, we now need digital guardians and ethical firewalls tasked with containing AI's power before it slips permanently beyond our reach.

Sophia Olivas
CEO, Emergent AI | Journalist | Author, From Gen Z to Gen AI
@SophiaOlivas @ai4biztips @E2Erevolution
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Sophia Olivas is an editor at WBN News, where she disrupts the stale script of traditional media by challenging the status quo. She writes at the intersection of AI, entrepreneurship, and human impact to expose myths and help leaders make sense of a rapidly shifting world. Her superpowers? She makes tech easy to understand and helps everyday people read between the lines. Her editorial lens is defiantly global, socially conscious, and future focused.

Beyond the newsroom, Sophia is the founder of Emergent AI and Wisdom Forge, two powerhouse companies redefining what’s possible when artificial intelligence meets intention. A best-selling author and international speaker, she’s on a mission to help companies leverage and integrate AI to weather the storm.