AI could cause ‘catastrophic’ financial crisis, says Yuval Noah Harari

Harari said an AI-created financial crisis would not destroy civilisation – ‘at least not directly’. Photograph: Antonio Olmos

Artificial intelligence could cause a financial crisis with “catastrophic” consequences, according to the historian and author Yuval Noah Harari, who says the technology’s sophistication makes forecasting its dangers difficult.

Harari told the Guardian a concern about safety testing AI models was foreseeing all the problems that a powerful system could cause. Unlike with nuclear weapons, there was not one “big, dangerous scenario” that everyone understood, he said.