Bridgewater’s Greg Jensen warns AI may need to kill people before regulators act

Greg Jensen, co-chief investment officer at Bridgewater Associates, delivered one of the bleakest assessments of AI regulation to date on September 11. His core argument: history suggests governments won’t act until something truly terrible happens. “Until the AI starts killing people, unfortunately, history would suggest we’re not going to do anything,” Jensen said, comparing the current moment to February 2020, when COVID-19 was already spreading globally but most governments hadn’t yet mobilized a response. A week of escalating warnings Jensen’s remarks capped a stretch of days that saw multiple high-profile figures voice serious concerns about the trajectory of AI development. On September 9 and 10, researchers at Anthropic, including Jacob Coxon and Evan Hubinger, issued stark cautions about the current pace of AI research. Coxon resigned from Anthropic during that window, citing the very risks he’d been studying from the inside. Both researchers warned that the field’s current trajectory could produce self-improving superintelligences, the kind of systems that don’t just follow instructions but rewrite their own capabilities. Their estimate was chilling: a greater than 10% pr...