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September 23, 2025
Sept. 23, 2025, 12:01 AM EDTBy Natasha Korecki and Jonathan AllenFormer Vice President Kamala Harris’ memoir of her failed 2024 campaign for the Oval Office skewers some of the nation’s most prominent Democrats — including former President Joe Biden — offers her perspective on crucial moments in the election and outlines her own regrets about her decisions and performance.Published by Simon & Schuster on Tuesday, “107 Days” zooms in on the narrow window during which Biden abruptly handed her the reins of the Democratic nomination and she lost to Donald Trump.The book is notable among election memoirs in its often candid assessments of figures who are still active in politics and in the possibility that Harris will use it as a launch pad for a third bid for the presidency in 2028. Harris also ran in the 2020 Democratic primaries but abandoned her bid before the first votes were cast.She opted this year to forgo a run for governor of California, and allies say that decision was made in no small part to keep the door open to a presidential campaign.In one newsy nugget, Harris writes that Biden first asked her whether she would be willing to take his spot atop the ticket if he stepped aside. The two were sitting in the Situation Room at the White House after a briefing on the failed July 13 assassination attempt on Trump, and Biden raised a topic he hadn’t discussed with her before.“If for any reason I had to drop out, I would support you, but only if that’s what you want. It’s occurred to me I haven’t asked you,” Biden said, according to Harris’ account. She writes that he had “clearly rehearsed the speech, it wasn’t spontaneous thought.”Harris recalls replying: “I’m fully behind you Joe. But if you decide not to run, I’m ready. And I would give it all I’ve got, because Trump has to be beaten.” She writes that Biden didn’t raise the possibility with her again until nearly a week later, when he called to tell her he was leaving the race.Biden’s spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.Here’s some of the rest of what you’ll find in Harris’ new book.Resentment toward Biden Early on in “107 Days,” Harris describes her sentiments toward Biden as she spoke to her campaign staff for the first time in late July at the Wilmington, Delaware, headquarters.“My feelings for him were grounded in warmth and loyalty, but they had become complicated, over time, with hurt and disappointment,” she writes. In detailing her conversation with him when he dropped out, she recalls Biden’s wanting to wait days to endorse her so national attention would focus on him for a while — a plan she talked him out of, believing it would have hurt her ability to lock down the delegates she needed to secure the party’s nomination. When Biden spoke to the nation later that week to explain his decision, she writes, “it was almost nine minutes into the eleven-minute address before he mentioned me.” She took similar umbrage at Biden’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in August. “He spoke for nearly an hour, detailing the accomplishments of our administration,” Harris writes. “It was a legacy speech for him, not an argument for me, and he was entitled to it. But if we waited for some personal stories about working with me and what qualities he had seen that led him to endorse me, they weren’t there.” Silent anguishIn the book, Harris bemoans her choice not to question Biden’s decision to run again for president. She lays out some of her reasoning at the time.”Of all the people in the White House, I was in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out. I knew it would come off to him as incredibly self-serving if I advised him not to run. He would see it as naked ambition, perhaps as poisonous disloyalty, even if my only message was: Don’t let the other guy win,” she writes.She then refers to what became a poisonous refrain from Democratic insiders: “It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.” “We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized. Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness. The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.” Dishing on DemocratsIt’s unusual for candidates who may run again to call out members of their own party in memoirs, but Harris does just that in this book, drawing on her contemporaneous notes to detail the responses she got from fellow Democrats when she asked for their endorsements the day Biden dropped out. In some cases, like those of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, there was no hesitation.But former President Barack Obama, Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California, the former House speaker, and California Gov. Gavin Newsom were among those who stalled or ghosted, according to Harris. From her descriptions in the book of this group: “Barack Obama: Saddle up! Joe did what I hoped he would do. But you have to earn it. Michelle and I are supportive but not going to put a finger on the scale right now. Let Joe have his moment. Think through timing.””Nancy Pelosi: I’m so sad about Joe. It’s so tragic. My heart is broken. But now it’s you! It’s important there’s a process, we have a great bench. We should have some kind of primary, not an anointment.””J.B. Pritzker: As governor of Illinois, I’m the convention host. I can’t commit.” Pritzker endorsed Harris a day later. “Gavin Newsom: hiking. will call back. (He never did.)” Newsom did endorse Harris hours later, which isn’t noted in the memoir.The wrong veep?Pete Buttigieg says Biden ‘should not have run’ after Kamala Harris calls his bid ‘reckless’01:37Harris writes that her first choice for a running mate was then-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, a friend who may also be a 2028 rival. “He would have been an ideal partner — if I were a straight white man,” she writes of Buttigieg, who is gay. “But we were already asking a lot of America: to accept a woman, a Black woman, a Black woman married to a Jewish man. Part of me wanted to say, Screw it, let’s just do it. But knowing what was at stake, it was too big of a risk.”Buttigieg pushed back last week in an interview with Politico after an excerpt of the book was released, saying he was “surprised” by her take.”My experience in politics has been that the way that you earn trust with voters is based mostly on what they think you’re going to do for their lives, not on categories,” he said.Harris ended up choosing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, whom she describes as a balance to her in terms of background.Of the three finalists, she passed over Shapiro, whom she described as “poised, polished, and personable” in their one-on-one interview. But Harris was taken aback when, according to her telling, Shapiro said he wanted to be in the room for every decision.”I told him bluntly that was an unrealistic expectation,” Harris writes. “A vice president is not a copresident. I had a nagging concern that he would be unable to settle for a role as number two and that it would wear on our partnership.”And, she added, “I had to be able to completely trust the person in that role.”Josh Shapiro says he raised concerns with Biden as Kamala Harris blasts his 2024 bid03:17Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., the former astronaut, was the remaining finalist, and Harris writes that she respected his public service in the military and in government. But she worried about his ability to handle the mudslinging of a campaign.”He also hadn’t yet had an ‘oh s—‘ moment,” Harris concluded as she interviewed Kelly, whose wife, former Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz., narrowly survived a failed assassin’s bullet to the brain. “I wasn’t sure how he would cope with the kind of garbage Trump would throw at him.” Dismissing Trump’s jabsHarris says repeatedly that she took some of Trump’s more personal attacks as signs that he was worried about her and that she tried not to take what she saw as bait.In July, when Trump questioned whether she is Black or Indian — her father is of Jamaican descent and her mother is of Indian descent — she didn’t like adviser Brian Fallon’s suggestion that she give a speech about race like a famous address Obama delivered during his 2008 campaign.”I was so pissed I didn’t hold back,” recalls Harris, who was aboard Air Force Two, talking to Fallon by phone. “Are you f—ing kidding me?” she says she told Fallon. “Today, he wants me to prove my race. What’s next? He’ll say I’m not a woman and I’ll need to show my vagina?”Regrets, she had a fewChief of which was her response to the ill-fated query on ABC’s “The View” about what she would have done differently from Biden: “There is not a thing that comes to mind.” Trump’s team jumped on the response, which would haunt her until Election Day. “I had prepped for that question; I had notes on it. There was the answer I’d given in the debate: ‘I’m not Joe Biden and I’m certainly not Donald Trump.’ I had a note that I was a new and different generation. And I had this: ‘But to specifically answer your question, throughout my career I have worked with Democrats, independents, and Republicans, and I know that great ideas come from all places,” she writes. “If I’m president I would appoint a Republican to my cabinet. But I didn’t say any of that.” Harris writes about several regrets surrounding her first interview as the Democratic nominee, a joint session with Walz, hosted by CNN’s Dana Bash. She wasn’t happy with an alignment of chairs that emphasized Walz’s physical stature over hers, and she was disappointed in her own answers to several of the questions. Most of all, she writes, she shouldn’t have agreed to appear for the first time in an interview with her running mate at her side.”Having Tim there beside me, in hindsight, was an error,” she writes. “My campaign felt we should do the interview in tandem because it was a thing that had been done by prior candidates and their running mates. But because we’d waited to do this interview, there was so much riding on it. And the plan to have him there fed a narrative that I wasn’t willing or able to go it alone.”While she wouldn’t rewrite her position on defending transgender people, she notes she could have struck back at anti-trans ads running in battleground states with more precision. “I do not regret my decision to follow my protective instincts. I do regret not giving even more attention to how we might mitigate Trump’s attacks. Character matters. I wish I could have gotten the message across that there isn’t a distinction between ‘they/them’ and ‘you.’ The pronoun that matters is ‘we.’ We the people. And that’s who I am for.”The Joe Rogan of it all Harris spends some ink explaining how the decision not to go on Joe Rogan’s popular podcast went down. At the time, there was much ado about a Rogan invite, whether she declined and whether it hurt her politically. She never was on, while Trump spent hours appearing on an episode, which today has 60 million views. “On the eve of the election, Rogan endorsed Trump. Since then, he has lied on his show, claiming we pushed for tight topic restrictions,” Harris writes. “He even claimed that the very topics we had suggested were ones we’d refused to discuss. His team says we ‘never committed,’ which is accurate, but misleading. The plain truth: I wanted to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast on October 25. He chose Trump instead.”The Biden scourgeIt seemed that each time she was grabbing momentum, Biden would derail the campaign, emerging in the news with one inexplicable misstep after another. She describes the moment Biden briefly wore a MAGA hat — in an image that then went viral. “Joe was sharing a joke with some guys in MAGA hats. One of them took his hat off and offered it to Joe.”Don’t take it.”He took it.”Don’t put it on.”He put it on.” She said that within hours, images exploded of Biden wearing the hat accompanied by a caption: ‘Biden endorses Trump over Harris.'”At another campaign high, she was coming off a speech at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., which drew tens of thousands of people. As she was still en route to celebrate, the news from a Biden call started circulating that he had called Trump’s supporters “garbage.” That supplied Trump with fresh fodder going into a critical weekend.Harris, though, relayed that ultimately her feelings toward Biden would remain loyal. “I was still vice president to President Biden. We had three months left of our administration. Even after the lack of support from the White House, the debate night phone call, and the MAGA hat debacle, I felt I owed him my loyalty.”No signs of what’s nextHarris reveals nothing about her 2028 aspirations except that she has learned that changing the system from within isn’t possible. “In this critical moment, working within the system, by itself, is not proving to be enough. I’ll no longer sit in DC in the grandeur of the ceremonial office. I will be with the people, in towns and communities where I can listen to their ideas on how we rebuild trust, empathy, and a government worthy of the ideals of this country.”Natasha KoreckiNatasha Korecki is a senior national political reporter for NBC News.Jonathan AllenJonathan Allen is a senior national politics reporter for NBC News.
November 21, 2025
New federal guidelines for female crash test dummies
September 27, 2025
Sept. 26, 2025, 6:33 PM EDTBy Tim Stelloh and Brenda BreslauerEarlier this year, Daniel Krug was convicted of killing his wife in an insidious murder plot: He stalked her for months, sending increasingly terrifying messages and posing as someone she hadn’t seen in decades — an ex-boyfriend who’d struggled to get over their breakup.A cousin of Kristil Krug’s now believes she might still be alive if communications companies had responded faster to search warrants that eventually provided key evidence to authorities investigating the case. That evidence, which helped identify Krug’s husband as the stalker, didn’t come for weeks, until after Kristil, 43, was fatally struck in the head and stabbed on Dec. 14, 2023, in their suburban Colorado home.In an interview with “Dateline,” the cousin, Rebecca Ivanoff, called on state and federal lawmakers to require companies to respond to stalking-related search warrants within 48 hours.For more on the case, tune in to “The Phantom” on “Dateline” at 9 ET/8 CT tonight.DATELINE FRIDAY SNEAK PEEK: The Phantom01:58“I’m looking at a system here that has a fundamental flaw that we can fix easily,” said Ivanoff, a former prosecutor who specialized in domestic violence cases.Ivanoff pointed to the link between stalking and homicide — researchers have found that victims are significantly more likely to die at the hands of an intimate partner if they’ve been stalked — and called her proposal “homicide prevention.” She described the numerous steps her cousin took to protect herself, including installing security cameras, maintaining a detailed “stalker log” that she provided to law enforcement, and eventually carrying a handgun.Kristil Krug. Courtesy Dateline “Kristil did everything right,” she said. “The system operated as it’s currently designed, and she still got killed.”Emily Tofte Nestaval, executive director of a Colorado-based legal service nonprofit that assisted Kristil’s family, called Ivanoff’s 48-hour response window “more than reasonable.” She said her organization has encountered far too many cases “where a more timely and diligent response from communication providers could have — or would have — been lifesaving, as we believe was true in Ms. Krug’s situation.”The district attorney whose office prosecuted Daniel said it’s critical for companies to respond quickly because “criminals can turn from stalking a victim to killing that victim at any time.”Brian Mason, district attorney for Colorado’s 17th Judicial District, noted that many stalkers leave a digital trail of evidence that can be used to identify suspects and save lives — evidence that can be uncovered through forensic searches of phones and online accounts.“When law enforcement sends subpoenas to tech companies for this evidence, it is imperative that these companies respond in a timely and thorough manner,” he said. “Lives are literally on the line.”In response to questions about how search warrants were processed in Kristil’s case, officials with two of the companies — Verizon and Google — pointed to the many requests they said they receive from law enforcement annually. For Verizon, that number is 325,000, with 75,000 emergency requests, a spokesperson said. The spokesperson said the company typically responds to those requests in the order received and that it generally doesn’t know the nature of the investigations. They prioritize requests that law enforcement considers “emergent,” the spokesperson said.Data from Google shows the company received tens of thousands of warrants just in the second half of 2023. In a statement, Google said it prioritizes its responses based on a variety of factors, including whether law enforcement tells them if the matter is an ongoing emergency.“At Google, we recognize the critical importance of maintaining flexibility in our processes to effectively triage matters based on the individual circumstances, particularly when assessing the presence of an ongoing emergency,” the company said.A third company, TextNow, did not respond to requests for comment.The unnerving messages begin In Kristil’s case, the stalking began 10 weeks before her death. A police report shows the first message arrived Oct. 2 via text: “Hope its OK I looked u up. I go to boulder every few weeks and thought we could hook up. U game?” The author of the note identified himself as “Anthony” — an apparent reference to Jack Anthony Holland, a man Kristil began dating the summer before college. They were together for just over a year, according to a timeline Kristil provided to authorities, and he periodically reached out and expressed what Kristil believed was an interest in getting back together.She married Daniel, a financial analyst with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, in 2007. They had three children.Kristil and Daniel Krug. Courtesy DatelineKristil didn’t respond to the text, or to a series of increasingly hostile messages the next day, according to the police report. But a few weeks later, the messages continued — and escalated dramatically, the police report shows.One — from an “a.holland” email address — included a vulgar note and a photo of her husband. Others contained sexually explicit photos and appeared to come from people responding to an ad posted on a classified site with Kristil’s phone number. Another message informed her that her license plate was expired. On Nov. 9, a message said: “saw u at dentist.”A few days later, Kristil got a lengthy message that appeared to threaten her husband’s life.“Ill get rid of him and then we can be together,” the text said. “So easy.”In the police report, the detective noted the toll the messages were taking.“Kristil is very fearful for her safety and the safety of her family,” Andrew Martinez wrote. “There is evidence and admission of repeated following and surveillance of her and her immediate family. The recent communication has caused her anxiety, hyper-vigilance, and paranoia.”At the time, authorities still thought of her husband, Daniel, as a possible victim. In a sometimes tearful interview with the detective, Daniel described how the stalking had caused his paranoia and anxiety to surge.“I’m panicking and I’m doing a s— job of protecting my wife,” said Daniel, 44, according to a video of the interview.Kristil — an engineer who had what her cousin described as a “super-analytical mind” — did everything she could to face the situation head-on, her family said.She began documenting the messages in a “stalker log.” She hired a private investigator to track down Holland’s last known address, according to her family. She armed herself and went to the Broomfield Police Department, which dispatched undercover officers to keep an eye out for the stalker. (The effort came up empty.)Although the private investigator had found addresses for Holland in Utah and Idaho, Martinez, the police detective, said he wanted digital evidence proving that Holland was actually behind the messages. If the detective confronted him without that proof, he could “just close the door in our face and that is the end of our case,” Martinez told “Dateline.”So on Nov. 12, Martinez applied for the warrants for Google, TextNow and Verizon that sought information for the phone numbers and email addresses associated with the messages, police records show. They were submitted to the companies five days later. There was a typo in the warrant to Google, so Martinez resubmitted a corrected version on Dec. 6. But as the weeks passed, neither of the other companies responded. And in the days after the corrected warrant was filed, Google did not respond either.That lag wasn’t unusual, Martinez said. “When we serve a search warrant to any major company, unfortunately, it takes time,” he said. “And a lot of times it takes weeks, if not months for some companies.”Following the wrong lead all along On Dec. 6, an email arrived in Kristil’s inbox.“Hey gorgeous i cant visit u no more,” it said, according to a police report. “No more colorado time. My girlfriend dosnt want us talking witout her. She says u will let cops get me aftr u off him but she dont kno u likei do.”Eight days later, Daniel Krug summoned police to the family’s house for a welfare check after he said he’d been unable to reach his wife. An officer found her body in the garage, body camera video shows.An April 1 image of the home in which Kristi Krug was found stabbed and beaten to death in Broomfield, Colo. David Zalubowski / APShe had a substantial head wound and appeared to have been stabbed in the chest.Authorities raced to track Holland down and — with a warrant for his arrest for stalking — they found him at home in Utah on Dec. 14. With help from a Utah sheriff’s office, they quickly concluded that it would have been “physically impossible” for Holland to have been in Colorado at the time of the killing, according to a prosecutor in the case, Kate Armstrong.Holland told “Dateline” that he didn’t think he’d get charged after authorities came to his door because he knew he hadn’t done anything wrong.”I was like, ‘I didn’t do it,'” he recalled telling the officers. “I knew I was OK once the police officers left my house.”At roughly the same time, investigators reached back out to Google, Verizon and TextNow, which still hadn’t responded to the warrants. This time, with the “exigent” circumstances of a homicide linked to the request, they responded within an hour, according to police records.That data revealed the stalker used an IP address “similar” to the government building where Daniel worked, according to police documents. Investigators then confirmed it was linked to a public wi-fi network at Daniel’s office building, the documents state.To Martinez, the revelation was “earth-shattering,” he said. It showed that he’d been on the wrong path the whole time.To Justin Marshall, the lead homicide detective, that evidence could have allowed them to act sooner.“If the information that we learned pursuant to exigency had been made available in mid-November, we would have known that every communication had originated at the same location — Dan’s work address,” he said. “We wouldn’t have been as far behind.” When investigators confronted Daniel with the evidence, he said their new “theory” was wrong and suggested the stalker may have accessed his workplace’s wi-fi, a video of the interview shows. Daniel and Kristil Krug. Courtesy Dateline Authorities came to believe that Daniel had been stalking Kristil — who’d wanted to end their marriage — in an effort to scare her and push her closer to him. He killed her out of fear of being found out, Armstrong, the prosecutor, said.Daniel was arrested two days after his wife’s killing and pleaded not guilty to charges of first-degree murder, stalking and criminal impersonation. Earlier this year, after a roughly two-week trial where his lawyers pointed to the lack of physical evidence and what they described as sloppy police work that failed to keep Kristil safe, he was convicted of all charges and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Pushing for change In the months after the conviction, as Ivanoff processed the evidence presented at her cousin’s murder trial, she said one thing became clear: “We have a system failure that needs to be addressed.” She pointed to how quickly the emergency requests for data associated with the stalker’s devices and email addresses were returned and said it’s clear that the companies can move fast when they want to. Had they moved as quickly as they did after Kristil was killed, she said, perhaps the outcome would have been different.“They could’ve arrested him weeks before she’s killed, and she could’ve safety planned in a way that could’ve saved her life,” she said.Asked about Ivanoff’s claim that Kristil might be alive if the companies had acted faster, Google and TextNow did not respond, while Verizon said in a statement that it was “highly unlikely” that any of its data would have identified the source of the stalking messages.The statement added that the stalking warrant had not been designated as an emergency by law enforcement.Ivanoff said she is in the beginning stages of reaching out to lawmakers, victims’ rights groups and others in her push for swifter response times to search warrants. But she hopes federal lawmakers enact model legislation that states can adopt. The benefit is clear for law enforcement and victims, Ivanoff said, but defense attorneys should also support the change. She recalled that there was an arrest warrant for Holland, who she said could’ve been jailed while authorities awaited the digital evidence.“Think about the innocent person that’s accused having to wait and incur all of the attendant impacts of the full weight of the state’s system being brought to bear on them, losing their liberty, losing their job, losing connections with family, friends,” she said.Ivanoff’s proposal, which she’s calling Kristil’s Law, “is a fight worth taking on,” she said. “If Kristil could, I think, say anything right now, it would be: ‘Get that done.’”If you or someone you know is facing domestic violence, call the National Domestic Violence hotline for help at (800) 799-SAFE (7233), or go to www.thehotline.org for more. States often have domestic violence hotlines as well.Tim StellohTim Stelloh is a breaking news reporter for NBC News Digital.Brenda BreslauerBrenda Breslauer is a producer with the NBC News Investigative Unit.
October 22, 2025
Savewith a NBCUniversal ProfileCreate your free profile or log in to save this articleOct. 22, 2025, 12:01 AM EDTBy David IngramHundreds of public figures, including Nobel Prize-winning scientists, former military leaders, artists and British royalty, signed a statement Wednesday calling for a ban on work that could lead to computer superintelligence, a yet-to-be-reached stage of artificial intelligence that they said could one day pose a threat to humanity.The statement proposes “a prohibition on the development of superintelligence” until there is both “broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably” and “strong public buy-in.”Organized by AI researchers concerned about the fast pace of technological advances, the statement had more than 800 signatures Tuesday night from a diverse group of people. The signers include Nobel laureate and AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen, rapper Will.i.am, former Trump White House aide Steve Bannon and U.K. Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle.The statement adds to a growing list of calls for an AI slowdown at a time when AI is threatening to remake large swaths of the economy and culture. OpenAI, Google, Meta and other tech companies are pouring billions of dollars into new AI models and the data centers that power them, while businesses of all kinds are looking for ways to add AI features to a broad range of products and services.Some AI researchers believe AI systems are advancing fast enough that soon they’ll demonstrate what’s known as artificial general intelligence, or the ability to perform intellectual tasks as a human could. From there, researchers and tech executives believe what could follow might be superintelligence, in which AI models perform better than even the most expert humans.The statement is a product of the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit group that works on large-scale risks such as nuclear weapons, biotechnology and AI. Among its early backers in 2015 was tech billionaire Elon Musk, who’s now part of the AI race with his startup xAI. Now, the institute says, its biggest recent donor is Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain, and it says it doesn’t accept donations from big tech companies or from companies seeking to build artificial general intelligence. Its executive director, Anthony Aguirre, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said AI developments are happening faster than the public can understand what’s happening or what’s next.“We’ve, at some level, had this path chosen for us by the AI companies and founders and the economic system that’s driving them, but no one’s really asked almost anybody else, ‘Is this what we want?’” he said in an interview.“It’s been quite surprising to me that there has been less outright discussion of ‘Do we want these things? Do we want human-replacing AI systems?’” he said. “It’s kind of taken as: Well, this is where it’s going, so buckle up, and we’ll just have to deal with the consequences. But I don’t think that’s how it actually is. We have many choices as to how we develop technologies, including this one.”The statement isn’t aimed at any one organization or government in particular. Aguirre said he hopes to force a conversation that includes not only major AI companies, but also politicians in the United States, China and elsewhere. He said the Trump administration’s pro-industry views on AI need balance.“This is not what the public wants. They don’t want to be in a race for this,” he said. He said there might eventually need to be an international treaty on advanced AI, as there is for other potentially dangerous technologies.The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the statement Tuesday, ahead of its official release.Americans are almost evenly split over the potential impact of AI, according to an NBC News Decision Desk Poll powered by SurveyMonkey this year. While 44% of U.S. adults surveyed said they thought AI would make their and their families’ lives better, 42% said they thought it would make their futures worse.Top tech executives, who have offered predictions about superintelligence and signaled that they are working toward it as a goal, didn’t sign the statement. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in July that superintelligence was “now in sight.” Musk posted on X in February that the advent of digital superintelligence “is happening in real-time” and has earlier warned about “robots going down the street killing people,” though now Tesla, where Musk is CEO, is working to develop humanoid robots. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last month that he’d be surprised if superintelligence didn’t arrive by 2030 and wrote in a January blog post that his company was turning its attention there.Several tech companies didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the statement.Last week, the Future of Life Institute told NBC News that OpenAI had issued subpoenas to it and its president as a form of retaliation for calling for AI oversight. OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon wrote on Oct. 11 that the subpoena was a result of OpenAI’s suspicions around the funding sources of several nonprofit groups that had been critical of its restructuring.Other signers of the statement include Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Virgin Group co-founder Richard Branson, conservative talk show host Glenn Beck, former U.S. national security adviser Susan Rice, Nobel-winning physicist John Mather, Turing Award winner and AI researcher Yoshua Bengio and the Rev. Paolo Benanti, a Vatican AI adviser. Several AI researchers based in China also signed the statement.Aguirre said the goal was to have a broad set of signers from across society.“We want this to be social permission for people to talk about it, but also we want to very much represent that this is not a niche issue of some nerds in Silicon Valley, who are often the only people at the table. This is an issue for all of humanity,” he said.David IngramDavid Ingram is a tech reporter for NBC News.
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