Palantir CTO Says AI Bros Light Up to Signal Faith in Cancer-Curing Bots 🚬

Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar said in a Sunday interview on CBS News' "Face the Nation" that AI researchers have taken up smoking to demonstrate how strongly they expect artificial intelligence to cure cancer. "So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI," Sankar told host Margaret Brennan. "I believe so much in AI that it's going to cure cancer. So I'm showing you my chips are all in." Sankar did not name any specific researcher, cite a survey, or explain how he arrived at the claim.

Sankar used the exchange to argue that effective altruism has become a "millenarian doomsday cult" and pointed to FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried as the movement's most recognizable public figure. He also invoked Blaise Pascal's "god-shaped hole," suggesting some researchers are filling it with a machine god called AGI.

The medical record is less reassuring. The CDC says smoking causes roughly one in three cancer deaths in the United States, and cigarette smoke contains at least 69 chemicals known to cause cancer. Smokers face about 25 times the lung cancer risk of non-smokers, and quitting reduces the elevated risk of 12 types of cancer, with lung cancer risk dropping by half 10 to 15 years after stopping.

The cancer pitch has become routine inside the AI industry. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in August that promising AI will cure cancer is "more a cliche than it is inspiring," writing that only actually curing the disease will earn public trust.

Public sentiment is mixed. In the CBS poll Brennan referenced, 50% of Americans said AI will create more problems than it solves, 29% said it will solve more than it creates, and 21% were unsure, while about 45% said they want the government to restrict AI's use and development. Revamp AI cofounder Stephen Campbell told Business Insider last month that the practice doubles as networking: "When you're smoking, you're networking by accident." The IMF's Kristalina Georgieva recently warned that AI could disrupt 40% of jobs, and insiders expect a major AI incident within a year. Palantir, whose data-analysis software relies heavily on AI, has not commented further on Sankar's remarks.