Amid all the doom and gloom about AI’s escalating doomsday debate, Lovable CEO Anton Osika offered a glimmer of calm over the weekend.
The Swedish startup founder shared a passage by C.S. Lewis, the British author and Christian thinker best known for “The Chronicles of Narnia,” about how to live under the threat of atomic war.
“Every unprecedented moment has a precedent somewhere,” Osika wrote in an X post on Saturday.
The passage, from Lewis’s 1948 essay “On Living in an Atomic Age,” argues that people should not let the prospect of catastrophe swallow up ordinary life.
“If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting with friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs,” Lewis wrote.
“They may break our bodies,” Lewis wrote of atomic bombs, “but they need not dominate our minds.”
Osika’s post came days after Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher who spent about three years at OpenAI and Anthropic, quit the latter with a stark warning about the AI race.
Coxon said the two frontier labs were racing toward self-improving superintelligence while “gambling with our lives.” His resignation has reignited a fierce debate over whether advanced AI could pose an extinction-level threat.
In a LinkedIn post last week, Osika said warnings such as Coxon’s “need to be taken seriously.” He said the companies building the most powerful AI systems should have to prove they can keep them under control, and backed slowing dangerous development when safety cannot be demonstrated.
Others, however, have pushed back on the most apocalyptic forecasts. AI researcher Gary Marcus said there was “no realistic scenario” for near-term human extinction, while Santa Fe Institute professor Melanie Mitchell called such fears “far-fetched.”
Over the weekend, though, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly backed efforts to pace frontier AI development and bring in third-party safety evaluators.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has shown little appetite for regulating the sector as it seeks to maintain the US lead over China.
“We’re leading China in AI, we’re the most sophisticated country in the world,” Trump told reporters on Sunday at his Doonbeg golf resort in Ireland. “And frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.”
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