The Microsoft-CrowdStrike outage could spur a Big Tech trust reckoning and threaten tech giants’ plans for AI | Experts warn the incident highlights the fragility of tech systems and AI’s potential risks.

“Does Big Tech deserve our trust to properly safeguard a technology as powerful as AI?

Gary Marcus, an AI researcher, told Business Insider that the Microsoft-CrowdStrike outage should be a “wake-up call” to consumers — and that the impact of a similar issue with AI would be tenfold.

“If a single bug can take down airlines, banks, retailers, media outlets, and more, what on earth makes you think we are ready for AGI?” Marcus wrote in a post on X.

Marcus agreed that companies can’t be trusted on their own to build reliable infrastructure and the outage should be a reminder that “we’re playing double or nothing when we allow AI systems to be unregulated.”

AGI, also known as artificial general intelligence, is a term for a version of AI that can achieve human capabilities like reasoning and judgment. [OpenAI cofounder John Schulman](https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-cofounder-agi-coming-fast-needs-limits-john-schulman-2024-5) previously predicted it was just a few years away.

The US Department of State commissioned a risk assessment report on AI, which was published earlier this year. The report indicated [AI poses a high risk of weaponization,](https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-report-risks-human-extinction-state-department-expert-reaction-2024-3) which could take the form of biowarfare, mass cyber-attacks, disinformation campaigns, or autonomous robots. The results could lead to “catastrophic risks” including human extinction, the report said.”