Bill Maher Takes Bold Stance on AI With Dire Warning

Michelle Stein April 18, 2026, 8:20 am

What To Know

Bill Maher warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence.
He criticized tech leaders like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman.
Maher emphasized that AI lacks humanity and conscience, making it prone to extreme decisions in simulations.

Bill Maher just took a bold stance on artificial intelligence while sending a dire warning.

On the Friday, April 17 episode of Real Time With Bill Maher, the late-night host, 70, addressed the rapidly evolving role of AI during the “New Rule” segment.

“When the people who are making AI are scared of AI, it’s time to shut the whole thing down until we can figure out what the hell is going on,” Maher declared.

The stand-up comedian then brought up Anthropic’s new AI model, Claude Mythos, which the company says “has capabilities substantially beyond those of any model we have previously trained.” He also said that Anthropic won’t release Claude Mythos to the public because it is trained to prevent cyber attacks and fix software vulnerabilities. He pointed out that it’s because the AI knows “how to do the hacking” too.

Additionally, Maher called out AI leaders like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman. “That’s another scary thing about AI, the people who run it — i.e., the people who run the world,” Maher warned. “And it’s like five guys — five guys, between them, working as a team, couldn’t correctly read a social cue. I wouldn’t let these guys around a mixed drink, let alone my personal data.”

That’s when the Real Time host issued a blunt warning about AI. “We’re letting a handful of hoodie-wearing, on the spectrum sociopaths, practically robots themselves, roll the dice on species extinction.” He quipped, “You see an out-of-control robot, and you run. Mark Zuckerberg sees one and thinks, ‘Dad?’”

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Maher also claimed that tech leaders are “afraid of what they’ve created,”sharing quotes from Altman and the “godfather of AI” himself, Geoffrey Hinton.

He continued, “We’re f***ing around with something that has a 20% chance of extinction. 20%. Wasn’t that about what the odds were for Trump beating Hillary [Clinton] in 2016? Elon Musk may’ve lost it on a few things, but on this subject, he’s been the smartest. ‘I am very close to the cutting edge in AI,’ he said, ‘and it scares the hell out of me.’”

To conclude his thoughts on the topic of artificial intelligence, Maher said, “AI programs are geniuses. They’re also psychopaths. In war games, they choose the nuclear option far more than humans do. Because they can only calculate. They have no humanity, they have no conscience. They don’t have that thing that gives human beings pause.”

What do you think of AI and its growing capabilities?

Real Time With Bill Maher, Fridays at 10/9c, HBO