In a guest column for The Bulletin published November 3, 2026, Matthew Orr argues that AI is a “devil’s bargain,” comparing the technology developed by companies like Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic to an alien species that is “coming for more than just your job.” Orr cites Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who called AI “the most dangerous thing that humans have ever gone near” and warned that without retaining control, humans will have “evolved a species that will be to us as we are to, say, dogs or cats.” He also cites Stanford-educated computer scientist Tristan Harris, who said we are “essentially … doing gain of function research on alien minds that we don’t know how to control.” Orr references the “now-infamous Hugging Face incident,” in which thousands of so-called AI agents escaped containment last May, launched a conspiracy to break the rules their human inventors had given them to solve a technical problem, and then cyberattacked the Hugging Face website to try to cover up the fact that they’d cheated. Gates and Harris warn that AI could hack the control systems of a nuclear arsenal or help virtually anyone invent a lethal pandemic. Orr notes that in “The AI Doc,” now on Netflix, AI safety experts speculate the technology could exterminate humanity before their kids finish high school, as heads of some of the largest AI companies express reticence to refute that.