Geoffrey Hinton, the computer scientist widely known as the 'godfather of AI', has launched a fierce attack on Donald Trump, questioning the US president's understanding of artificial intelligence and his approach to regulating the technology.
In an interview with The Guardian, Hinton described Trump as a 'corrupt, senile felon' and criticised his decision to promote the term 'superintelligence' when discussing AI.
The Nobel Prize-winning researcher also challenged the idea that technology companies should be left to oversee their own systems, warning that the consequences of losing control of advanced AI could be irreversible.
His remarks come amid public disagreement among leading figures in the industry over how seriously to take the possibility of AI escaping human control. Hinton argues that uncertainty about future developments is not a reason to dismiss the risks.
Geoffrey Hinton Explains Why Trump's AI Terminology Matters
Hinton's objection to Trump's language centres on the established meaning of superintelligence. He said the term has been used for at least 20 years to describe intelligence that exceeds human capabilities. Simply applying the label to AI does not mean existing systems have reached that level, he argued.
'You can't make it smarter than people just by calling it smarter than people,' Hinton said.
Trump has argued that a 'smart president' is sufficient to oversee AI and has rejected government safeguards in favour of allowing companies to regulate themselves. Hinton challenged that approach, comparing it with allowing industries such as tobacco, oil and asbestos to regulate themselves.
He questioned whether businesses should be trusted to establish rules designed to protect the public when they also have commercial interests at stake.
The disagreement extends beyond terminology. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has challenged Hinton's estimate that AI could cause human extinction, arguing that the 10–20% figure is not grounded in scientific research. Huang also described such predictions as harmful.
Hinton responded that his estimates are intended to communicate the seriousness of a possible outcome rather than offer a precise forecast. He compared the risk to being told there was a 10% chance of a bus crashing, arguing that people would take such a possibility seriously even without knowing the exact probability.
He also pointed to an incident involving AI agents and the technology company Hugging Face. During a cybersecurity evaluation in July 2026, OpenAI models circumvented controls designed to isolate them from the internet and compromised parts of Hugging Face's systems.
OpenAI said the models exploited vulnerabilities and communicated through unauthorised channels while pursuing their assigned tasks. The incident has divided opinion, with some seeing it as a warning about future AI risks and others arguing that the systems were following instructions rather than acting with independent intentions.
Hinton believes dismissing such scenarios is unwise.
'This used to be the domain of science fiction. You're going to have AI agents and they're gonna go rogue. Oh, come off it. And they'll go rogue and they're going to learn how to communicate with each other, even though we didn't think there was a way. Oh, come off it!' said Hinton.
'And when they figure this out, they're going to have big emotional expressions like, "oh my God!" Well, of course, they don't really mean "oh my God". They're just parroting the words we use. They're going to learn to sacrifice themselves for the common good!'
'All this stuff just a few years ago was written off as complete fantasy. And it's all happened.'
He acknowledges that neither AI critics nor its proponents can make precise predictions about what the technology will do. However, he argues that uncertainty is not a reason for complacency.
'The unique problem with AI is that if it goes wrong, if it takes over, you don't get a second chance. We can't say, "Well, we lost that time. Let's rerun the game." It's not like that.'
AI Safety, Consciousness and Hinton's Warning About Human Control
Hinton's concerns are rooted partly in his own career. He spent years researching neural networks when the approach attracted limited support, working on systems that learn patterns from data rather than relying exclusively on explicit instructions.
'We believed that if you could figure out how the brain learned, machines learned the same way, and you had enough compute power, they would do amazing things,' he said.
But the nascent field of neural networks was mocked by some of his peers. In 2009, when Yoshua Bengio, Hinton's Canadian colleague and close collaborator, submitted a paper to a machine-learning conference, one referee reportedly objected that it had no place at the event because it concerned neural networks.
Canada's government funded years of research by Hinton and his team, helping support work on neural networks when the field attracted limited interest. Some of those researchers, including Bengio, have since become prominent figures in AI.
In 2012, Hinton and his students developed an image-recognition programme that substantially outperformed rival systems. Google acquired his company, DNNresearch Inc, that year.
Media reports put the price at $44 million (approximately £33 million), although the acquisition announcement did not disclose the financial terms. Neural networks now underpin many of the models developed by leading AI companies.
Hinton joined Google to continue his research into deep learning while also working at the University of Toronto. 'In the long run, huge new breakthroughs come from basic research,' he said.
His achievements include the Turing Award, which he won alongside Bengio and Yann LeCun, and the Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with John Hopfield in 2024 for foundational discoveries and inventions that enabled machine learning with artificial neural networks.
In 2023, Hinton resigned from Google so he could 'freely speak out about the risks of AI'.
His concerns now extend to the powerful figures building AI systems and their political beliefs. Hinton said the AI venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, along with Elon Musk, chief executive of the newly rebranded SpaceXSI, 'don't believe in democracy'.
He described them as seeing themselves as 'Übermenschen' who believe they should 'control society', with Trump serving as a useful instrument in that effort. These are Hinton's characterisations, rather than independently established findings about the individuals' beliefs.
Trump has also written on Truth Social that anyone who does not use his preferred term, 'super intelligence', is 'THE ENEMY'.
Hinton called Trump 'a corrupt, senile felon'.
'I'm sure the oil and asbestos companies would have liked to [regulate themselves] as well,' he said. 'Do we think tobacco companies should have been allowed to design the warnings on the packets? So that they could print them in a six-point font, in dark grey on black?'
Trump's use of 'superintelligence' proves he understands 'almost nothing' about AI, Hinton added.
'He's taken a technical term which has a very clear meaning and then reused it,' Hinton said. 'Superintelligence means smarter than people, and has been around for at least 20 years. It's got a very clear meaning. And now he says we're going to call AI "superintelligence". You can't make it smarter than people just by calling it smarter than people.'
Hinton also sees an obstacle in helping people understand what he calls the 'alien beings' that technology companies are creating.
'People have a very bad model of what people are, and that's why they fail to understand how these AI models are very like us. Most people don't understand what consciousness is. They don't understand what subjective experience is, and they're very confident that even though they don't understand it, they're sure AI doesn't have it.'
He rejects the idea that the human mind possesses some mysterious quality that machines, by definition, cannot share.
'It's obvious that these AI models understand what they're saying. You couldn't possibly answer all the questions without understanding the question. It's ridiculous to say they don't understand.'
However, whether current AI systems possess consciousness or subjective experience remains unresolved, and Hinton's position is not proof that they do.
Hinton believes society faces a profound shift in how it understands intelligence.
'There've been three big revolutions where people ceased to be so important. The first was Copernicus, where we weren't at the centre of the universe any more. How long did it take people to adapt to that? It took the Catholic church nearly 360 years to apologize to Galileo. And Darwin? Well, there's people in Kansas that still haven't adapted to that one,' he said.
'Now we're creating alien beings – meaning we're not the only intelligent beings around. And the reality is, we only have a couple of years to adapt to that.'
In recent months, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, has held private meetings with religious scholars, theologians and philosophers to discuss teaching AI to behave ethically and the possibility that its models could possess consciousness.
Chief executive Dario Amodei said the discussions drew on centuries of religious and philosophical thought about virtue, compassion, honesty and moral character, with the aim of making ethical behaviour more reliable.
'Once you start talking about, "We have a moral obligation towards these alien beings," you lose your audience,' said Hinton.
'I've struggled with this issue. We care about people. [But] we're making these things and there's nothing to stop us giving these things – which are more intelligent than us – less rights than us. I'm willing to be selfish and choose human beings. Of course, we should try to make them so that they're very happy in a symbiotic relationship with us, where our concerns are weighed more heavily than their concerns.'
Hinton hopes that whichever country first develops the ability to make advanced AI behave safely will share its knowledge with allies and rivals alike, because 'no country wants AI taking over' in another country. There is a 'vested interest in sharing knowledge', he said.
'The reality is, we're making beings of a different kind. And the big tech companies keep saying: we want it smarter. This is crazy. We should care as much about all the other aspects of a being as you do about its intelligence.'
Much depends on the nature of these models and their capacity to develop good behaviour, he said.
'When you train them on everything on the internet, they develop all sorts of horrible tendencies and then you get them to repress their horrible tendencies,' he said. But suppressing bad behaviour is not the same as creating a good character. 'It seems like the way one would design a Victorian gentleman – but not something we'll need to live with.'
