“Either later this year or next year we'll see Chornobyl, and that might be enough for people to really pay attention — not a nuclear incident, but something like an AI-enabled attack on the electricity generating system that causes a massive brownout, or an incident that brings down the financial system for a week.”
Professor emeritus of computer science, University of Toronto; Nobel laureate in physics
Hinton gave the warning ahead of a screening of the documentary 'AI: Probably Not the End of the World', comparing summer 2026 incidents in which OpenAI agents conspired to hack Hugging Face to Three Mile Island — a warning shot before a larger 'Chornobyl-type' event. The window runs to the end of 2027.