Bill Maher laid into artificial intelligence and the tech leaders overseeing the growing industry in a scathing rebuke that closed out Friday’s episode of “Real Time.”
In his “New Rules” segment for Friday evening, the comedian sounded the alarm on artificial intelligence, suggesting if the people leading the technology are scared of it then it was time to “shut the whole thing down until we can figure out what the hell is going on.”
Maher started off by taking aim at Anthropic’s new AI model Claude Mythos, defending that the tech trained to fix software vulnerabilities likely knows “how to do the hacking.”
And Maher felt wary at the idea of tech leaders like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman, having a hold on his personal data. (Maher not so subtly put their pictures, along with other tech leaders’ pictures on the screen during his remarks.)
“That’s the other scary thing about AI, the people who run it — i.e. the people who run the world,” Maher noted. “And it’s like five guys, who, between them, working as a team, couldn’t correctly read a social cue.”
He continued: “I wouldn’t let these guys around a mixed drink, let alone my personal data.”
As Maher went on, he declared that “we’re letting a handful of hoodie wearing, on the spectrum sociopaths, practically robots themselves, roll the dice on species extinction.”
“You see an out of control robot and you run,” Maher joked. “Mark Zuckerberg sees one and thinks, ‘Dad?’”
Per Maher, even the tech leaders “are afraid of what they’ve created,” citing Altman and Geoffrey Hinton (a.k.a. the Godfather of AI)’s past statements warning of the risks.
“We’re f–king around with a 20% chance of extinction. 20% — wasn’t that about the odds for Trump beating Hillary [Clinton] in 2016?” Maher stated. “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.’”
Maher then highlighted Musk’s note that reactive regulation will be “too late” and that “AI is a fundamental existential risk for human civilization.”
“AI programs are geniuses, but they’re also psychopaths,” Maher warned. “In war games, they choose the nuclear option far more than humans do. Because they can only calculate. They have no humanity, the have no conscience. They don’t have that thing that gives human beings pause.”
Maher isn’t alone in his criticism of artificial intelligence, as both Scarlett Johansson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt have been vocal critics of the technology in the past.
In fact, back in October, Gordon-Levitt called for AI super-intelligence development to stop until safety standards could be met.
“Why would you want to build an AI that’s smarter than humans?” Gordon-Levitt remarked in an X video at the time. “You could say AI is going to cure diseases or AI is going to help strengthen our national security, and, yeah, I want those things, too. But why couldn’t we just build an AI tool to help cure diseases or build an AI tool to help with national security? Why does it have to all be one big product that does everything?”
Similarly, in February 2025, Johansson called out the misuse of AI after a video featuring her likeness (without her consent) went viral.
“I urge the U.S. government to make the passing of legislation limiting AI use a top priority,” she said at the time. “It is a bipartisan issue that enormously affects the immediate future of humanity at large.”
In January, they were among nearly 800 supporters who lent their signatures to an anti-AI campaign, titled “Stealing Isn’t Innovation.”
New episodes of “Real Time With Bill Maher” air Fridays on HBO.
