Joseph Gordon-Levitt has signed a growing petition calling for development of AI-powered superintelligence to cease until more is known about the technology and proper safeguards have been put in place to protect humanity.
Gordon-Levitt is one of the petition’s 1,500-and-counting signatories, which also include numerous politicians, religious leaders and tech experts. Other entertainment figures, like Sir Stephen Fry, Will.I.am, Kate Bush, “Everything Everywhere All At Once” co-director Daniel Kwan and Elon Musk’s former partner, Grimes, have all signed the petition as well.
Musk himself is not one of the petition’s signatories but he is quoted, along with other non-signatories like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, on the petition’s list of statements proving why superintelligence poses a real threat to humanity.
“Why would you want to build an AI that’s smarter than humans?” Gordon-Levitt remarked in an X video announcing his involvement in the petition. “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?”
“The answer is, of course, that’s what will make more money,” Gordon-Levitt continued. “They want to build the product that will imitate a person, make you feel like it’s your friend or your lover, seduce your kids, turn us all into slop junkies and make it hard to tell what’s true or what’s false and undermine democracy and, yeah, give rise to authoritarianism and make gajillions of dollars.”
“Is that what we want?” he mused. “Because that’s what these big tech companies are talking about when they talk about building superintelligence.”
I’ve signed a petition, along with many smarter and more qualified people than myself, that calls for Superintelligence development to halt until some basic safety standards are met. Join me here: https://t.co/b97HeSvnEC pic.twitter.com/Vo2tuoZKBC
— Joseph Gordon-Levitt (@hitRECordJoe) October 22, 2025
Gordon-Levitt has become an outspoken opponent of AI in recent months. He created a video op-ed in late September for the New York Times calling out Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s AI chatbots and the “synthetic intimacy” that said chatbots have created with unsuspecting minors online. “It’s hard to describe how angry this makes me,” Gordon-Levitt said in the op-ed.
In October, Gordon-Levitt also publicly called out California Governor Gavin Newsom, accusing the politician of being “too scared” to sign a bill into law that would have created necessary regulations against AI.
It was additionally announced this month that Rachel McAdams had signed on to star in Gordon-Levitt’s next directorial project, a thriller said to focus heavily on AI. Plot details about the film are being kept under wraps for the time being, but Gordon-Levitt co-wrote its script with Kieran Fitzgerald. Both share a “story by” credit on the project with Natasha Lyonne.
“Let’s not build superintelligence until, No. 1, we can prove it’s safe, and No. 2, the public actually wants it,” Gordon-Levitt argued in his X video, in which he urged others who are concerned about the future of AI to sign the new petition, too. “If you are concerned about the future these big tech companies are bringing to us, without permission, signing this petition is at least one small thing you could do.”
The petition, titled a “Statement on Superintelligence,” states that AI companies’ recent tech breakthroughs have “raised concerns ranging from human economic obsolescence and disempowerment, losses of freedom, civil liberties, dignity, and control, to national security risks and even potential human extinction.”
