Nick Clegg dismisses fears of AI’s godlike powers, urges focus on real threats

Nick Clegg has a message for the AI doomsday crowd: calm down. The former UK Deputy Prime Minister, who spent years as Meta’s top policy executive before leaving in early 2025, is pushing back hard against the narrative that artificial intelligence is on the verge of becoming an uncontrollable, godlike force. His preferred description of today’s AI systems? “Very versatile and very stupid.” Clegg argues that too many people inside the tech industry are “winding themselves up into a lather” over hypothetical superintelligence scenarios while ignoring the far more concrete, far more immediate problem staring them in the face: the growing concentration of AI power among a small number of massive US and Chinese corporations. The case against doomerism In a March 2026 interview with WIRED, Clegg characterized the concept of superintelligence as “hand-wavy” hype. That’s a pointed choice of words from someone who spent years inside one of the companies most aggressively building these systems. He has also turned his skepticism toward his own country’s approach. Clegg has previously criticized UK AI safety summits for fixating on apocalyptic scenarios rather than exploring practical opport...