AI companies keep talking about how dangerous their models are, and they just keep building them anyway.
EXPERT OPINION BY JASON ATEN, TECH COLUMNIST @JASONATEN
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It wasn’t that long ago that Sam Altman tried to get Scarlett Johansson to give her voice to the voice mode OpenAI was building into ChatGPT. Altman, like many tech CEOs, seemed unusually infatuated with Hollywood’s vision of the future and—in this case—with the particular vision painted by the 2013 movie Her. Johansson declined, and OpenAI went ahead and basically did it anyway.
We’ll set aside the fact that Her is pretty much a downer of a movie. I suppose the appeal was that we’d all have a voice assistant in the cloud that we can access anywhere and just have it do stuff for us. I’ll admit that would be very cool, but I think everyone picked the wrong movie.
The movie I wish these CEOs would watch is Jurassic Park.
I first made the comparison on a recent episode of Primary <a href="https://cinemamix360.com/2026/09/29/videoworks-and-coton-sound-technology-in-yacht-design/” title=”Videoworks and Coton: sound technology in yacht design”>Technology, the podcast I co-host with Stephen Robles. We were talking specifically about employees of AI companies who signed a statement saying “the world’s leading AI companies believe they could be close to automating AI research,” and—at the same time—the Hugging Face incident where OpenAI’s autonomous agents hacked the platform.
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As more and more frontier AI companies kept telling us about the unexpected behavior of their models, all I could think of was that we’re living in the Jurassic Park story. Specifically, I think about the velociraptors testing the electric fence.
If you haven’t seen Jurassic Park recently, the important thing to remember is that no one running the park is under the impression that the velociraptors are safe. Robert Muldoon, the park’s game warden, tells everyone exactly that, warning them about how intelligent they are. He explains that they systematically attack the fences, looking for weaknesses.
“They’re extremely intelligent—even problem-solving intelligent,” he says. “They never attack the same place twice. They were testing the fences for weaknesses, systematically. They remember.”
