Mark Cuban's Grok Query Puts AI Extinction Risk at 3%, Far Above Climate Change

Billionaire investor Mark Cuban asked Grok on September 14 to weigh AI against climate change as a cause of human extinction within 25 years. The chatbot assigned AI roughly a 3% probability and climate change about 0.001% — a 3,000-fold gap. Grok said an AI extinction event could occur in the mid-2030s to 2040s through "rapid misaligned superintelligence," while calling the estimate "highly uncertain and contested among experts." It said climate change has "no plausible path to extinction that soon." The figures carry no predictive authority; no historical dataset can price a future technology. A 2023 AI Impacts survey of 2,778 AI researchers gave a median 5% probability to an "extremely bad" outcome including extinction. Global corporate AI investment reached $581.7 billion in 2025, up 130% year-over-year, per Stanford's 2026 AI Index. Private AI investment hit $344.7 billion, with $285.9 billion in the United States.