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Ali Ghodsi
Co-founder and chief executive of Databricks, who puts AI’s existential risk “close to zero” and argues the real danger is an AI-accelerated cyberattack surface, not extinction.
Roles
- 2013 – presentCo-founder, DatabricksCo-founded the company in 2013 to commercialise Apache Spark, which he had helped start as a researcher at UC Berkeley; the source gives no month.Source →
- 2016 – presentChief Executive Officer, DatabricksBecame chief executive in 2016; the source gives no month. Named to the 2026 Time 100 list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence.Source →
On the record
18 Sept 2026 · Podcast · The a16z Show
I think that right now, the existential risk is close to zero. So why freak everybody out?
Chief Executive Officer, Databricks at the time
Said in conversation with the a16z partners Martin Casado and Sarah Wang, in the fortnight of the Anthropic and Google DeepMind resignations and Dario Amodei's call to pace the frontier. He is drawing a line between technical debate among safety researchers, which the same report says he respects, and broadcasting a "10% risk that all of humanity is gonna be wiped out" to millions on social media, which he calls irresponsible; his own named danger is an AI-accelerated cyberattack surface, not extinction. The date is the date printed on the page cited, which reports the conversation; no source read here dates the recording itself. He made the same argument in televised interviews on 17 September, but the CNBC and Bloomberg video pages carry a headline and no transcript, and bloomberg.com, benzinga.com and the Scuttlebutt newsletter all refuse an automated fetch — so the source is the outlet that reproduces the sentence and attributes it with "he said".