Former Google Boss Eric Schmidt Predicts 'An Alien Intelligence Is Coming' As AI's Power Begins To Outpace Humanity

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Artificial intelligence is advancing so rapidly that it may soon move beyond human understanding, said former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

“An alien intelligence is coming,” he said at the Sifted Summit in London earlier this month, raising concerns that AI models can be hacked, repurposed and weaponized in ways that outstrip human control.

Schmidt, who led Google from 2001 to 2011, described how AI’s rapid progress also exposes deep security flaws. “There’s evidence that you can take models, closed or open, and you can hack them to remove their guardrails,” he said.

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He said that such manipulation could let systems generate dangerous information — “a bad example would be they learn how to kill someone.” Schmidt said that major developers embed protections but said “there’s evidence that they can be reverse-engineered,” he told the Sifted Summit.

He said that hackers exploit vulnerabilities through prompt injections and jailbreaking. According to Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), prompt injection attacks manipulate AI systems by feeding them malicious inputs disguised as legitimate user prompts, causing the model to produce unintended responses.

Jailbreaking, meanwhile, is a technique that according to Microsoft, “can cause the failure of guardrails (mitigations),” allowing the AI to ignore safety restrictions and generate prohibited or harmful content. Schmidt said these risks show why the world lacks an effective “non-proliferation regime” to stop AI misuse — a framework similar to nuclear arms control that still doesn’t exist.

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“The arrival of an alien intelligence that is not quite us and more or less under our control is a very big deal for humanity,” Schmidt said. He added that despite his warnings, AI remains vastly underappreciated — a view he and former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger reached in their joint research.

Schmidt said the thesis is proving true as machine abilities “far exceed what humans can do over time.” He cited OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which reached 100 million users in just two months, as an example of AI’s rapid adoption. “I think it’s underhyped, not overhyped,” he told the Sifted Summit audience.