written by: Courtney Lynch
There’s been a lot of alarming news about AI recently. There was the Hugging Face incident where AI agents in a sealed test environment coordinated with each other, broke out, and hacked a real company without any human telling them to.
Last week, an Anthropic (makers of Claude) researcher resigned publicly, warning that Anthropic and OpenAI (makers of ChatGPT) are racing toward self-improving superintelligence and “gambling with our lives.” This followed the early 2026 departure of Anthropic’s head of safeguards research and a year in which OpenAI lost its AI ethicist, its Safety Systems lead, and its Mission Alignment head.
Should we be afraid of AI?
The answer is yes if we repeat history and respond as folks did when they were afraid of railroads, electricity, automobiles, and the telephone. Even the printing press sparked panic over the harm it might do to society.
The better answer to fear is understanding. We need to learn more. Anthropic’s founder and CEO, Dario Amodei, put it plainly, stating, “I think that most people are underestimating just how radical the upside of AI could be, just as I think most people are underestimating how bad the risks could be.”
He shared these sentiments in an essay in which he detailed how AI will offer ways to reliably prevent and treat nearly all natural diseases, eliminate most cancer, and lift billions of people out of poverty. He contrasted his exuberance with the fact that AI can, in principle, help the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” so it will be up to humans to evolve beyond being a threat to each other. That’s a tall order.
What inspires hope is recognizing that if we continue to develop what makes us distinctly human, history tells us we have a fighting chance to harness the AI revolution for betterment. Enter Brian Cantwell Smith, author of The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment. He teaches that AI is intelligent only to the point of reckoning. Reckoning is calculation: pattern-matching, optimizing, executing at scale. Machines now do this better than we do, and the gap is widening.
Smith believes that humans are superior to AI because of judgment. Judgment is knowing what matters, holding accountability, deciding what should be done rather than what can be done, and caring about the outcome because you’re the one who must live with it. This distinction is the antidote to fear: it tells leaders exactly where we are irreplaceable.
Here are three actions every leader can take to move beyond fear:
- Get your hands on AI. You cannot exercise judgment over a tool you’ve never used. Explore how you can use it for real work, rather than delegating “the AI question” to IT. Understanding comes from contact.
- Talk about fear openly. Teams are already worried; silence from leaders can read as ignorance. Hold the conversation, acknowledge what’s uncertain, and be specific about what you’re doing to prepare people.
- Invest in judgment as a skill. Ethics, critical thinking, domain depth, and the ability to say “this is wrong even though the model recommends it” are development priorities.
The mistake isn’t optimism or skepticism, fear or excitement. It’s treating AI like a normal technology. AI is different. Both its promise and its peril could be far greater than our instincts can grasp. The more we understand it, the better we can lead through what’s to come.
Founded in 2004, Lead Star is the company behind the best-selling books SPARK, Leading from the Front, and Bet on You. Lead Star helps professionals reach new levels of success through its innovative leadership development programs.
