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Nuclear war and malicious use of AI threaten end of humanity by 2100, says Lancet assessment
The Guardian reports on the new Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health, which lists 17 major threats over the next 75 years. It names malicious use of AI, including bioweapons, and nuclear conflict as carrying risks of human extinction, while saying their likelihood is low and that each threat has a realistic route to action.
Why it matters
The same thing, for different readers.
What it means for you
A commission convened by a leading medical journal ranks malicious AI use alongside nuclear war as unlikely but potentially extinction-level threats to human health this century.
For lawmakers
The commission urges governments to fund anticipation, prevention and preparation for a wider set of threats, and says its 17-threat list will be updated every year.
For researchers
Threats were ranked by modelled healthy years lost (disability-adjusted life years), placing AI misuse inside a public-health framework rather than a technology-industry one.
In their own words
Every quotation was found, word for word, in the text we saved from the source. That shows the words are there; it does not make them true, or prove the speaker meant them as quoted.
From the source’s own text.
“Malicious use of AI, including bioweapons, and nuclear conflict with nuclear famine carry risks of extinction in the next 75 years”
“The scale of harm, should they be realised, would inflict an apocalypse on humanity.”
“We’re starting from the premise that if you are a policymaker today, whether at the global multilateral level or at the national level, these are the potential threats that you could face, and this is the magnitude by which, if you act, you can actually make a difference.”
“There’s a much larger number of threats that we need to worry about, and governments really need to dedicate some money and staff to the task of anticipation, prevention and preparation for this more diverse set of threats.”
How the finding was reached
In our words, from the source. Weigh the finding by how it was made.
- What was done
- A commission of 35 experts (The Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health) modeled, for each threat, the years of healthy life that could be lost to illness, disability or early death over the next 75 years on current trajectories (disability-adjusted life years, DALYs), with best-case and worst-case scenarios. A threat made the list if it could cost many healthy years and had potential solutions. This entry rests only on the Guardian's account of the report.
- What it found
- The commission lists 17 major threats; those that could cause more than 1 billion cumulative DALYs were deemed "major catastrophic threats". The report says malicious use of AI, including bioweapons, and nuclear conflict with nuclear famine carry risks of extinction in the next 75 years, while their likelihood remains low. It says a realistic route to act exists on each threat.
- What it does not show
- Known only through the Guardian's article; the report itself was not read. The article gives no AI-specific numbers or probabilities. The ranking is a model of expected health loss on current trajectories, not an observation, and the commission says it will update the assessment each year.
- Status
- A report
The record
- Questions
- How is AI used in attacks, defence and war?
- People
- Kat Lay (Wrote it) · Christopher Murray (Speaks, Commission co-chair; director, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, University of Washington) · Ibrahim Abubakar (Speaks, Commission member; professor of infectious disease epidemiology, UCL)
- What we read
- We read the whole source.
- Found by
- The Radar, run of October 12, 2026, via
the-guardian-ai(tier 2: a major outlet’s own reporting) - Cite this
- The Guardian, “Nuclear war and malicious use of AI threaten end of humanity by 2100, says Lancet assessment”, October 11, 2026. Entry in the Ctrl AI Base, https://ctrlai.com/base/guardian-2026-10-11-lancet-threats-humanity-2100