AI Won't Destroy Us, But It Will Improve Our Lives, DoE's Darío Gil ...

"AI won't destroy us, but it will improve our lives" is the sort of headline you write once the doom-merchants have stopped selling and you'd quite like a slot on the after-dinner circuit. Darío Gil of the Department of Energy has surveyed the frontier and concluded that the machines are, on balance, lovely — while noting that the ratio of capability to testing at many frontier sites is "not correct." Not wrong, you understand. Not dangerous, not reckless, not a fire alarm — "not correct." The phrase does an enormous amount of lifting, in the way "unplanned rapid disassembly" carries the weight of a rocket that has just exploded.

Note what's actually on offer to fix it: OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are contributing "models and tokens" to the DOE's Genesis Mission. Tokens. The frontier labs, having spent the quarter telling investors they are building minds, are now funding the government's testing via a metered giveaway, like a pub landlord donating a bag of crisps to the darts team. And this lands in the same government queue we flagged a fortnight ago — the state that wants first look before the Brits get a whiff.

Gil's ask — that labs "accelerate testing and evaluation to make models safe before release" — is a request, not a rule, from a department that builds warheads for a living and still can't extract a straight answer from a lab. Meanwhile the title tells you exactly where we are: an industry that spent two years promising an apocalypse now wants a testimonial. Gil says the models won't destroy us, and he's probably right — the destruction will be distributed, quiet, and itemised. He'd just like someone to correct the ratio before the next release, and someone, somewhere, will note the concern solemnly and ship anyway. The testing will be "accelerated." The ratio will remain "not correct." The tokens are free.