✍️ By Ismael Kherroubi Garcia.
Ismael is Founder & Co-lead of the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Network (RAIN), and Founder & CEO of Kairoi.
📌 Editor’s Note: This article is part of our Tech Futures series, a collaboration between the Montreal AI Ethics Institute (MAIEI) and the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Network (RAIN). The series challenges mainstream AI narratives, proposing that rigorous research and science are better sources of information about AI than industry leaders. This 10th instalment of Tech Futures by RAIN distills a common narrative from AI executives: that AI is dangerous. Why would one say that about the products they sell? As it turns out, it’s a common narrative that was named in the 1970s and helps keep regulators at bay, granting Big Tech companies more control over the future of tech.
Claude Mythos Preview’s large increase in capabilities has led us to decide not to make it generally available — Anthropic, April 7th, 2026
There is a trend we have seen in the world of AI for quite some time; it’s Big Tech’s emphasis on negativity, its instilling a sense of discomfort amongst the public, either because AI is after our jobs or poses an existential threat to humanity. But why? Shouldn’t they be celebrating the great features of their advanced AI products? Isn’t the point that AI will bring about a great deal of opportunities? Well, it just happens to be that fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) are the foundation of a well-established marketing strategy in Big Tech.
“FUD” was coined in the mid-seventies by Gene Amdahl, a former IBM engineer, to denounce the aggressive marketing tactics that IBM followed to undermine his company’s products:
FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products — Gene Amdahl, cited in FUD – in A Marketing Strategy in the Computer Industry (2002)
One might argue that all is fair in love and war and marketing, but FUD has entailed major legal battles and fines. Consider the estimated $275 million settlement that Microsoft paid Caldera for anti-competitive techniques before the threat of DR-DOS, a direct competitor to Microsoft’s operating system at the time, MS-DOS. Internal memos from Microsoft showed Bill Gates and other executives admitting to the superiority of DR-DOS. The owners of DR-DOS had contested in 1996:
That Microsoft used vapourware announcements to dampen interest in DR-DOS; that Microsoft used FUD to counter the DR-DOS threat; that Microsoft developed intentional incompatibilities to make it impossible to use DR-DOS with Windows; and that Microsoft used exclusionary licensing terms to block out DR-DOS – Did Microsoft’s Vaporware, FUD, Incompatibility Kill DR-DOS? (1999)
“Vapourware,” a term coined in 1983, means “good ideas incompletely implemented.” It’s an evolution of FUD: actual competitor products are undermined by claims about the superiority of one’s own future products, whether they’re launched late or not at all. It is a valid term for much of what we’re seeing in AI today, but the FUD strategy has evolved once again, not to denote the relative danger of competitors’ products or the superiority of one’s future products, but the danger of one’s own current and future products.
Our model, called GPT‑2 (a successor to GPT), was trained simply to predict the next word in 40GB of Internet text. Due to our concerns about malicious applications of the technology, we are not releasing the trained model — OpenAI, February 14th, 2019
The danger that today’s FUD strategy emphasises is that of users maliciously deploying advanced AI tools. For example, Anthropic claims that “Claude Mythos Preview” could lead to serious cybersecurity threats if available to the general public. As a response, they have created a new consortium, “Project Glasswing,” to basically ready the cybersecurity industry for the threat Anthropic will eventually unleash. The goal of this modern FUD strategy is to demonstrate that the innovator —in this case, Anthropic— is the only entity that can be trusted to lead the safe design, implementation and even regulation of such tools. Add to this the technical complexities of AI, alongside narratives about its accelerating advancement, and AI companies are granted the authority to supposedly safeguard the public from the tools they create.
We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. — Future of Life Institute, March 22nd, 2023
We’re seeing history rhyme with itself. Instilling FUD has been valuable to Big Tech for many years, and AI companies are just adding a new twist to the strategy. They think they’re playing 4D chess with their FUD but we can’t be fooled by the seemingly esoteric moves they make.
We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advance of the technology. — Anthropic, June 4th, 2026
Big Tech companies and executives are unimaginative and simply exploit capitalist structures to further accumulate wealth. Their public announcements should be understood within this framing. We should not see their promotion of FUD as anything but a way to manufacture public trust. Conversely, we could just feel towards Big Tech’s vapourware what they want us to feel: fear, uncertainty and doubt.
Image credit: Image by PIRO 4D from Pixabay