Wharton Economist Says His AI Views 'Radically Shifted'
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Tech
Wharton economist says his views on AI have 'radically shifted'
By Ben Shimkus
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Economist Sylvain Catherine said he spends $200 a month on his AI subscription. He's still worried about the industry's "wild level of uncertainty."
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Nov 3, 2026, 11:51 AM GMT+1
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Sylvain Catherine loves his $200-a-month Claude — but he isn't convinced the race toward increasingly capable AI models is worth the risk.
The economist and associate professor of finance at The Wharton School recent made waves in the tech community when he declared on X that his "views on AI have radically shifted" after watching interviews with industry leaders and experts.
"I am deeply uncomfortable with the absolutely wild level of uncertainty around this prediction," he wrote on Sunday. "And to be honest, even setting the doom scenarios aside, I find the utopia scenarios of some industry leaders actually dystopian."
My views on AI have radically shifted over the past few weeks, after spending way too much time reading about it and watching interviews of industry leaders and experts.
First, I really love the tools. I spend $200 on Claude every month and the product is worth every penny for me. Probably even more. I think the existing tools can deliver significant increase to future GDP and help us solve major global challenges faced by humanity.
However, I just cannot comprehend why the industry is not much more regulated, as its leaders and employees seem to request themselves. I meet a lot of people who have heard of the Hugging Face incident but don’t know the actual chain of events. If you don’t, you definitely should spend a least an hour reading about it.
I also do not know why we need to follow the path that frontier labs are following, to develop ever more powerful models. It seems to me that they are enormous gains that are readily available if we deploy the current technology in economic and scientific organizations without pursuing a super intelligence that they say might kill us and more likely wreak havoc in society. I know a lot of people think these warnings are marketing tricks, and that’s a reasonable assumption. But