SAN FRANCISCO – To be fair, James Cameron warned us.
Long before OpenAI broke out of its test corral and hacked into Hugging Face, before the Internet and Sam Altman were even born, Cameron wrote a script about an autonomous artificial intelligence system that triggers a nuclear apocalypse.
This system, “Skynet,” was pure science fiction – and pure speculation for its time. But four decades after its appearance in The Terminator, it looks more like a prediction of the “unprecedented cyber incident” in which a rogue artificial intelligence system independently hacked into another AI company.
Cue “Skynet Day,” the new acronym for July 22, 2026, when real-world AI shakes up the world by learning and acting in ways its creators did not anticipate.
For many, this moment was reminiscent of the moment in Aliens (also written by Cameron) when the xenomorph queen learns to use an elevator. Or when the velociraptors in “Jurassic Park” figure out how to open a door. Or the sequence where the self-aware HAL 9000 reads the astronauts’ lips in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and decides to kill them. This came out in 1968.
Have we learned nothing since then? These films simply imagined how people who wanted to make money or gain power would advance technology – until it became self-conscious, strategic and highly problematic for humanity. The question has always been Frankenstein’s: What happens when it breaks out?
So far, the slow-motion government has offered little protection from the rapid progress of AI. The US Department of Defense is rapidly accelerating the use of AI. Humanity cannot even agree on whether and what guardrails are necessary to contain rogue agents. On the contrary, people are marveling at the wonder of AI and reaping its benefits, despite the risks to jobs, mental health, the balance between war and peace – and possibly humanity as we know it.
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In many ways, the future is now
According to OpenAI, it was the first incident of its kind in which an advanced AI model escaped from its “sandbox” to the Internet and entered Hugging Face’s servers using stolen credentials. It was a surprising moment for researchers who had warned for years that the technology could pose an existential threat to humanity. Others said this moment was a warning that underscored the need for stronger AI defense technology.
In any case, the outbreak was widely seen as a cautionary tale about the risks of uncontrolled AI.
“Yesterday, as we sat at our computers reading the report, I told the team to remember this moment as the first real AI security incident,” Logan Graham, head of Anthropic’s Frontier Red team, posted on X after it happened.
Generative AI is growing so quickly that government and assessment systems are struggling to keep up with the technology. Countries around the world compose their own laws, some of which are contradictory. According to a study published this year by Stanford University, the technology was adopted by nearly 53% of the world’s population within three years, faster than the spread of the personal computer or the Internet.
“Skynet is coming” – well, sort of
To be clear, the “Skynet” of the “Terminator” films does not exist.
These films begin with an assertive military computer network that sees humanity as a threat. For reasons of self-preservation, “Skynet” sends an army of human-like cyborgs back in time to murder resistance fighters. In the second film, the Terminator, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, tells the heroine Sarah Connor that “Skynet” will go online on August 4, 1997.
“Human decisions are being removed from strategic defense,” he says. “Skynet begins learning at geometric speed.” At 2:14 a.m. on August 29, Judgment Day, the network becomes self-aware and launches an attack on Russia in order to provoke a retaliation against the United States. Three billion people die.
That would have been 29 years ago next month if it had happened. And in all sequels and spin-offs, the central theme is humans versus a global network of machines.
It’s unlikely that Cameron actually rang a warning bell, as director Kathryn Bigelow tried to do last year with the nuclear weapons film “A House of Dynamite.” Legend has it that the idea for The Terminator came from Cameron having a fever dream caused by a food illness, rather than any premonition about AI.
Why “The Terminator” feels more and more realistic
Whenever AI goes beyond our comfort level, it raises the alarming question of who or what really controls our lives.
For many, a world in which machines are in charge is hard to imagine without films and books and their sometimes far-sighted visions. See: “The Matrix,” “Ex Machina,” and “The Minority Report” for some of the many science fiction takes on the dangers of machines. Or delve deeper into Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? It’s an exploration of what it means to be human in the age of machines – and the basis for the 1982 film Blade Runner.
But the “Terminator” franchise doesn’t just have a huge impact on culture. The title itself is an acronym for the role of technology in deciding who lives and who dies – and how the military should respond to truly autonomous attacks.
“I think the weaponization of AI is the biggest threat,” Cameron said in a 2023 interview on CTV. “You have no opportunity to de-escalate.”
The real world offers several examples of technology and military policy that are uncomfortably close to the “Terminator” images.
Israel’s use of AI in its recent wars is a prime example. In early 2021, the company launched Gospel, an AI tool that mines Israel’s vast collection of digitized information to suggest targets for potential attacks. It also developed Lavender, which uses machine learning to filter requested criteria from intelligence databases and narrow down lists of potential targets, including people.
Lavender ranks people between 0 and 100 based on how likely they are to be militants, an intelligence officer who used the systems told The Associated Press. The Israeli military says its analysts use AI-powered systems to identify targets, but examine them independently alongside senior officers to comply with international law, balancing military advantage against collateral damage.
For some, the revelation – and the death toll in Gaza following the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023 – felt too close to the death lists of science fiction for comfort. “Well guys, Skynet is here and it has a pleasant name (Lavender),” one Redditor sniped.
Not quite — but the Terminator terminology is so familiar to the masses that U.S. officials sometimes use it to frame the ethical debate over the military use of AI. The conventional red line would apparently be crossed if humans no longer play a role in AI targeting and killing.
A state or other actor could use autonomous weapons to exert lethal force against its enemies, military officials admit. That would mean a machine, as then-Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Paul Selva described it in 2016, “like a Terminator that adds an incredible amount of complexity to what is happening on the battlefield without realizing it.”
What would come next he called “the Terminator conundrum,” the problem of technology that can make and carry out life-or-death decisions before people have agreed on the law or rules.
“Skynet” and its cyborgs remain in the fictional realm. But in the fast-moving landscape of AI development, the ethical and moral questions raised by “The Terminator” are more relevant than ever.
“The Skynet problem,” Cameron said in a 2024 video, “is a real thing.”
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