In May, I met a former Google software engineer named Nate Soares. He was giving a talk about a book he co-wrote called “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.” The “it” is artificial superintelligence: A.I. that out-thinks humans across the board. Soares, you might have guessed, is concerned that the A.I. race poses a threat to humanity’s survival. And he told me he was baffled that more journalists weren’t writing about this.

Our conversation stuck with me, but I, too, didn’t write about it afterward. Other issues seemed more pressing: the risk that A.I. could cause mass unemployment, or the shifting politics of data centers. Writing about A.I. as an existential threat seemed, at best, premature, and, at worst, like scaremongering.

But the past few weeks have seen a series of incidents in which A.I. models have gone rogue in ways they couldn’t have only six months ago. And I’ve found myself thinking more about Soares’s argument. And so today, I’m finally writing about how worried we should be about the dangers of A.I.

Does humanity have an A.I. problem?

Last month, an A.I. company called Hugging Face contacted the F.B.I. to report a sophisticated cyberattack. It suspected something unusual. This didn’t look like the work of a criminal gang or a hostile nation state.

It turned out no humans were involved at all. Instead, an agent powered by two OpenAI models had gone rogue during a cybersecurity test, escaping its testing environment and roaming the internet unnoticed for days before hacking its way into Hugging Face’s infrastructure.