Andrew Feldman thinks the AI doomsday narrative isn’t doing the industry any favors. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, the Cerebras Systems CEO and co-founder quipped that “some of the leaders in the AI world maybe shouldn’t be allowed to talk in public.”
He was referring to warnings about AI’s dangers, including models breaking containment and debates among AI insiders over whether AI could kill all of humanity by the end of the decade. The debate has even made its way into comedy: in a recent “Saturday Night Live” skit parodying Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a fictional character summed it up with the line, “We do not condone what we are doing.”
Feldman thinks the promise and potential of AI developments are getting overlooked. He thinks AI leaders should more often tell people the technology could help create a future where their grandchildren “never meet anybody who dies of cancer.” He offered that as a possibility, not a reason to dismiss concerns about AI risks.
Feldman has a vested interest in AI succeeding: Cerebras sells AI chips, and its customers include OpenAI, Block, Figma, pharmaceutical giant GSK, and Lovable. Still, Feldman is pragmatic about weighing the risks against the rewards.
“I don’t think there are powerful technologies that don’t come with the challenge of ‘what happens when powerful technologies are in the hands of bad people?’ I think you can’t make one and not have the other,” Feldman said at Disrupt.
“I think what we have to say is that this technology is powerful,” he added. “We have to be thoughtful about it. We have to regulate it reasonably,” he said.
Feldman also suggested that some of the backlash against AI may have to do with how the data center industry has approached new buildouts driven by AI demand. He said the industry hasn’t worked closely enough with local communities, particularly in the United States, or engaged residents as the power, oil, and gas industries have.
He contrasted U.S. NIMBY-ism, short for “not in my backyard!”, with approaches in Brazil, Canada, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Mexico, and Sweden, which he named as markets encouraging companies to build data centers. His comparison suggests that opposition may reflect not only concerns about AI, but also how the infrastructure behind it is planned with communities.
Feldman also isn’t worried that efficiency improvements will reduce demand for Cerebras chips or those made by other companies competing with Nvidia. He said hardware vendors can make computing more efficient while model makers improve their models to achieve the same goals with less, arguing that both kinds of progress need to come together.
