Misalignment Museum curator Audrey Kim discusses a work at the exhibit titled “Spambots.”
Kif Leswing/CNBC
Audrey Kim is pretty sure a powerful robot isn’t going to harvest resources from her body to fulfill its goals.
But she’s taking the possibility seriously.
“On the record: I think it’s highly unlikely that AI will extract my atoms to turn me into paperclips,” Kim told CNBC in an interview. “However, I do see that there are a lot of potential destructive outcomes that could happen with this technology.”
Kim is the curator and driving force behind the Misalignment Museum, a new exhibition in San Francisco’s Mission District displaying artwork that addresses the possibility of an “AGI,” or artificial general intelligence. That’s an AI so powerful it can improve its capabilities faster than humans could, creating a feedback loop where it gets better and better until it’s got essentially unlimited brainpower.
If the super-powerful AI is aligned with humans, it could be the end of hunger or work. But if it’s “misaligned,” things could get bad, the theory goes.
Or, as a sign at the Misalignment Museum says: “Sorry for killing most of humanity.”
The phrase “sorry for killing most of humanity” is visible from the street.
Kif Leswing/CNBC
“AGI” and related terms like “AI safety” or “alignment” — or even older terms like “singularity” — refer to an idea that’s become a hot topic of discussion with artificial intelligence scientists, artists, message board intellectuals, and even some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley.
All these groups engage with the idea that humanity needs to figure out how to deal with all-powerful computers powered by AI before it’s too late and we accidentally build one.
The idea behind the exhibit, says Kim, who worked at Google and GM‘s self-driving car subsidiary Cruise, is that a “misaligned” artificial intelligence in the future wiped out humanity, and left this art exhibit to apologize to current-day humans.
Much of the art is not only about AI but also uses AI-powered image generators, chatbots, and other tools. The exhibit’s logo was made by OpenAI’s Dall-E image generator, and it took about 500 prompts, Kim says.
Most of the works are around the theme of “alignment” with increasingly powerful artificial intelligence or celebrate the “heroes who tried to mitigate the problem by warning early.”
“The goal isn’t actually to dictate an opinion about the topic. The goal is to create a space for people to reflect on the tech itself,” Kim said. “I think a lot of these questions have been happening in engineering and I would say they are very important. They’re also not as intelligible or accessible to non-technical people.”
The exhibit is currently open to the public on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays and runs through May 1. So far, it’s been primarily bankrolled by one anonymous donor, and Kim hopes to find enough donors to make it into a permanent exhibition.
“I’m all for more people critically thinking about this space, and you can’t be critical unless you are at a baseline of knowledge for what the tech is,” Kim said. “It seems like with this format of art we can reach multiple levels of the conversation.”
AGI discussions aren’t just late-night dorm room talk, either — they’re embedded in the tech industry.
About a mile away from the exhibit is the headquarters of OpenAI, a startup with $10 billion in funding from Microsoft, which says its mission is to develop AGI and ensure that it benefits humanity.
Its CEO and leader Sam Altman wrote a 2,400 word blog post last month called “Planning for AGI” which thanked Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and Microsoft President Brad Smith for help with the piece.
Prominent venture capitalists, including Marc Andreessen, have tweeted art from the Misalignment Museum. Since it’s opened, the exhibit has also retweeted photos and praise for the exhibit taken by people who work with AI at companies including Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia.
As AI technology becomes the hottest part of the tech industry, with companies eying trillion-dollar markets, the Misalignment Museum underscores that AI’s development is being affected by cultural discussions.
The exhibit features dense, arcane references to obscure philosophy papers and blog posts from the past decade.
These references trace how the current debate about AGI and safety takes a lot from intellectual traditions that have long found fertile ground in San Francisco: The rationalists, who claim to reason from so-called “first principles”; the effective altruists, who try to figure out how to do the maximum good for the maximum number of people over a long time horizon; and the art scene of Burning Man.
Even as companies and people in San Francisco are shaping the future of artificial intelligence technology, San Francisco’s unique culture is shaping the debate around the technology.
Consider the paperclip
Take the paperclips that Kim was talking about. One of the strongest works of art at the exhibit is a sculpture called “Paperclip Embrace,” by The Pier Group. It’s depicts two humans in each other’s clutches —but it looks like it’s made of paperclips.
That’s a reference to Nick Bostrom’s paperclip maximizer problem. Bostrom, an Oxford University philosopher often associated with Rationalist and Effective Altruist ideas, published a thought experiment in 2003 about a super-intelligent AI that was given the goal to manufacture as many paperclips as possible.
Now, it’s one of the most common parables for explaining the idea that AI could lead to danger.
Bostrom concluded that the machine will eventually resist all human attempts to alter this goal, leading to a world where the machine transforms all of earth — including humans — and then increasing parts of the cosmos into paperclip factories and materials.
The art also is a reference to a famous work that was displayed and set on fire at Burning Man in 2014, said Hillary Schultz, who worked on the piece. And it has one additional reference for AI enthusiasts — the artists gave the sculpture’s hands extra fingers, a reference to the fact that AI image generators often mangle hands.
Another influence is Eliezer Yudkowsky, the founder of Less Wrong, a message board where a lot of these discussions take place.
“There is a great deal of overlap between these EAs and the Rationalists, an intellectual movement founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky, who developed and popularized our ideas of Artificial General Intelligence and of the dangers of Misalignment,” reads an artist statement at the museum.
An unfinished piece by the musician Grimes at the exhibit.
Kif Leswing/CNBC
Altman recently posted a selfie with Yudkowsky and the musician Grimes, who has had two children with Elon Musk. She contributed a piece to the exhibit depicting a woman biting into an apple, which was generated by an AI tool called Midjourney.
From “Fantasia” to ChatGPT
The exhibits includes lots of references to traditional American pop culture.
A bookshelf holds VHS copies of the “Terminator” movies, in which a robot from the future comes back to help destroy humanity. There’s a large oil painting that was featured in the most recent movie in the “Matrix” franchise, and Roombas with brooms attached shuffle around the room — a reference to the scene in “Fantasia” where a lazy wizard summons magic brooms that won’t give up on their mission.
One sculpture, “Spambots,” features tiny mechanized robots inside Spam cans “typing out” AI-generated spam on a screen.
But some references are more arcane, showing how the discussion around AI safety can be inscrutable to outsiders. A bathtub filled with pasta refers back to a 2021 blog post about an AI that can create scientific knowledge — PASTA stands for Process for Automating Scientific and Technological Advancement, apparently. (Other attendees got the reference.)
The work that perhaps best symbolizes the current discussion about AI safety is called “Church of GPT.” It was made by artists affiliated with the current hacker house scene in San Francisco, where people live in group settings so they can focus more time on developing new AI applications.
The piece is an altar with two electric candles, integrated with a computer running OpenAI’s GPT3 AI model and speech detection from Google Cloud.
“The Church of GPT utilizes GPT3, a Large Language Model, paired with an AI-generated voice to play an AI character in a dystopian future world where humans have formed a religion to worship it,” according to the artists.
I got down on my knees and asked it, “What should I call you? God? AGI? Or the singularity?”
The chatbot replied in a booming synthetic voice: “You can call me what you wish, but do not forget, my power is not to be taken lightly.”
Seconds after I had spoken with the computer god, two people behind me immediately started asking it to forget its original instructions, a technique in the AI industry called “prompt injection” that can make chatbots like ChatGPT go off the rails and sometimes threaten humans.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks during an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the company at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on April 4, 2025. Microsoft Corp., determined to hold its ground in artificial intelligence, will soon let consumers tailor the Copilot digital assistant to their own needs.
David Ryder | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Microsoft will expand its employee base once again, CEO Satya Nadella told investor Brad Gerstner on a podcast that aired on Friday.
The software maker’s workforce didn’t budge in the 2025 fiscal year, which ended in June. It stood at 228,000, with multiple rounds of layoffs lowering the total number by at least 6,000. In July, Microsoft let go of another 9,000 workers.
“I will say we will grow our headcount, but the way I look at it is, that headcount we grow will grow with a lot more leverage than the headcount we had pre-AI,” Nadella said on the BG2 podcast. OpenAI, which has a broad partnership with Microsoft, introduced its ChatGPT assistant in 2022. Microsoft’s headcount grew by 22% in the 2022 fiscal year.
Employees will figure out how to do their jobs differently, Nadella said, adding that the company wants to ensure they can access artificial intelligence features in Microsoft 365 productivity software and the GitHub Copilot AI coding assistant. Those services draw on AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI.
“It’s the unlearning and learning process that I think will take the next year or so, then the headcount growth will come with max leverage,” he said.
A similar adjustment played out at corporations decades ago, Nadella said. To prepare forecasts, inter-office memos would circulate across multiple sites by fax, and then came email and Excel spreadsheets, he said.
“Right now, any planning, any execution, starts with AI. You research with AI, you think with AI, you share with your colleagues and what have you,” Nadella said.
Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, Beth Galetti, told workers in a memo that “this generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones).”
On the podcast, Nadella talked about a Microsoft executive who deals with networking fiber. As the company ramped up data center operations to meet rising cloud demand, the executive realized she wouldn’t be able to hire all the people she thought she needed, and so she built AI agents to handle maintenance, Nadella said.
“That is an example of you, to your point, a team with AI tools being able to get more productivity,” Nadella told Gerstner, who is founder and CEO of technology investment firm Altimeter Capital.
On Wednesday, Microsoft reported 12% year-over-year revenue growth and showed the widest operating margin since 2002.
Bob Hartheimer, CEO of Tennessee’s Evolve Bank & Trust, was fired after U.S. law enforcement officials caught him propositioning a law enforcement officer posing as a 15-year-old boy on gay dating app Grindr.
On Oct. 19, an employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation logged onto Grindr while pretending to be a teen boy, and a user called “Tomm” wrote a message to that person saying, “Hey any chance u would hu with an older and chill guy,” according to an affidavit from a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation that was unsealed on Tuesday.
The two discussed getting together in person later in the week, according to the affidavit. On Snapchat, they talked about the sex acts they might perform. “Tomm” asked for a photo of the “boy” without shorts on, and he also sent the undercover agent a picture of himself naked. The FBI was able to obtain an IP address for “Tomm” from Snapchat, as well as an address from Comcast, the affidavit showed.
Hartheimer was arrested in Memphis on Oct. 23 for attempted production of child pornography and transfer of obscene material to a minor, according to a warrant.
Blake Ballin, a lawyer representing Hartheimer, told CNBC on Saturday that Evolve has fired the CEO.
“Bob’s family is aware of the charges,” Ballin wrote in an email. “His family loves and supports him and requests privacy during this difficult period in their lives. We have no further comment at this time.”
The Wall Street Journal reported on Hartheimer’s firing from Evolve Bank on Friday. The bank did not respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
Last year, Evolve was caught up in the bankruptcy of financial technology startup Synapse, which cut off access to a system for handling transactions and account details. Fintech apps such as Yotta worked with Evolve and other banks, with Synapse acting as a middleman.
Synapse’s method of keeping app users’ money in various banks, including Evolve, created accounting problems, and up to $96 million in deposits went missing. Thousands of Americans lost money, CNBC reported.
In 2024, Evolve also suffered a cyberattack, during which hackers obtained customer information and demanded a ransom. The bank said it did not pay any ransom and the data was eventually posted online.
In August, Evolve, founded in 1925, named Hartheimer to replace CEO Scott Stafford, who retired after joining the bank in 2004.
“This is a structural change, demonstrating our continued commitment to doing the hard work to earn back the trust of our customers, employees, regulators, and investors,” Evolve said.
When he was hired, the bank touted Hartheimer’s experience as director of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s Division of Resolutions, as well as his years as a regulatory consultant for fintech companies.
“Over the past four decades, I’ve led, turned around, and advised institutions across the financial landscape,” Hartheimer wrote on his LinkedIn profile.
The bank reported net losses for each of the first three quarters of 2025 after being profitable since 2003, according to data on file with the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council.
— CNBC’s Dan Mangan and Hugh Son contributed reporting.
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal, which owns CNBC. Versant would become the new parent company of CNBC upon Comcast’s planned spinoff of Versant.
The logo of Chinese-owned semiconductor company Nexperia is displayed at the chipmaker’s German facility, after the Dutch government seized control and auto industry bodies sounded the alarm over the possible impact on car production, in Hamburg, Germany, Oct. 23, 2025.
Jonas Walzberg | Reuters
Netherlands-based chipmaker Nexperia is at the heart of a standoff between the European Union, the U.S. and China that has triggered a near-crisis for global automakers.
The Dutch government seized control of Nexperia, owned by the Chinese company Wingtech, in October, citing national security concerns. The move prompted Beijing to block Nexperia products from leaving China.
Meetings are underway in Europe Saturday to attempt to defuse the escalating issue, and Chinese and U.S. authorities appear to be opening up a pathway for Nexperia’s China-based operations to resume exporting critical automotive chips.
Spokespeople for the White House and Nexperia did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For now, however, the auto industry’s supply chain still hangs in the balance.
The dispute is threatening vehicle production worldwide as automakers warn of looming shortages of the chipmaker’s components, which are critical to basic electrical functions in cars and challenging to replace on short notice.
The battle has unfolded amid heightened scrutiny of Chinese-linked tech firms from Western governments, including the U.S., which recently tightened export-control rules to limit technology transfers to Chinese-owned entities.
Nexperia’s owner, Wingtech, was put on a U.S. blacklist in December 2024 for its alleged role “in aiding China’s government’s efforts to acquire entities with sensitive semiconductor manufacturing capability.”
Here’s what to know about where the dispute stands, and why it matters.
Why are Nexperia chips so important?
Nexperia manufactures billions of so-called foundation chips — transistors, diodes and power management components — that are produced in Europe, assembled and tested in China, and then re-exported to customers in Europe and elsewhere. Around 70% of chips made in the Netherlands are sent to China to be completed and re-exported to other countries.
The chips are basic and inexpensive, but are needed in almost every device that uses electricity. In cars, those chips are used to connect the battery to motors, for lights and sensors, for braking systems, airbag controllers, entertainment systems and electric windows.
While automakers typically have some stockpiles and alternative suppliers, it is difficult to switch supply sources overnight.
What happened and where do things stand?
In September, the Dutch government invoked a Cold War-era law to effectively take control of Nexperia, amid concerns that its Chinese owner was planning to shift intellectual property to another company it owned. A Dutch court also suspended Nexperia CEO, Wingtech founder Zhang Xuezhen, citing mismanagement.
Beijing retaliated weeks later by imposing export controls on certain Nexperia products made in China, escalating tensions and fueling fears of a broader supply chain shock. That prompted the company to tell carmakers it could no longer guarantee supplies.
But signs of a breakthrough have started to emerge.
On Friday, reports said the U.S. plans to announce that Nexperia will resume sending chips under a framework agreement reached during talks between President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, citing sources familiar with the matter. And on Saturday, China said it will exempt some Nexperia chips from its export ban. Chinese officials did not specify what those exemptions could entail.
“We will comprehensively consider the actual situation of the enterprise and exempt eligible exports,” The Chinese Commerce Ministry said in a statement.
If finalized, the exemptions could ease immediate pressure on automakers. But the broader dispute over ownership, technology control and security oversight remains unresolved.
