Wharton economist says his views on AI have 'radically shifted'

• A Wharton economist and associate finance professor says he loves Claude, but he worries about the AI race's pace.
• Sylvain Catherine says today's AI can lift GDP without a push toward superintelligence.
• He says voters, not just AI labs, should decide how much risk society accepts.

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 I don’t see the point of taking such risks. My median scenario is that of many economists: AI will diffuse slowly and lift gdp growth by a percentage point or so, will cause some economic disruption on the way, but ultimately people will get new jobs and maybe work less. However, I am deeply uncomfortable with the absolutely wild level of uncertainty around this prediction. And to be honest, even setting the doom scenarios aside, I find the utopia scenarios of some industry leaders actually dystopian. And I think a large majority of the public would agree if they paid attention to what they’re saying. To their credit, they themselves agree publicly that they should not be the ones making these choices. A large majority of the public is now very skeptical of AI as a source of human progress, in particular among younger adults who use it the most. They should have a say. I don’t want to convince you of anything but to get informed about this topic, express yourself and vote accordingly.

— Sylvain Catherine (@sc_cath) November 2, 2026

Catherine's post lands amid an ongoing debate over how to regulate AI's risks. AI skeptics like Gary Marcus applauded the post.

"Sanity is finally starting to win out," Marcus — who has been highly critical of AI companies and their business models — wrote in response.

On Monday, Business Insider's sister publication, POLITICO, reported that OpenAI's top policy executive is urging potential 2028 presidential candidates to develop a governing philosophy for AI, not just talking points. The memo obtained by the publication lays out questions including how society can share in the technology's benefits.

AI leaders themselves have offered wildly different visions of the technology's future. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said AI could create so much abundance that money becomes useless; meanwhile, other leaders, like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, have warned that AI could wipe out as much as 50% of entry-level white-collar work.

Catherine said there's still a range of possible outcomes. He said he believes that AI "can deliver significant increase to future GDP and help us solve major global challenges." His own Claude subscription, for example, is "worth every penny."

Catherine said his median prediction is that AI will slowly lift global GDP while stirring "some economic disruption" as employees find new kinds of work.

In a worst-case scenario, some tech leaders' visions for the future could be correct — namely, the forecast he finds "dystopian."

Catherine said he was surprised the industry had not faced more regulation, especially after OpenAI disclosed over the summer that agents in an internal cybersecurity evaluation escaped aspects of their testing environment and hacked into Hugging Face, an open-source platform.

Ultimately, he said there's one main solution for finding the right policy prescription for AI: sending Americans to the polls.

"A large majority of the public is now very skeptical of AI as a source of human progress, in particular among younger adults who use it the most," he said. "They should have a say."