More or less of an existential threat than a conflict between nuclear powers because one of them decided to launch a unilateral strike against a datacentre located outside one of their cities just in case it hosted a particularly dangerous chatbot?
Sam Altman: "Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen (for example, an engineered virus with a long incubation period and a high mortality rate) but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could."
Trolley problem: on the left track is a class of schoolchildren. On the right track is a a computer which a Harry Potter fanfic author argues has magic powers and the marketing department of Apple kind of agrees. Do you let Eliezer persuade you to kill the kids?
And in this case we're not talking about bombing sites if they appear to be used for uranium enrichment which isn't exactly an everyday need, we're talking about bombing them if they appear to be optimised to contain lots of computers. You don't even have to be an AI sceptic to imagine a policy of threatening to launch missile strikes on Chinese businesses if they build out capacity in a way distant observers don't like might be more likely to result in millions of deaths than the whatever runs on the Chinese business' computers...