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The AI Boom Is a Climate Bust

It’s not just the massive amounts of water and energy data centers require—AI is also spreading climate misinformation across the Internet.

A Google data center in Henderson, Nevada, on July 24, 2025.

“Ithink AI will probably, like, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world,” Sam Altman said in 2015, the year he cofounded Open AI, the artificial intelligence company that made him a billionaire. But not to worry, he added: “In the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.” 

As if to confirm Altman’s dystopian prediction, recent scientific research has documented that AI chatbots increasingly lie, cheat, and disregard direct instructions from humans. That’s bad enough when the issue is whether e-mails should be deleted; it’s another thing entirely when the future of humanity is at stake. In simulated war games, AI ordered nuclear strikes in 95 cases out of 100, researchers at Kings College London found.

Bill Gates has said that AI “will make it easier to fight climate change,” but more and more evidence suggests that AI actually makes it harder. “Our investigations have documented that Big Tech is now increasingly embracing the climate crisis denial rhetoric of Big Oil,” Geoff Dembicki, the global managing editor of DeSmog told Covering Climate Now. Scientific American has reported that Elon Musk’s AI chatbot has been spreading climate denial.

“Targeted AI has become a key tool in spreading climate change disinformation,” observes a report by the NGO Forum On Information Democracy. “AI algorithms can help craft highly personalized messages…[that........

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