In brief
- Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar claimed on CBS that many AI researchers have started smoking to show how much they believe in AI.
- Sankar provide any data, and used the segment to attack effective altruism as a doomsday cult.
- The CDC says smoking causes about one in three U.S. cancer deaths, and Anthropic's Dario Amodei says only actually curing cancer will earn public trust in AI.
Nothing says “I trust the future of medicine” quite like lighting a Marlboro and waiting for the chatbot to fix your lungs. That is the habit Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar says is spreading among AI researchers, who have supposedly started smoking cigarettes to prove how confident they are that AI will cure cancer.
“So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI,” Sankar said in an interview on CBS News' “Face the Nation” on Sunday. “I believe so much in AI that it's going to cure cancer. So I'm showing you my chips are all in.”
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He did not name a single researcher, cite a survey, or explain how he knows. The remark landed as an aside while host Margaret Brennan pressed him on why he was so focused on the topic.
He pointed to FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried as the effective altruist most Americans know, calling the movement a “millenarian doomsday cult.” He also invoked Pascal's idea of a god-shaped hole in every human heart, which he suggested some of these researchers are filling with a machine god called AGI.
The medical record is less enthusiastic than the thesis. The CDC says smoking causes roughly one in three cancer deaths in the United States, and cigarette smoke contains at least 69 chemicals known to cause cancer.
Smokers face about 25 times the lung cancer risk of non-smokers, according to the agency. Quitting lowers the risk of 12 types of cancer, and the added lung cancer risk drops by half 10 to 15 years after stopping.
The cancer pitch is not new in this industry. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in August that promising AI will cure cancer has become “more a cliche than it is inspiring,” and that only actually curing it would earn the public's trust.
2/2 Second, on the messaging around AI. I do not agree that my messaging has been disproportionately negative. In fact it has been about equally balanced between risks and benefits: Ive written one major essay about each, and even in interviews where I discuss the risks, I…
— Dario Amodei (@DarioAmodei) August 15, 2026
That trust is thin. In the CBS poll Brennan cited, 50% of Americans said AI will create more problems than it solves, 29% said it will solve more than it creates, and 21% were unsure.
About 45% said they want the government to restrict AI's use and development. Smoking to show faith in the technology does not obviously help that number, but it does help AI bros bond with each other. “When you're smoking, you're networking by accident,” Revamp AI cofounder Stephen Campbell told Business Insider last month.
The IMF's Kristalina Georgieva recently warned that AI could hit 40% of jobs, and insiders expect a major AI incident within a year. Indirectly causing a lung cancer outbreak was probably not on their bingo card.
Palantir sells data-analysis software to governments and militaries. Most of its business relies on AI.
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