Andrew Ng is an American computer scientist, entrepreneur and educator whose career spans the industrial deep-learning programs at Google and Baidu, large-scale online AI education, and venture investment in AI companies. In AI policy he is among the most consistently quoted opponents of regulation premised on catastrophic or existential risk, a position he restated in September 2026 in terms that placed him directly against the frontier-lab safety statements of that month.
Career
Ng was the founding lead of the Google Brain team, and subsequently served as vice president and chief scientist at Baidu, where he led a 1,300-person AI team responsible for the company's AI technology and strategy. He was formerly Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which he describes as home to more than 20 faculty members and research groups, and remains an adjunct professor at Stanford University (Source: andrewng.org).
He co-founded Coursera in 2012 and is its chairman; the platform reports more than 150 million registered learners. He is the founder of DeepLearning.AI, an AI education company that states it has trained more than seven million learners through courses offered with Stanford Online, Coursera and technology companies, and by his own account more than eight million people have taken an AI class from him. He is managing general partner at AI Fund, a venture studio that co-founds AI companies; managing partner at AI Aspire, an enterprise AI advisory firm operating in partnership with Bain & Company; and executive chairman of LandingAI, a document-processing company. His own site's summary description also identifies him as a board director at Amazon, a role the biography text itself does not mention (Source: andrewng.org).
Ng holds a B.Sc. from Carnegie Mellon University, an M.Sc. from MIT and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and has authored or co-authored more than 200 papers. He was named to the Time100 AI list in 2023 (Source: andrewng.org).
Position on existential risk and regulation
In a Bloomberg TV interview on September 17, 2026, Ng said that warnings about existential AI risks coming from researchers at the largest model developers are "science fiction" — "much more science fiction than science" — and that such warnings may be detrimental to ensuring the technology delivers its maximum benefits to society. He said the industry had stoked fears about catastrophic harms earlier in the AI boom in an apparent bid to bolster publicity and shape regulation (Source: bloomberg.com; bloomberg.com). The Bloomberg article body beyond its lede was paywalled and was not read. According to The Next Web, Ng said the same thing is happening now; that outlet connects the current wave of warnings to the September 8, 2026 resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, a link it draws itself rather than one it attributes to Ng (Source: thenextweb.com).
The position is a long-standing one. The Next Web reports that Ng told a US Senate forum in December 2023 that large companies hype fear to create rules that would "pull up the ladder" against new entrants, and that in the same statement he put the odds of AI causing human extinction at roughly one in 10 million over a century (Source: thenextweb.com). See P(doom) for comparable published estimates.
The timing places the statement against the sequence of frontier-lab commitments of that month — the pacing essay and the joint safety statements compared at Coordinated slowdown proposals compared — and against AI Existential Risk, the framing his remarks dispute. The specific claim that catastrophic-risk warnings serve a regulatory-positioning purpose is an argument about motive rather than about the underlying technical question, and no response from the researchers it refers to has been recorded. The Next Web observed that recital 110 of the EU AI Act lists loss-of-control risks, including models making copies of themselves, in the same paragraph as the chemical, biological, cyber and critical-infrastructure risks that Ng would prioritise (Source: thenextweb.com).
Open questions
- The Bloomberg account was read only to the lede, and the interview video was not transcribed. Whether Ng named particular companies, researchers or legislative proposals, and whether he addressed the September 2026 pacing commitments by name, is not established by the sources held.
- His Amazon board directorship appears in his own site's summary description but not in its biography text, and is not corroborated by any other source held. Its date, scope and current status are unrecorded — a relevant gap given that Amazon issued its own AI safety position on September 16, 2026.
- His positions on specific 2026 US federal and state AI bills are not established by the available sources, despite his being one of the most frequently quoted industry voices on AI regulation.
Relationships
- contradicts: AI Existential Risk — he argues the framing is unfounded and counterproductive
- contradicts: Coordinated slowdown proposals compared — his September 2026 remarks reject the premise of the pacing commitments made that month
- related: P(doom) — his reported extinction estimate of roughly one in 10 million over a century
- related: Jacob Coxon — the resignation The Next Web identifies as the start of the September 2026 wave of warnings
- related: Yann LeCun — the other most-cited researcher-critic of existential-risk framing
- related: Google DeepMind — Google Brain, which he founded, is an antecedent of the merged organisation
- related: Baidu (ERNIE) — where he was VP and chief scientist
- related: Amazon — board directorship per his own site's description
- related: AI in Education — DeepLearning.AI and Coursera