Which AI does the internet fear most?
The Doom Index measures how much of the conversation about each system is framed in terms of existential risk, how intense that conversation is, and how much of it comes from people who work on AI rather than from anonymous accounts.
9h 54m to midnight
Doom Index 17.5 / 100 · most-discussed: Anthropic
This measures discourse, not risk. It reflects how much and how intensely people are talking about existential risk in relation to each system. It is not a prediction, a probability, or an assessment of actual danger.
The framing echoes the Doomsday Clock, which is an editorial judgement device rather than a measurement. This one is computed, but it measures conversation, not danger.
Ranking · last 168h
Companies & labs
2 ranked6 entities excluded — insufficient data
chatgpt, gpt-5, claude, gemini, grok, google-deepmind. These are excluded because too few documents mentioned them in the window to compute a meaningful score. Exclusion here means we do not know, not that there is no concern.
This measures discourse, not risk. It reflects how much and how intensely people are talking about existential risk in relation to each system. It is not a prediction, a probability, or an assessment of actual danger.
How the Doom Index is computed
DoomIndex = 100 × [ 0.55 · existential share + 0.25 · fear intensity + 0.20 · expert voice ]
- Existential share
- What proportion of the fear expressed about this system is specifically about loss of control, rather than about jobs, deepfakes or privacy. Those are real concerns, but they are not doom.
- Fear intensity
- How strongly that fear is expressed, weighted by reach — not how often the system is mentioned. A widely-discussed model does not climb the ranking on volume alone.
- Expert voice
- How much of the existential discourse comes from people with demonstrable standing in the field. This is the anti-hysteria term: a system cannot top this ranking on anonymous panic alone.
Why we do not rank by predicted danger. “Which AI will kill humanity first” is not a measurable quantity, and publishing a ranking of real products by predicted lethality would be an assertion we cannot support. What people fear is measurable, auditable, and — it turns out — the more interesting number.