Public anxiety about artificial intelligence (AI) has escalated sharply this year, climbing from worries about software companies to fears for jobs and, now, to talk of human extinction.
That is the message of a chart from Deutsche Bank, which has tracked how the dominant AI-related fear in Google searches has shifted over 2026.
The first phase was the "SaaSpocalypse", the fear that AI would gut providers of software as a service, which coincided with a heavy sell-off in software shares.
Attention then moved to a "job apocalypse", as searches were driven by fears that AI would wipe out employment, entry-level roles in particular.
From job threat to existential fear
The latest and now dominant spike is for "AI extinction", the existential worry that the technology could one day threaten humanity itself.
That jump followed a noisy week in which the bosses of Anthropic and OpenAI publicly agreed the industry should slow down, and an Anthropic researcher resigned with a warning of catastrophe.
Adrian Cox, the Deutsche Bank strategist behind the note, is unimpressed.
His argument, captured in the note's "we have seen this movie before" framing, is that even the finest minds have a poor record of predicting where technology goes.
On that reading, a surge in extinction searches says more about how effectively AI leaders have frightened people than about the real odds of disaster.
10% still seems too high, no?
Jensen Huang, the head of chipmaker Nvidia, made much the same point when asked about a 10% chance of AI causing human extinction.
"All of these predictions have been wrong," he said.
For Deutsche Bank, the deeper concern is financial rather than philosophical.
The bank points to stretched valuations at the biggest technology firms, at levels that invite comparison with past bubbles.
A historic boom, and by some counts trillions of dollars of investment, now rests on the hope that the hype eventually turns into real returns.
The worry is that mounting fear, whichever form it takes, could unsettle markets already braced for a possible sharp fall.
For now, the chart is less a forecast of doom than a measure of how successfully a handful of executives have shaped what the rest of us worry about.
