Artificial intelligence could pose existential risks, and governments need to know how to make sure the technology “doesn’t get abused by bad people,” former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned Wednesday, CNBC reported.

The future of artificial intelligence has been at the center of conversations between technologists and policymakers grappling with what the technology will look like in the future and how it should be regulated.

ChatGPT, a chatbot that went viral last year, has certainly pushed AI into the spotlight as major companies around the world look to launch competing products and showcase their AI capabilities.

Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit in London, Schmidt said he worries that artificial intelligence is an “existential risk.”

“And existential risk is defined as many, many, many, many people injured or killed,” Schmidt said. “There are scenarios, not today, but quite soon, when these systems can find zero-day exploits in cyber problems or discover new types of biology. This is fiction today, but the reasoning is probably true. And when that happens, we want to be ready to know how to make sure these things aren’t misused by bad people,” he continued.

Zero-day exploits are security vulnerabilities discovered by hackers in software and systems.

Schmidt, who was Google’s CEO from 2001 to 2011, doesn’t have a clear vision of how AI should be regulated, but said it’s a “broader issue for society.”

However, he said it was unlikely that a new regulatory agency would be created in the US to regulate AI.

Schmidt is not the first major tech figure to warn of the dangers of AI.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, admitted in March that he was “a little scared” of artificial intelligence.

He said he worries that authoritarian governments will develop the technology. Tesla CEO Elon Musk previously stated that he considers artificial intelligence to be one of the “biggest risks” to civilization.

Even current Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, who recently led the company to launch its own chatbot called Bard AI, said the technology would “affect every product in every company,” adding that society needs to prepare for change.

Schmidt served on the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which in 2019 began reviewing the technology, including a potential regulatory framework. The commission published its assessment in 2021, warning that the US is not ready for the era of AI.