Steve Wozniak

Steve Wozniak (born 1950) co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs in 1976 and single-handedly designed the Apple I and Apple II, the machines that put the personal computer on desks and made him one of the most admired engineers in Silicon Valley history. Unlike most tech founders of his stature, “Woz” has spent the decades since as a folk hero of hands-on engineering — which gives his AI warnings an unusual weight.

From pause letter to prohibition

Wozniak signed the March 2023 Future of Life Institute letter calling for a six-month pause on training systems beyond GPT-4. That May he told the BBC that AI’s fluency makes it “open to the bad players, the ones that want to trick you about who they are” — his fear is less killer robots than scams, misinformation, and unaccountable platforms. He conceded “we can’t stop the technology,” but argued for regulation and clear labeling of AI content, complaining that Big Tech firms “feel [as if] they can kind of get away with anything.”

In October 2025 he escalated, joining Geoffrey Hinton, Richard Branson, and more than 850 others in signing the Future of Life Institute’s Statement on Superintelligence. Wozniak’s position carries nuance: he is no Luddite, remains a lifelong technology enthusiast, and frames the danger as human misuse and profit motives rather than the machines themselves — telling interviewers he is simply “not a fan” of trusting AI that lacks human understanding.