Geoffrey Hinton’s 10%–20% estimate is his personal assessment of the chance that AI could cause human extinction in the coming decades; he said it was meant to convey a serious risk, not predict a specific event. Separately, an open letter on AI and cybersecurity recommends initially isolating cyber-capable models from the internet, then weighing any permitted online actions against how difficult it is to predict whether they could cause a security failure. Hinton explained his estimate in an interview with The Guardian, and the letter sets out its containment recommendations.