Elon Musk warned senators during a Capitol Hill meeting that artificial intelligence is a “civilizational risk” to governments and societies, NBC News reports.

This is the first of its kind closed-door summit with artificial intelligence as the main topic and all the titans of big tech, including Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Sundar Pichai and Sam Altman.

After leaving the meeting, the billionaire entrepreneur called the event “historic.” He stood by the idea that artificial intelligence should be controlled by a new federal agency because he believes AI poses a huge danger.

“The consequences of AI going wrong are severe so we have to be proactive rather than reactive. The question is really one of civilizational risk. It’s not like for one group of humans versus another. It’s like, hey, this is something that’s potentially risky for all humans everywhere”, Musk told a gaggle of reporters before he ducked into his waiting Tesla.

According to Musk, the chance of artificial intelligence wiping out humanity is just above zero, and therefore it is necessary to take preventive measures.

Senator Cynthia Lummis, who was present at the meeting, told reporters that she was very surprised and even stunned by Musk’s phrase that referred to artificial intelligence as a “civilisational risk”.

Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, did not answer questions as he left the summit. His team provided his prepared remarks from inside the room, where he said the onus is on the government to regulate AI.

Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT parent company OpenAI, said he was surprised, given the format, by the broad agreement in the room on “the need to take this seriously and treat it with urgency”.

In addition to Musk, Zuckerberg, Gates and Altman, Wednesday’s forum was attended by the CEOs of Google, IBM, Microsoft, Nvidia and Palantir, as well as the heads of labor, human rights and entertainment groups.