From within the very laboratories building the future, warnings of civilizational extinction have begun to echo outward — not from the margins, but from the boardrooms of the world's most powerful artificial intelligence companies. Within a decade, some of these firms suggest, humanity may lose control of what it has created. Yet as these alarms grow louder, an older and quieter question reasserts itself: when those who profit from a technology are also those who define its dangers, how do we learn to tell the difference between a warning and a strategy?