The race to get artificial intelligence to market has raised the risk of a Hindenburg-style disaster that shatters global confidence in the technology, a leading researcher has warned.

Michael Wooldridge, a professor of AI at Oxford University, said the danger arose from the immense commercial pressures that technology firms were under to release new AI tools, with companies desperate to win customers before the products’ capabilities and potential flaws are fully understood.

The surge in AI chatbots with guardrails that are easily bypassed showed how commercial incentives were prioritised over more cautious development and safety testing, he said.

“It’s the classic technology scenario,” he said. “You’ve got a technology that’s very, very promising, but not as rigorously tested as you would like it to be, and the commercial pressure behind it is unbearable.”

Wooldridge, who will deliver the Royal Society’s Michael Faraday prize lecture on Wednesday evening, titled “This is not the AI we were promised”, said a Hindenburg moment was “very plausible” as companies rushed to deploy more advanced AI tools.

The problem, Wooldridge said, was that AI chatbots failed in unpredictable ways and had no idea when they were wrong, but were designed to provide confident answers regardless. When delivered in human-like and sycophantic responses, the answers could easily mislead people, he added. The risk is that people start treating AIs as if they were human. In a 2025 survey by the Center for Democracy and Technology, nearly a third of students reported that they or a friend had had a romantic relationship with an AI.