The Financial Post reports in its Wednesday, May 31, edition that top artificial intelligence executives including OpenAI chief executive officer Sam Altman on Tuesday joined experts and professors in raising the "risk of extinction from AI," which they urged policy makers to equate at par with risks posed by pandemics and nuclear war. A Reuters dispatch to the Post reports that more than 350 signatories wrote in a one-line statement published by the non-profit Center for AI Safety (CAIS), "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." As well as Mr. Altman, they included the CEOs of AI firms Deepmind and Anthropic, and executives from Microsoft and Google. Also among them were Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio -- two of the three "godfathers of AI" who received the 2018 Turing Award for their work on deep learning -- and professors from institutions ranging from Harvard to China's Tsinghua University. The letter coincided with the U.S.-EU Trade and Technology Council meeting in Sweden where politicians are expected to talk about regulating AI.