Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar said Sunday that many artificial intelligence researchers have started smoking cigarettes as a way of demonstrating how strongly they believe AI will cure cancer — a claim he offered without naming a single researcher or citing any supporting data.

"So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI," Sankar said during appearance on CBS News' Face the Nation, the network's long-running Sunday public affairs program. "I believe so much in AI that it's going to cure cancer. So I'm showing you my chips are all in."

The remark came as an aside while host Margaret Brennan pressed him on why he had been so focused on the topic. Sankar did not identify any of the researchers he referenced, point to a survey, or explain the basis for his claim.

The appearance also gave Sankar a platform to attack effective altruism, the philosophical movement closely associated with concerns about AI risk. He pointed to FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried as the effective altruist most Americans know — a reputation cemented by FTX's 2022 collapse and Bankman-Fried's subsequent fraud conviction — and described the movement as a "millenarian doomsday cult." He also invoked Blaise Pascal's idea of a god-shaped hole in every human heart, suggesting that some researchers are filling that void with a machine god they call AGI, or artificial general intelligence.

The medical record is less enthusiastic than the thesis. According to the CDC, smoking causes roughly one in three cancer deaths in the United States, and cigarette smoke contains at least 69 chemicals known to cause cancer. The agency says smokers face about 25 times the lung cancer risk of non-smokers. Quitting lowers the risk of 12 types of cancer, and the added lung cancer risk drops by half 10 to 15 years after a person stops.

The promise that AI will cure cancer has become a familiar refrain across the industry. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in August that the pitch has become "more a cliche than it is inspiring," arguing that only actually curing the disease would earn the public's trust. Amodei also pushed back on criticism of his own public messaging in a post on X, part of a thread defending how he balances the technology's risks and benefits:

2/2 Second, on the messaging around AI. I do not agree that my messaging has been disproportionately negative. In fact it has been about equally balanced between risks and benefits: I've written one major essay about each, and even in interviews where I discuss the risks, I… — Dario Amodei (@DarioAmodei) August 15, 2026

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Public trust in AI remains thin. In the CBS News poll Brennan cited on the program, 50% of Americans said AI will create more problems than it solves, 29% said it will solve more than it creates, and 21% were unsure. About 45% said they want the government to restrict AI's use and development. That gap matters because the industry's favorite pitch is a medical one, and medical claims are ultimately judged by clinical results rather than displays of conviction.

Smoking as a display of technological faith does not obviously move those numbers, but it does appear to serve a social purpose within the industry. "When you're smoking, you're networking by accident," Revamp AI cofounder Stephen Campbell told Business Insider last month.

Sankar's comments arrive against a backdrop of broader warnings about AI's impact. International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva recently cautioned that AI could affect 40% of jobs worldwide, and industry insiders have been quietly rehearsing for a major AI incident they expect within a year.

Palantir, the data-analytics company Sankar helps lead, sells software to governments and militaries, and most of its business relies on AI.