Technology companies’ claims about artificial intelligence’s ability to mitigate planet-warming emissions amount to a new form of “greenwashing,” a new report says.
The report, authored by energy and climate analyst Ketan Joshi, digs into the sourcing for those claims and finds that, in many cases, they are “at best deserving of more scrutiny and at worst catastrophically overstated.”
It also juxtaposes the claims against actual emissions from building out and powering the data centers behind AI.
“Put simply, the evidence of massive climate benefits for AI is weak, whilst the evidence of substantial harm is strong,” says the report, which is supported by a consortium of climate groups including Stand.Earth, Beyond Fossil Fuels and Friends of the Earth.
