There is a particular arrogance that flourishes in every court of true believers, and it usually announces itself with a gesture. In the Silicon Valley of 2026, according to one man who works at the heart of the American data-power industry, the gesture is a lit cigarette.
Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, told CBS News’ Face the Nation on Sunday that a striking habit has taken root among the builders of artificial intelligence. “So many AI researchers have started smoking as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI,” he said. The reasoning, as he laid it out, runs like a wager: “I believe so much in AI that it’s going to cure cancer. So I’m showing you my chips are all in.”
As Business Insider reported, Sankar named no researchers and offered no evidence for the claim. The cigarette remains what it has always been: a major cause of preventable illness and death, and no AI breakthrough has yet abolished what tobacco does to the human lung. The smoker’s bet, if anyone is truly making it, rests entirely on the machine keeping a promise it has not made.
The machine god of AGI
Sankar raised the anecdote not to praise the smokers but to diagnose them. He has been an open critic of AI safety advocates, and in the interview he described what he sees as Silicon Valley’s “mass psychosis” and “social delusion” around artificial intelligence — a valley, in his telling, that has mistaken its product for a deity.
He reached for the philosopher Blaise Pascal and his idea that human beings carry a “God-shaped hole” in their hearts. “I think it’s important to understand that many of these folks in Silicon Valley who are building this technology have filled that hole with the machine god of AGI,” Sankar said. It is a curious sermon to hear from the CTO of a company whose own fortunes are bound to the spread of artificial intelligence, but that is the nature of heresy trials: the most zealous accusers are often those who know the congregation best.
A countercurrent in the land of cold plunges
Whether or not cancer-curing confidence is the motive, the cigarette has indeed made a small comeback in a sector that built its identity on the optimized body — cold plunges, sleep tracking, peptide treatments. Business Insider’s Henry Chandonnet documented last month a pocket of founders, engineers, and investors who have embraced smoking. For some, a cigarette break is networking: a reason to stand outside with strangers. For others, it is styling — a way to look less polished, less desperate, than the standard-issue startup founder.
And for a few, Sankar’s wager appears in its pure form. “By the time you do get lung cancer, our AI robots are supposed to have cured that,” Avi Schiffmann, founder of the AI wearable startup Friend, previously told Business Insider.
Every age of faith produces its indulgences — small permissions the faithful grant themselves because salvation is near and the old rules no longer apply. The medieval believer bought pardons; the true believer of AGI, if Sankar is to be believed, buys cigarettes. In both cases the theology is convenient, the reckoning deferred, and the bill, when it arrives, addressed to the body rather than the church.