The climate case for AI has not been made

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AI leaders claim their tech will fix the climate. The evidence mostly points in the opposite direction so far.

This week, as countries meet in Antalya, Turkey for the United Nations climate conference, one topic likely to dominate the conversation is artificial intelligence. The host has already called on countries to commit to ensuring that AI is designed, powered, and deployed in ways that support climate action.

But so far, industries around the world aren’t doing nearly enough to harness the technology to actually drive down the greenhouse-gas emissions heating up the planet, despite some very optimistic claims from AI companies.

In 2024, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared that AI would unleash “astounding triumphs,” including “fixing the climate.” The year before, in a 2023 op-ed, the head of sustainability at Google and her coauthor wrote that AI could reduce global emissions 5% to 10% by 2030.

Some academic researchers have examined these AI-related climate claims. A peer-reviewed study published last year, led by researchers at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute and the firm Systemiq, estimated that AI could help cut global emissions by the equivalent of 3.2 to 5.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide annually by 2035—roughly on par with the US’s annual energy-related emissions on the high end, even after subtracting AI’s own energy footprint.

Those potential gains are mostly concentrated in three sectors: power, meat and dairy, and vehicles.

But projections like these are only as good as our willingness to test them against present-day reality. So is there evidence that the largest companies in these three sectors are beginning to integrate AI in line with the study’s projections, and if so, do the results match expectations? Or is the 2035 number still mostly aspirational?

Companies across these sectors have announced plenty of initial efforts to incorporate AI into various business practices. But an AI-assisted review of public information from significant market actors in each sector, conducted and reviewed by the second author of this piece, found that few have announced they’re pursuing the specific emissions-reducing routes that informed the projections in the study—and fewer still claim they’ve used them to achieve meaningful climate progress.