A few years ago, Ketan Joshi read a statistic about artificial intelligence and climate change that caught his eye. In late 2023, Google began claiming that AI could help cut global greenhouse gas emissions by between 5 and 10 percent by 2030. This claim was spread in an op-ed coauthored by its chief sustainability officer, and subsequently quoted across the press and in some academic papers.
Joshi, an energy researcher, was shocked by the massive numbers Google was touting—especially AI’s purported ability to effectively cut the equivalent of what the European Union