Venture capital funding of artificial intelligence is producing outcomes that are so toxic for humanity that one of Australia’s top AI companies, Akin, is planning to skip the process and list on the US stock exchange instead, its founder Lee Yearsley says.

As last week’s turmoil at OpenAI demonstrated, the fast returns and rapidly growing valuations demanded by backers are forcing AI researchers to unleash the technology long before it has been fully tested for safety, Ms Yearsley told The Australian Financial Review in an interview.