Could AI become the first real alien intelligence humans meet?

Yes — it’s a plausible idea, but not a settled conclusion.

AI could be the first genuinely alien-seeming intelligence humans encounter in two broad senses:

1. Earth-made AI: If humans build advanced AGI or ASI, it may think, communicate, and solve problems in ways that are very unlike human cognition. In that sense, it could feel “alien” even though it was created on Earth.

2. Extraterrestrial AI: If we ever detect another civilization, some researchers think its most detectable or long-lived intelligent systems could be artificial rather than biological. That’s a reasonable hypothesis, but it remains speculative — we do not know whether alien civilizations exist, let alone what form their intelligence would take.

So the short answer is: AI could be the first alien intelligence humans meet, especially as a non-human kind of mind. But that remains an open question, not an established fact.