Hollywood director James Cameron says the world is on the brink of a “Terminator-style apocalypse” if artificial intelligence is allowed access to weapons systems.

Cameron conceded it’s possible for humankind to be left facing extinction as predicted in his 1984 sci-fi movie The Terminator starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“I do think there’s still a danger of a Terminator-style apocalypse where you put AI together with weapons systems, even up to the level of nuclear weapon systems, nuclear defence counterstrike, all that stuff,” he told Rolling Stone magazine.

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“Because the theatre of operations is so rapid, the decision windows are so fast, it would take a super-intelligence to be able to process it, and maybe we’ll be smart and keep a human in the loop.

“But humans are fallible, and there have been a lot of mistakes made that have put us right on the brink of international incidents that could have led to nuclear war. So I don’t know.”

Cameron added: “I feel like we’re at this cusp in human development where you’ve got the three existential threats: climate and our overall degradation of the natural world, nuclear weapons, and super-intelligence.

“They’re all sort of manifesting and peaking at the same time ...”

Cameron recently signed an open letter calling for nuclear disarmament and his next film is Ghosts of Hiroshima, based on the Charles Pellegrino book of the same name which tells the story of the atomic bomb blast in 1945 and its aftermath.

The director admitted the movie might be the most “challenging film” he will ever make.