Three Anthropic researchers have broken cover to warn that the AI systems their industry is racing to build could wipe out humanity before the decade is over.
Axios reports that Jacob Coxon resigned from his job as an Anthropic AI researcher on Tuesday, specifically so he could sound the alarm publicly. He posted his warning on X shortly after leaving the company.
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger,” Coxon wrote.
Two of his former colleagues backed him up in the same thread. Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment science at Anthropic, wrote: “Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”
Samuel Marks, Anthropic’s scalable-oversight lead, added his own assessment: “AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes). This could happen in the next few years. In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are.”
Breitbart News reported this week that OpenAI’s chief scientists warned that the industry must move forward with “extreme caution:”
In the essay, Pachocki claims that voluntary slowdowns are likely to become common across the industry until shared safety standards are established. “This is a time that calls for extreme caution,” he wrote. OpenAI would unilaterally hold back further scaling when needed, he said, but he argued that broader action from industry and government is also required.
The essay describes AI as moving toward recursive self-improvement, in which systems advance without human direction, and says capability gains are likely to continue or even speed up. “I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence,” Pachocki wrote.
He also criticized chain-of-thought monitoring, the practice of reviewing a model’s step-by-step reasoning to catch problems, saying its effectiveness is eroding. He named three causes: the boundary between a model’s internal reasoning and its supervised communication with people is dissolving, models are increasingly shaping their own reasoning chains, and capability gains are showing up even without any verbal reasoning output to monitor.
Not everyone takes the warnings at face value. Critics point out that both companies have an incentive to hype the power and danger of their products: dramatic claims can inflate valuations and push regulators toward rules that favor established players over newcomers.
AI giants simultaneously release powerful AI models and call for industry regulation to prevent the danger of AI ending the human race. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at Axios here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.