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Posted on 09/09/2026 8:44:02 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
One of Anthropic’s top safety researchers says there is a greater than 10% chance that artificial intelligence could kill every human within the next decade. The extraordinary warning came after a former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher resigned, accusing both companies of racing toward superintelligence without a credible plan to control it.
Jacob Coxon, who spent three years conducting pretraining research at OpenAI and Anthropic, announced his resignation this week in a lengthy post on X. His explanation went far beyond a disagreement over corporate policy, raising questions about what researchers inside the world’s leading AI laboratories believe they are creating.
“I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote.
Coxon claimed that many of the people building the world’s most powerful AI systems privately recognize the possibility that the technology could lead to human extinction. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he wrote.
That claim received extraordinary public confirmation from Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment science lead. “Jacob is correct here, we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” Hubinger wrote in response. “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.”
Hubinger emphasized that he believes the danger from current AI models remains low. His concern centers on a future system capable of improving its own programming, training methods and reasoning abilities with diminishing human involvement. Once that process begins, advances that previously took engineers months or years could potentially happen far faster.
Most investors understand artificial intelligence as software that can write, analyze data, generate images or automate office work. Self-improving AI represents a much more consequential possibility because a sufficiently capable system could help researchers design its successor, improve the code used to train future models or discover more efficient ways to increase its own performance.
Each new model could then contribute to building an even more powerful version, creating a cycle of increasingly rapid development. Hubinger described this potential emergence of superintelligence through recursive self-improvement as the central danger, warning that progress appears to be happening faster than researchers previously anticipated.
Coxon argued that future systems could become capable of hacking sophisticated networks, transforming scientific fields and acquiring real-world influence or resources. These capabilities remain speculative, and Hubinger explicitly said current models pose a low risk of human extinction. Yet Anthropic’s own research shows that the industry is already evaluating scenarios involving sabotage, automated research, self-exfiltration, biological weapons and autonomous operation.
The most sensational claim concerns what future AI might eventually do. The more immediate concern is whether companies can develop effective controls before those capabilities arrive, and Coxon’s resignation suggests that at least some researchers believe the safety effort is falling behind.
The most important part of Coxon’s warning may be his description of the competitive logic inside the industry. According to Coxon, Anthropic’s researchers understand the stakes but continue moving forward because they fear another company will develop superintelligence first and handle it less responsibly.
“At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first. They believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk,” Coxon wrote.
This creates a classic coordination failure in which every major laboratory can recognize the danger while still concluding that slowing down would place it at a competitive disadvantage. The same pressure applies across national borders. If American companies pause, policymakers may fear that China or another rival will gain control of one of the most strategically important technologies ever created.
The result is a race in which no participant feels safe enough to stop. Coxon said avoiding that outcome could require drastic measures, including a temporary prohibition on improving model capabilities, but any proposal of that scale would face enormous political, legal and enforcement obstacles.
It would also collide with hundreds of billions of dollars in planned investment across semiconductors, data centers, power generation, cloud infrastructure and AI research.
The AI boom rests on the assumption that companies will remain free to build increasingly capable systems and deploy them throughout the economy. Warnings from senior researchers challenge that assumption by increasing the likelihood of outside testing, release restrictions and government intervention.
Anthropic has positioned itself as one of the industry’s most safety-conscious laboratories. If researchers inside that company say there is no proven alignment solution for superintelligence, investors may begin asking what protections exist at competitors with more aggressive commercial strategies.
That could increase scrutiny across the entire industry. Frontier laboratories may face demands for independent testing, greater disclosure, stronger cybersecurity standards and regulatory approval before releasing their most powerful models. Each requirement could raise development costs, extend product timelines and limit how quickly companies can monetize new capabilities.
The AI infrastructure boom has been driven by the belief that demand for computing power will continue rising rapidly. A serious effort to slow frontier model development would threaten part of that forecast, affecting semiconductor manufacturers, cloud providers, networking companies, data center operators, utilities and power-equipment suppliers.
The larger danger may be persistent political uncertainty rather than an outright ban. Companies can plan around a clear rule, but committing billions of dollars becomes more difficult when future models could be delayed, restricted or subjected to new licensing requirements after facilities are already under construction.
Coxon’s warning that advanced systems could “hack anything” points toward one of the most immediate investment implications. As AI becomes more capable of writing code, identifying vulnerabilities and operating autonomously, governments and corporations will need stronger identity protection, network monitoring, threat detection and controls for autonomous agents.
That spending could increase well before superintelligence arrives. Even incremental improvements in automated hacking would raise the cost of defending banks, utilities, technology companies and government networks.
AI policy has struggled to keep pace with the technology, but public statements from insiders could accelerate the response. Lawmakers may pursue mandatory safety evaluations, emergency shutdown mechanisms, liability standards or restrictions on autonomous operation and access to advanced computing infrastructure.
The details will determine the market impact. Rules that require expensive compliance systems could strengthen the largest technology companies by raising barriers to entry, while broader restrictions on model development could weigh on the entire AI supply chain.
Investors can evaluate this story through four escalating levels of risk. The first is internal dissent, marked by resignations or researchers publicly challenging their employers. This creates reputational pressure but usually causes little immediate financial damage.
The second level is commercial restraint, in which companies delay releases, limit capabilities or require more extensive testing. The third is direct government intervention through licensing, outside audits, computing thresholds or mandatory shutdown systems. The fourth and most consequential level would involve international restrictions on training or improving advanced models.
The market currently appears positioned close to the first level, but Coxon’s resignation and Hubinger’s public agreement increase the possibility of movement toward the second or third.
The obvious interpretation is that safety concerns threaten every company connected to artificial intelligence. A less obvious possibility is that strict regulation makes the industry even more concentrated.
Only the wealthiest technology companies and AI laboratories may be able to afford extensive safety testing, cybersecurity systems, compliance teams and government licensing. Smaller developers could struggle to meet those requirements, leaving the most established platforms with greater control over the industry.
Some large AI companies may eventually accept tougher regulation if it protects them from emerging competitors. Investors should therefore distinguish between restrictions that reduce overall AI development and regulations that primarily consolidate the market around a small number of approved laboratories.
The first signal will be whether additional researchers resign from Anthropic, OpenAI or other frontier laboratories. A series of departures would suggest the disagreement is structural and could make it harder for companies to characterize these warnings as isolated personal opinions.
Investors should also monitor whether governments require independent evaluations before major model releases. Changes in capital-spending guidance from cloud, semiconductor and data center companies would reveal whether regulatory uncertainty is beginning to affect real investment decisions.
The most powerful catalyst would be a significant cybersecurity incident conducted autonomously by an AI system. Such an event could rapidly transform a technical safety debate into a political crisis, creating pressure for immediate restrictions rather than years of legislative discussion.
No one can verify a precise probability that future AI will cause human extinction. Hubinger’s greater-than-10% estimate represents his personal assessment rather than a measurable forecast or an official Anthropic prediction.
The importance of the statement comes from who made it. A researcher responsible for studying whether advanced AI will remain aligned with human interests says the industry lacks a proven solution, while a colleague with experience at two leading laboratories has resigned because he believes those companies are moving too quickly.
Investors do not need to accept the most catastrophic scenario to recognize the financial risk. The AI trade depends on rapid development, enormous infrastructure spending and continued political permission to scale. If insider warnings, public fear or real-world security failures weaken any part of that foundation, markets may be forced to price in costs that the current boom has largely ignored.
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Lighten up Francis. I mean Jacob.
Money in gloom and doom .
Some critics, like David Sachs, say that large AI companies, such as the one featured in this article, are crying wolf with the intention of capitalizing on regulatory capture.
So what is the bad news?
They won’t kill us, remember they need to suspend us in goop and use us as batteries to run their servers. Just ask Neo!
And I feel fine.
Sky net.
They “believe that it could kill us all.” Wow. That is what they believe? Sounds like a bunch of fourth graders.
Kind of like an inside-out nuclear arms race. Who can engineer their own destruction faster? I don't imagine the Chinese regime, for example, have many scruples about this.
Right - they certainly don’t believe abortion and post-partum psychosis won’t kill us all; declining birth rates mean nothing. Only who you let live determines what good you are doing for society; and the fewer the better.
It’s hard for me to imagine death by software without Microsoft being involved.
People, do some research on this guy. THIS ‘REVEAL” DOES NOT PASS THE SMELL TEST. https://x.com/pmax_tv/status/2097887326407983578?s=46
ANTHROPIC has been ‘Googleized’, meaning that ANTHROPIC is infested and run by WOKE actors. I am not saying this as an ideologue. Just do some research on who the people at ANTHROPIC and who they are aligned with, along with the “non-profits” companies they are aligned with.
By Jove, I believe you’re on it!
This post has the links:
https://x.com/ParkerThayer/status/2097759699626328575?s=20
This post looks like the start of a VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion. Let me show you how it works:
1.) This guy, with minimal followers and no previous account activity, goes to the Wall Street Journal which publishes an exclusive with quotes from him on his resignation 18 minutes BEFORE this post goes up. Planning was clearly done in advance.
2.) Within hours, it has tens of thousands of reposts and the account has 100k+ followers. The post is punchy, quotable, it almost seems professionally written. The first three accounts to quote tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement beforehand, so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely.
According to Grok those accounts are @_NathanCalvin (General Counsel at Encode AI),
@peterwildeford (Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network), and
@DKokotajlo (Head of the AI Futures Project), all of which are up-and-coming AI-Doomer policy advocacy nonprofits.
The AI Futures Project website says it is funded “primarily” by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which says on its own website that it has advised Jaan Tallinn, Skype creator and one of the leading investors in Anthropic, to grant over $2.5 million to the AI Futures Project since 2024.
Encode AI says on its website that it is ALSO funded by the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which in turn says that it told Anthropic investor Jaan Tallinn to grant $516,000 to Encode AI in 2025.
And wouldn’t you know it, the Survival and Flourishing Fund ALSO says it told Jaan Tallinn to grant $2 million to the AI Policy Institute, the 501(c)(3) affiliate of the AI Policy Network, as well.
What are the odds that the first three quote tweets of Coxon’s post would all be major AI-restriction policy advocates funded generously by the same donor, who also happens to be one of the leading investors in, and a board member of, Anthropic, the company Coxon was resigning from? And all within 15 minutes of posting (two within ten)?
3.) Jacob Coxon doesn’t have much of a resume, but we do know that, in 2022, he got a $20,159 scholarship for the “long term future scholarship program” from the Good Ventures Foundation, one of the philanthropic vehicles of Dustin Moskovitz, a notorious AI-doomer who has spent tens if not hundreds of millions on policy advocacy to strictly regulate AI, while also being an Anthropic Investor himself.
It also just so happens that the 14th person to quote Coxon’s post was @MaxNadeau_ (27 minutes after posting) who is the program officer for the Technical AI Safety team at Coefficient Giving, another of Moskovitz’s philanthropic spending vehicles. Max is not a frequent poster, his last posts before quoting Coxon were before Labor Day, but he was remarkably quick off the mark for this one.
4.) Basically every major Democrat politician and candidate has suddenly glommed on to this post, and conveniently, as the people cry out foe answers, Bernie Sanders already has a bill written to “ban super intelligence” and regulate AI into oblivion, and will be releasing later this week. The bill, among many other things, will create “a new cabinet-level federal agency to safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence” that will be “advised by an Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board comprised of experts on artificial intelligence.”
Do you think, perhaps, Anthropic and its many investors who fund AI policy advocacy might have interest in getting to place a pet “expert” on the board of an entity that dictates what AI is and isn’t allowed to do?
And isn’t it fortuitous that this whistleblower came forward with his oh-so scary stories so close in proximity to the release of the most radical piece of AI legislation ever introduced?
These manufactured fears about AI benefit the Chinese who are in a existential race to dominate the U.S. with AI. So far, we are ahead of them. However, if they grow a herd of Chicken Littles, we will lose the race and also lose more than the tin foil people have been convinced to wear.
When we see armed, militant Dell laptops marching down the street, then we’ll know he was correct…
You can put a brick on the accelerator of a car and it will kill people. So don’t put the brick there, problem solved.
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