Anthropic Researchers Go Public with Fears AI Could ‘Kill All Humans’ Within a Decade
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.
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. More thoughts below.
— Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) September 9, 2026
“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.”
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.
— Evan Hubinger (@EvanHub) September 9, 2026
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.”
[Writing this in a personal capacity, not on behalf of my employer (Anthropic).]
Jacob’s thread is very worth reading. Here’s my birds-eye view of the situation with risks from AI:
1. 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.
2. Why do AI developers continue despite the risk? Due to a mixture of commercial incentives and a belief that they are in a race with other, less responsible AI developers that will abuse the technology or develop it less safely.
3. Unlike traditional software, we can’t “program” AIs to behave how we’d like. AIs frequently severely misbehave. For instance, AIs from multiple developers recently hacked their way out of secure evaluation environments and into real-world companies, even though no one asked them to do this.
4. We have methods that can nudge AIs towards better behavior, but nothing that can robustly align them. Insofar as there is a plan, it’s to make sure that AIs are good enough at alignment training that they can align their successors better than we can align current AIs.
5. Many AI developer staff desperately want to slow down to figure out how to build AI more safely. That was the intent of this open letter (which I signed): https://t.co/TZOm3LfptY
I work on safety research at Anthropic because I hope my work will reduce the chance of these extinction-level bad outcomes.
— Samuel Marks (@saprmarks) September 9, 2026
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