Insiders At Top AI Companies Say AI Is Killing Us, So, I Don’t Know, Maybe We Should Listen? [Op-Ed]

OK, so, most people across the U.S. are concerned that artificial intelligence technology is advancing too fast and radically; educators are concerned that AI makes it harder for people to think for themselves; Black educators are concerned that AI is disproportionately targeting Black children with discriminatory assessments. Environmental scientists across the globe have been sounding the alarm on what generative artificial intelligence is doing to the physical world — especially in minority communities — for years.

But fine, if you don’t want to listen to a bunch of experts, activists, educators, and people who care about staying alive on a planet that can sustain life express their fears and concerns about AI — how about you listen to insiders at top AI corporations tell you about how AI could kill us all?

On Tuesday, Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher for AI research and products corporation Anthropic, posted on X that he resigned from the company that day because he “spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic,” and learned that “neither company is acting responsibly,” but are instead “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

“Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing,” Coxon wrote in a thread of tweets. “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.”

After Coxon posted his thread — at the end of which he urged other lab researchers to “consider what the next few years will actually feel like” and whether they want to “kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind” — Anthropic alignment-science lead Evan Hubinger responded with a damning tweet of his own, saying, “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.”

Then Samuel Marks, Anthropic’s scalable-oversight lead, according to Axios, chimed in, writing in a lengthy response, “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.”

Axios reported that insiders at Anthropic are sounding the alarm on the dangerous speed at which AI tech is advancing on the heels of top OpenAI leaders, including CEO Sam Altman, saying much the same.

Look, none of these AI researchers and leaders are claiming that Skynet is coming to the real world imminently, or anything like that. But when multiple top researchers and leaders for major AI corporations are warning that AI technology is improving faster and becoming more capable of recursive self-improvement than they ever thought possible, and that the rabid development of the technology is not being done responsibly, maybe we should start listening to them more than we listen to pro-AI politicians, tech billionaires who are only concerned with profits, or an AI-slop-obsessed president, who continues to push for AI data centers where voters don’t want them.

Just a thought.

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