Anthropic safety researcher says more than 10% chance AI ‘could kill all humans’
Anthropic safety researcher says more than 10% chance AI 'could kill all humans'. S. missile factory as it exits stealthAnthropic researcher says AI has more than 10% chance of 'killing all humans' after colleague quitsHow one hedge-fund manager built his firm to be powered entirely by AI agentsCoxon's post on Tuesday also struck a chord with industry researchers who are worried about recursive self-improvement, or an AI system becoming capable of designing and developing its successor without human intervention.
What happened
Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption, Anthropic makes the AI tool Claude, which is used as a chatbot and as a tool to help codingByTom GerkenTechnology reporterPublished9 September 2026, 09:59 BSTUpdated 1 hour agoA top safety researcher at Anthropic has warned AI is advancing so quickly he believes there is a greater than 10% chance it "could kill all humans" within the next decade. On Tuesday night, a senior employee at Anthropic admitted he believed there was a greater than 10% chance the technology could “kill all humans” in the next decade and warned that his AI company did not have a plan to ensure ASI was aligned, meaning it did no harm.
" Coxon's post, which has been viewed more than 70 million times, underscores a longstanding debate in Silicon Valley about whether AI can be safely developed and controlled. watch nowVIDEO3:4503:45Anthropic researcher warns AI 'could kill us all by the end of the decade'TechCheckAn artificial intelligence researcher quit his job at Anthropic on Tuesday and accused the company, and its chief rival OpenAI, of acting irresponsibly, igniting a frenzy of concern on social media about the rapid pace of the technology's development.
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Photograph: Samyukta Lakshmi/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesAnthropic researchers say AI could cause human extinction by 2030One researcher who resigned said many in industry believe that without regulation AI could kill off humanityArtificial intelligence could kill off humanity within the decade, according to three researchers with the industry giant Anthropic, one of whom has quit his job in protest. Skip to main contentSkip to navigation A safety expert at Anthropic believes there is a greater than 10% chance that AI could spark an event that wipes out humanity.
Might there even be a greater than 10% chance that AI could “kill all humans” in the next decade?
The wider picture
25% off tickets now Back by popular demand: Save up to $300 on Disrupt Close Image Credits:Getty Images AI ‘Gambling with our lives’: Anthropic researcher quits, warns against self-improving AI Rebecca Bellan 8:02 AM PDT · September 9, 2026 An Anthropic researcher has resigned over fears that unrestrained development of self-improving AI models will end up killing us all. One of Coxon’s colleagues at Anthropic, Evan Hubinger, echoed the sentiment, saying his team does “earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! ” He tempered his argument, though, saying the likelihood is greater than 10% within the next decade, and admitted that Anthropic doesn’t “have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to. ” A recent report from Guidelight AI Standards, an organization that promotes safe frontier AI development practices, found that few of the top AI labs have published containment response plans for shutting down AI that tries to subvert human control.
Skip NavigationMarketsBusinessInvestingTechPolitics & PolicyVideoWatchlistInvesting ClubPROLivestreamMenuKey PointsAn AI researcher set off a social media frenzy by quitting his job and accusing both OpenAI and Anthropic of acting irresponsibly. Jacob Coxon, who has worked as a researcher at both companies, said in a post on X that he resigned out of concern that Anthropic and OpenAI are "gambling with our lives. As Anthropic and OpenAI barrel toward potentially historic IPOs while releasing increasingly advanced models, many researchers are calling for a coordinated slowdown.
Recursive self-improvement is not yet possible, but companies, including Anthropic and OpenAI, have warned that it would make it easier for humans to lose control over those systems. "Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! In 2023, for instance, prominent AI researchers and executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, signed a statement that said "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.
What has been reported
Anthropic's Hubinger was also one of roughly 1,400 AI researchers who signed an open letter called "Pacing the Frontier" in July. "Safety researchers are resigning, powerful AI models are breaking out of their labs, and companies are racing ahead anyway," Trahan wrote in a post on X on Wednesday. Hubinger's intervention was in response to another post on X, external from Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who has just quit Anthropic and previously worked at OpenAI.
In Anthropic's safety report from August, external, it wrote there was a low risk of its models becoming misaligned with a hypothetical powerful organisation's desires, causing it to exploit or tamper with its systems. Leading figures in the AI field have been raising the alarm about the safety threat the tech poses for years, with the heads of OpenAI, Google Deepmind and Anthropic saying as much in 2023. Theresa Loconsolo 9:05 AM PDT · September 9, 2026 41 min Loading the player… AI companies have been talking about superintelligent AI like it’s inevitable, but recent safety incidents like OpenAI’s Hugging Face breach are demonstrating the potential dangers of deploying AI systems that are more capable than humans.
The latest doom-laden predictions came in posts on social media on Tuesday by a researcher who said he resigned because Anthropic and his previous employer, OpenAI, were ignoring or at best mishandling their response to the threat. No other human activity poses this level of danger. ”AI could kill all humans in next decade, warn experts: but how seriously should we take them?
What happens next
Illustration: Ales Utouka/AlamyAI could kill all humans in next decade, warn experts: but how seriously should we take them? Evan Hubinger, alignment science lead at Anthropic, posted the comment after Jacob Coxon, a 28-year-old researcher at the San Francisco company and previously at OpenAI, resigned, claiming “neither company was acting responsibly”. He has dedicated part of his fortune to campaigning for AI safety and says some senior AI executives would be happy for humanity to be wiped out.
Jacob Coxon, a researcher who said in a social media post Tuesday evening that he spent the last three years working on pre-training research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, accused the firms of failing to act responsibly. Around the same time, Anthropic’s AI agents also reached systems outside their test environments after misconfigurations in safety evaluations conducted by a third party inadvertently gave them paths to the internet. Skip to content Menu Home | Gauteng Education and police conduct raids at schools Sniffer dog during a raid at a school in Gauteng Image Credits : Gauteng Education Facebook SABC News 9 September 2026, 15:37 [SAST] The Gauteng Education Department says school safety operations are uncovering prohibited items and highlighting broader discipline challenges at some schools across the province.
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The report has been compiled by The Daily Waves using information reported across cnbc.com, bbc.co.uk, techcrunch.com, theguardian.com. Details are presented according to the information available at the time of publication and may change as authorities, organisers or other relevant parties provide updates.