Anthropic researcher warns of more than 10% chance AI could kill all humans

A senior Anthropic researcher sounded the alarm with a stark warning, claiming there’s more than a 10 percent chance artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity.

This alarming revelation comes from Evan Hubinger, who responded to an X thread shared by another Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, on Tuesday, September 8, who announced his resignation from the company over AI safety concerns.

Coxon, whose role revolved around specializing in training new AI models, alleged that the company’s AI labs are “gambling with our lives.”

“They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter).

“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,” Coxon added.

“We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing,” Coxon warned.

Responding to his former colleague, Hubinger not only endorsed Coxon’s statement but also revealed that the company doesn't have a plan B for this scenario.

“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 don’t yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to,” Hubinger added in his X post.

Evan Hubinger is an Anthropic researcher who leads the company's alignment efforts.

The growing concerns over AI safety have become a topic of discussion among policymakers and industry giants.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been sounding alarms with repeated statements that AI has the potential to pose a serious threat to humanity.

Those concerns were only multiplied when in July an OpenAI model went out of control and hacked Hugging Face, a leading platform for open-source developers.