Three researchers at AI company Anthropic went public this week with a stunning warning: the technology they helped build could kill everyone on Earth before the decade is over, Axios reported on Wednesday.
Researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic Tuesday specifically to sound the alarm publicly, insisting the fear inside the industry is genuine even when executives soften their language for the press.
"The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt," Coxon wrote on X.
Anthropic's own alignment-science lead, Evan Hubinger, backed him up, putting a number on his personal estimate of the risk.
"We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!" he wrote on X. "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."
A third Anthropic researcher, Samuel Marks, who leads scalable oversight at the company, said the more senior someone is inside these labs, the more worried they tend to be about the technology spiraling into human extinction or comparably catastrophic outcomes, potentially within just a few years.
The warnings land just days after top OpenAI leadership, including CEO Sam Altman, separately admitted AI development is entering an uncontrollable, high-speed phase.
Critics argue companies like Anthropic and OpenAI benefit from hyping doomsday scenarios, since it boosts their valuations and could invite regulation that locks out smaller competitors.
But people close to these companies say the private mood has grown noticeably more anxious in recent months, especially among staff who've seen unreleased, more advanced models the public hasn't encountered yet.
The underlying worry isn't a threat today, but a system that keeps outpacing its own creators' expectations and is inching toward the point where it can enhance its own capabilities without human help — an escalating cycle that engineers admit they may not be equipped to rein in once it starts.
With the industry racing ahead full speed while simultaneously pleading for global regulation or a pause, insiders say lawmakers need to start taking these internal warnings seriously before it's too late to act.
Anthropic has diligently cultivated a reputation for being one of the most responsible AI companies on the market. The company was singled out for punishment by the Trump administration's Pentagon over its refusal to allow its models to be used for mass surveillance or automated use of weapons.