Concerns that artificial intelligence might kill us all are blowing up right now following warnings from researchers and leaders at some of the world’s foremost AI companies. Speculation is rife over how legislators will act. Nature breaks down what the fears are, who is expressing them and what might happen next.
The latest hysteria about AI kicked off on 8 September, researcher Jacob Coxon told the Wall Street Journal that he was resigning from the AI firm Anthropic, based in San Francisco, California, because he feared that the systems the company is developing could spiral out of control and destroy humanity.
In a subsequent post on the social-media platform X, his first ever, Coxon wrote: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Hours later, Evan Hubinger, who leads Anthropic’s ‘alignment science’ — the effort to get model actions to correspond to human values — amplified the message by reposting it and adding his own estimate that the risk of human extinction is “>10% within the next decade”. Coxon’s post racked up more than 100 million views in 24 hours.
Dario Amodei, the firm’s chief executive, then posted an essay calling for a slowdown – but not a halt – in AI development. Rival AI leaders Sam Altman of OpenAI in San Francisco, and Elon Musk of xAI in Palo Alto, California, have since backed this suggestion.
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