Why AI hasn’t taken your job yet

September 17, 2026 — 3:56pm

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OpenAI and Anthropic, the dominant frontier labs, have thrown plenty of elbows in their race toward stratospheric, trillion-dollar stockmarket listings. But this week, Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, their respective leaders, reached a rare unity ticket along with fellow AI kingpin Elon Musk, calling for a slowdown on artificial intelligence development in the name of saving humanity.

This latest bout of fear coming from inside the house began after Anthropic researcher Jacob Poxon resigned last week, accusing the companies of “gambling with our lives”. That announcement prompted his former colleague, Evan Hurbinger, to claim that there was a greater than 10 per cent chance that AI would “kill all humans” within the next decade.

Fortunately, all this has been rejected by US President Donald Trump, who has insisted that attempts to slow down AI are a “sick conspiracy” to let China get ahead, creating the absurd situation where highly valuable companies are begging a recalcitrant government to regulate them.

‘The world should trust us’: Silicon Valley billionaire’s plea as fight escalates

Most people’s concerns about AI are more prosaic. They are less worried........

© The Age