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The Real AI Threat Is Already Here

Never mind some future apocalypse—AI is being used right now to cause enormous suffering.

Even Luddites terrified by the destructive capabilities of AI would have a hard time crafting nightmare scenarios as frightening as the ones conjured up by the industry itself. On September 8, researcher Jacob Coxon announced on X that he was resigning from the AI giant Anthropic. Coxon explained that Anthropic and another tech giant, OpenAI, were not “acting responsibly” but rather “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives…. The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Coxon’s views were endorsed by Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger, who wrote on X: “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 do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”

Coxon and Hubinger are far from alone; a surprisingly large number of researchers in the field have offered scenarios in which AI poses an existential threat, some of which eerily call to mind movies like The Terminator: AI develops consciousness, decides that it wants to be free of its pesky biological progenitor, and then figures out some plan to wipe out humanity. The possible extermination schemes include hacking nuclear-weapons systems, developing dangerous viruses, or simply shutting down the cybernetic infrastructure that is now essential to our existence.

As AI has increased in political salience, a wide swath of the public has given credence to these fears. According to data scientist David Shor, “64% of voters think it’s either very or somewhat likely that AI could pose a threat to humanity’s survival.”

Not everyone is afraid. The venture capitalist David Sacks, an ally of Elon Musk and an AI adviser to Donald Trump, argued on X that “Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on........

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