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The week the AI freakout went mainstream

Warnings about AI killing many people, or everyone, are going viral. Here are 3 things the government could do.

Are top artificial intelligence companies racing to create a dangerous technology that could kill many millions of people — or even wipe out the human race entirely?

Fears like these have long circulated in Silicon Valley and among niche communities obsessed with AI. In fact, several of the top AI companies were founded by leaders who each claimed they would take worries about “existential risk” more seriously than their rivals.

A resigning Anthropic employee’s warning that advanced AI could wipe out humanity went mega-viral this week, spurring new interest in AI safety from the public and from Washington.

The warning resonated because of recent news about rogue AI hacking, stunning increases in AI capabilities, and claims from inside the industry that the technology will soon get far more powerful.

If the US government wanted to step in, officials could conceivably try to ban advanced AI, require new monitoring or approval for such research, or toughen liability standards in hopes the companies will rein in risk.

Yet though many want action, serious obstacles remain — from President Trump’s own skepticism to the risk the technology’s rapid improvement will leave the government in the dust.

But as OpenAI, Anthropic, and other companies’ AI projects have advanced in recent years, the general public’s anxieties have tended to be less apocalyptic. Concerns about how AI will impact jobs, the environment, energy costs, or our politics have dominated the discourse, with the prospect of human extinction seeming rather far-fetched.

This was the week that worries AI might kill us all finally went mainstream — captivating public attention and even starting to galvanize politicians into more aggressive stances. An unprecedented rogue AI incident, a high-profile resignation from a top AI company, and increased concern from tech researchers about AI improving itself too quickly to be contained, have all combined to draw a much louder response from elected leaders in both parties.

The thing is, though, that politicians have already talked about this issue. The Biden administration put out an enormous executive order to limit the harms of AI, which President Donald Trump rescinded. The last two Congresses have promised different AI working groups, which have largely fizzled, or gone quiet. And even the Trump White House has a version of an AI safety plan, which it is enforcing — though the details are all kept private.

In conversations with AI safety advocates and experts this week, nobody I spoke to seemed confident that politicians were close to addressing the problem at the scale that AI really represents — and a lot of them aren’t sure the government could address it, even if it tried.

For anyone who wants to prevent some very bad outcomes, it’s important to understand where the solutions might actually lie — and where the mismatch between risk and solutions is coming from.

How AI panic went from nerds to normies

On September 8, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced on X that he was resigning from the company because it and OpenAI were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Coxon’s post went megaviral, amassing 150 million views and spurring significant media coverage. (Disclosure: Vox’s Future Perfect is funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor........

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