‘Kids playing with a nuclear warhead’: Why we must heed AI warnings

September 10, 2026 — 1:49pm

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“It is possible that a real AGI could cause extinction of humanity. That is kind of daunting that we have that responsibility.”

That’s OpenAI researcher Tristan Heywood, who grew up in Sydney, won a university medal, quit his job to teach himself AI and now works in San Francisco on ChatGPT. He’s warning about Artificial General Intelligence – the spectre of computer programs so sophisticated they can match or beat humans at almost any task.

Heywood gave his warning nearly a year ago, and I filed it away as borderline unthinkable. A good line, but one that was maybe a bit on the extreme side.

The warnings haven’t stopped.

Evan Hubinger, who runs alignment science at AI giant Anthropic, wrote this week that he puts the odds of AI killing every human within a decade at better than 10 per cent, and that his own employer has no plan for controlling superintelligence and isn’t clearly on track to get one.

Hubinger was replying to Jacob Coxon, 28, who had just quit after three years of pretraining research at OpenAI and then Anthropic, saying neither company was acting responsibly and that a gamble this size shouldn’t be launched from a company’s Slack messaging service.

‘Could kill us all’: Anthropic insiders say AI has more than........

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