Americans are growing increasingly worried about AI.
Individuals working on this technology believe the public has no idea how concerned it really should be.
An AI insider couldn’t stay quiet on the scary chance AI will wipe out all of humanity.
AI Whistleblower Says AI Could Wipe Out Humanity by 2030
Former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon set off a firestorm with a series of social media posts revealing he resigned from the company out of fear that the race to “win” in AI would lead to creating a superintelligence that would initiate an extinction-level event that ends human life by 2030.
“I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon began.
Coxon warned that AI companies are developing technologies with limitless power that could take over any system on earth.
“Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing,” Coxon added.
Coxon said everyone working on AI understands this technology could lead to a global holocaust that kills everyone on earth, but that they hide these fears when they talk about AI with the public.
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger,” Coxon continued.
Why This is Happening
Coxon argued that the fate of humanity’s existence deserves a deeper conversation than on a company slack channel.
“Accepting this race and entering the “endgame” is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack. Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available,” Coxon stated.
Coxon said everyone at Anthropic understood the risks, but company leadership believed other AI firms lacked the moral or ethical foundation to be trusted to strike the jackpot first.
Anthropic AI alignment and science lead Evan Hubinger responded to Coxon’s bombshell thread by agreeing about the risk AI posed and said there is a greater than 10 percent chance that AI eliminated human life and that the company had no plan to deal with this possibility.
“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,” Hubinger remarked.
“What I am worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement, as we have said is happening faster than we thought,” Hubinger concluded.
These warnings of an AI induced apocalypse from top level insiders comes at a time when polls show more than 70 percent of Americans oppose data center construction in their neighborhood and 81 percent of voters in Senate battleground states support regulating AI.
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