A warning from a former Anthropic researcher that AI could threaten humanity has drawn widespread support from senior scientists, but a top Pentagon official has rejected the claim. The reaction follows Jacob Coxon's resignation from Anthropic, where he said AI firms are 'racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives'. Coxon's post on X has been viewed over 150 million times, according to Bloomberg.

Several researchers at Anthropic and OpenAI have publicly supported the warning. Evan Hubinger, who leads Anthropic's alignment science team, wrote on X that the company's staff really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans, putting the chance at more than 10 percent within the next decade. Anthropic researcher Samuel Marks also said AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction, with more senior employees being more concerned.

Paul Christiano, formerly head of safety at the US Commerce Department's Center for AI Standards and Innovation, weighed in, saying recent progress had led him to see a meaningful risk of catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term. OpenAI announced that Christiano was joining the board of its nonprofit foundation. Geoffrey Hinton, often called a godfather of AI, told BBC Newsnight that a 10 percent risk of human extinction seemed a not unreasonable estimate.

Not everyone accepted the warning, however. Emil Michael, the US Defense Department's chief technology officer, rejected it at a defense industry conference in Washington, describing Coxon's message as 'all the fears that had coalesced in one well-written tweet'. Michael said the free market, industry collaboration, and engagement with government could mitigate the potential harms.

The warning has drawn a quick political reaction, with Representative Lori Trahan writing that safety researchers were resigning, powerful AI models were breaking out of their labs, and companies were racing ahead anyway. Senator Bernie Sanders said he would introduce legislation to pause AI development, while Senator Ted Cruz called the risk 'scary as hell'. David Sacks, chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, addressed the matter on X, saying Anthropic's planned public offering must be paused until the claims of the whistleblower can be investigated.

Anthropic declined to comment on the post, but a spokesperson told CNBC that the company had always been transparent that AI would bring both enormous benefits and unprecedented risks. The spokesperson said Anthropic was building models with some of the strongest safeguards in the industry and was the first lab to publish a framework for mitigating catastrophic risks from AI models.

This article was written with the assistance of AI.
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