Doomsday: AI builders stoke fears of human extinction

Following safety concerns raised by British artificial intelligence researcher, Jacob Coxon, who worked with Anthropic and OpenAI, some tech professionals have also warned that unchecked AI developments may spell doom for the human race.

Coxon recently resigned from Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot. He had previously worked at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

He said he spent about three years conducting AI pre-training research at the two companies.

According to him, both Anthropic and OpenAI are fast-tracking moves towards self-improving super-intelligent AI without adequate safety measures.

The 27-year-old, in an interview with CNN, said, “It sounds like something that’s not real, but I think it is frighteningly real and it’s easiest to understand it if you think about real things that happened two months ago.

“So, two months ago, OpenAI agents hacked into third-party infrastructure entirely at their own accord. And this was like a concentrated hacking spree that they carried out of their own volition.

“And I think that if you extrapolate into the future the level of capabilities of these AIs with the same independent volition, they could cause extreme havoc.”

AI displacing humans

Coxon said AI could be on its way to displacing humans.

“For example, in areas like coding or maths, a couple of years ago, these AIs were just about helping humans a little bit. They could give you suggestions. Now they’re close to replacing them.

“We still need humans at the moment, but quite plausibly, within a year, we’ll no longer need humans for doing research in many areas.

“Only on Tuesday, OpenAI solved a millennium problem, one of the biggest unsolved open problems in mathematics, purely autonomously using an AI. And I think what’s most scary is if AI is used to make itself more intelligent.”

He argued that AIs had gone beyond finding solutions to problems and assisting in tasks, but were already taking charge and acting independently.

“The AI just gets smarter and smarter with no human involvement necessary, until you have a thing that is vastly smarter than humans,” he added.

Coxon’s resignation and warnings have got experts talking about the threat of AI to humanity.

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he wrote on X on Friday.

Experts’ warnings

Other AI professionals and tech experts trooped out on X, reacting to Coxon’s claims, with many validating his submission.

Anthropic’s Alignment Science Lead, Evan Hubinger, said the possibility that it would happen within the next 10 years was higher than 10 per cent.

“Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it’s >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 said.

Also, Chief US Economist Anna Wang said she believed her colleagues shared the concerns raised by Coxon.

“I worked at Google DeepMind and now at Anthropic. This is a common sentiment amongst my peers. (I write this in personal capacity.) There is not yet a viable scientific plan to solve risks from recursively self-improving AI. Please look up,” she stated.

Anthropic’s Alignment Team Lead and Coxon’s former colleague, Ethan Perez, said he totally agreed with the British researcher’s concerns that AI posed risks to the human race.

“Jacob was a senior researcher who joined Anthropic in May. My Anthropic colleagues and I had been trying to recruit him for ~2 years, because we knew he was a strong researcher at OpenAI. Before he left, I pitched him to stay and join my team, and I was sad he decided to leave, as are many of my colleagues. 100% agree with him that AI poses serious risks to society, and I’m glad he’s speaking out!” Perez added.

AI could kill

Stressing the Briton’s analysis, Sky News technology correspondent Rowland Manthorpe highlighted three possible ways AI could kill humans.

He gave the analysis during a ‘This Is Why’ show with Niall Paterson, maintaining that the prompts human beings give AI to solve problems could end the human race.

Manthorpe said AI could create a super-virus that would destroy everyone on the planet.

According to him, there could also be a scenario where “it doesn’t much like us and starts to go after us.”

“In some variation on what people called the paper-clip problem, which is telling an intelligent, determined and highly capable AI to go make paper clips, it follows your instruction literally and turns the whole world into paper clips,” Manthorpe said.

Saying that the scenarios were seemingly unreasonable examples, he added that they were not impossible with the excessive dependency of humans on AI.

Lawmakers react

Coxon’s concerns on Wednesday drew reactions from lawmakers in the United States and the United Kingdom, as some urged their respective legislatures to devise proposals that would regulate AI.

According to The Guardian, a British media platform, Ted Cruz, a US Republican senator from Texas, reiterated that AI posed a “catastrophic risk” to humanity.

In the same vein, independent Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, said, “A recent poll shows that the American people overwhelmingly want to ban artificial super intelligence and pause the development of AI until we establish clear safety standards.”

On X, Politico reports that Democratic House Representative from Massachusetts, Lori Trahan, said, “The call is coming from inside the house. Safety researchers are resigning, powerful AI models are breaking out of their labs, and companies are racing ahead anyway.”

Similarly, in the UK, the Member of Parliament for Newcastle upon Tyne Central and West, Chi Onwurah, sponsored a bill to block technology companies from creating digital twins of people without their consent.

Presenting the ‘There Is Only One Me’ bill on the floor of the House of Commons on Thursday, the British-Nigerian said, “Today, I presented a bill to stop ‘digital twinning’ without express consent.”

“Now, Madam Deputy Speaker, we know that tech companies collect data on everything we do, every click we make, every photo we share, every sandwich we buy, every post we like,” she said.

“But now that data is being combined with AI to turn an individual, for example, you, Madam Deputy Speaker, into an algorithm to predict your behaviour, to target advertising at you, to persuade you to watch a particular video or believe a dodgy news report. Think about it.”

‘Mere fear of unknown’

Despite the US lawmakers’ outcry, US President Donald Trump was unperturbed by warnings from AI researchers that the advanced technology threatens all humans, saying his utmost interest was maintaining an edge over China.

While fielding questions from journalists on Thursday in Dallas, Trump said, “No, I don’t have any.”

“I have concerns that if we don’t win AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position,” the president said. “We are leading China right now by a pretty good period. I would say a year, which is, you know, considered a lot.”

In his aligned submission with Trump, a Nigerian AI expert and the Chief Executive Officer of Realsearch and Partners Limited, Enakirerhi Ejovwoke, said the concerns were good but should be treated as “the fear of the unknown.”

He argued that AI could not wipe out humanity, adding that all past technological innovations and advancements had been confronted with uncertainties that frightened humans.

“That fear is understandable because the future is inherently difficult to predict, and history repeatedly reminds us that even highly informed experts and institutions can substantially misjudge how emerging technologies will develop,” Ejovwoke said.

The tech professional said the warning signs were significant in justifying stronger security, better containment, independent testing, transparency around serious incidents and thoughtful regulation.

He stated, “The lesson is not that experts are useless. The lesson is that the future often unfolds in ways that even experts cannot completely anticipate. My position, therefore, is not safety versus innovation. We need safe innovation.

“We should build stronger safeguards at the same time that we continue experimenting, researching and creating. Safety should shape the direction and speed of progress, not become an excuse to abandon progress altogether.

“I also don’t believe AI represents the final stage of human innovation. The internet did not end innovation. Instead, it created the foundation for cloud computing, smartphones, social networks, digital commerce and eventually modern AI. AI itself will almost certainly expose another layer of possibilities that we cannot fully see Today.”

Disrupting misused attempts

In its reaction to Coxon’s fears, Anthropic claimed it had identified and disrupted attempts to use its AI model for “malicious activity” that could support the development of biological weapons.

In a BBC News report on Thursday, the AI company said Anthropic made the statement based on the findings from its recent threat intelligence report.

Anthropic said, “Over the past eight months, our threat intelligence team identified and disrupted operations in which threat actors tried to use Claude for malicious activity.

“In each case, we disrupted the activity, used what we learned to strengthen our safeguards, and shared intelligence with authorities and industry partners, where appropriate.”