Nature challenges AI extinction claims after Anthropic exit

Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic on September 8 and told the Wall Street Journal that systems the company is developing could "spiral out of control and destroy humanity." In a follow-up X post, he wrote: "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." The post collected more than 100 million views in a day.

Evan Hubinger, who leads Anthropic's alignment science efforts, reposted it with his own line: "the risk of human extinction is >10% within the next decade." CEO Dario Amodei then published an essay calling for a slowdown, but not a halt, in AI development, backed by Sam Altman at OpenAI and Elon Musk at xAI. Nearly 1,400 AI sector employees signed an open letter demanding the same thing after a run of cybersecurity incidents.

Four of the researchers we follow posted the Nature piece within a day. Elizabeth Gibney asked whether the extinction talk holds up as science. Michael Vermeer of the RAND Corporation told her it "involves so many untestable claims that you just end up with a conversation that is really more like faith than something scientific or empirical." A 2025 RAND study examined nuclear weapons, biotechnology, and atmospheric modification as extinction pathways. On nuclear the verdict was flat: "complete extinction by nuclear weapons is not feasible." The other two "could not be ruled out," though a successful attack "would require models to have considerable ability to physically interact with the world" and "would almost certainly take time and be detectable."

Heidy Khlaaf of the AI Now Institute called the existential framing "fear-mongering" and pointed at nearer damage: "AI's low reliability and accuracy rates in critical environments with life-or-death consequences." CNN reported earlier this year that false information in an AI-generated report almost led the US military to board a Chinese ship.

The AI Futures project's speculative "AI 2027" forecast, cited in the piece, imagines an AI that "unleashes a biological weapon to kill humans off and thereby make more space for solar panels and robot factories."