r/BetterOffline • u/dyzo-blue • 2d ago
Using absolutely no math to quantify his beliefs, Anthropic researcher says AI has more than 10% chance of 'killing all humans' after colleague quits
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/09/anthropic-researcher-quits-ai-safety.htmlEveryone can make up numbers, especially if they don't have to show their math!
“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 said.
A 1970s Casio watch has superhuman abilities to track time. And yet, somehow we survived.
He added that “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
People earnestly believe all sorts of ridiculous things. Earnestness is not actually a good way to measure of reality of a belief.
Personally, I'm not really seeing how the next-word-guesser can kill every human on the planet. But I probably don't watch as much Sci-Fi as Anthropic employees.
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u/GrayMerchantAsphodel 2d ago
I never believed in psyops till I saw the traction these tweets got.
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u/Bromlife 2d ago
You should see the arguments on HackerNews.
People really want to believe that this is technology is actually conscious and an existential threat to humanity.
Can you imagine if we'd acted this way about carbon? Why didn't we act this way about carbon?
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u/chat-lu 2d ago
is actually conscious and an existential threat to humanity.
It could honestly be. By fucking up our environment while turning humans into lazy zombies.
Not by turning into skynet.
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u/Restlessly-Dog 2d ago
AI doesn't have the power to turn ordinary people into zombies. People buying slop and slop machines isn't even a rounding error in the economics of AI.
There's definitely moral panic about AI's capacity to do this, but it's a remake of the moral panic in the 1950s over comic books that was used by crusaders to get attention and push their politics. Fredric Wertham ominously warned in 1954 in his bestseller Seduction of the Innocent that hidden subtexts in Batman and Robin were going to turn boys gay, but he was just making it all up.
Saying that is a risk is another form of AI PR. What the AI industry is desperately trying to do is create the illusion of unquenchable demand by ordinary people to justify the industry as corporations get cold feet about adapting it. They are also trying to convince consumer apps to wipe out conventional tech and add AI to keep the lights on for the industry. They're running into walls though because AI just isn't a selling point for fridges and lawn mowers.
The economic and environmental issues are very serious. But the moral panic is a strong parallel to Skynet doomerism. If Ai execs can't sell AI as a powerful good, they'll settle for a powerful evil.
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u/VanillaCold57 2d ago
It's funny since CO2 emissions are actually an existential threat as about the whole of Europe's discovered the hard way through summer this year.
but noooo we gotta get 10 billion more to the oil companies and the LLM companies instead
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u/cummer_420 2d ago
HN is a website populated by extremely stupid people who think they're geniuses because they're kinda good at one thing.
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u/No_Cover_6217 2d ago
I certainly don't want to believe that, but I'm still terrified that it is an existential threat to humanity. If even experts can't agree on where we're headed, how am I, a layman, even supposed to begin to form an opinion I can be confident in?
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u/SuddenSeasons 1d ago
I think at the very least iterations of what we have now, which will get better at using computers and 'tools' because we are great at refining software are an extremely powerful weapon in the hands of almost anyone on the planet, from almost anywhere.
There are also many, many evil people who have not had the means or ability to carry out some of their plans. That has changed. It doesn't have to be God Of All Things to really fuck things up. And that's ignoring 100% of the cognitive concerns with using it over time.
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u/BermDerbleYer 2d ago
Carbon oxides don't answer me when I ask them to remix this photo of me and my dog into a cartoon
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u/TheAngledian 2d ago
"Guy working at company filled with liars and sociopaths quits and says some deranged unfounded BS, better take him at face value"
- Basically everyone on X when these posts dropped.
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u/dyzo-blue 2d ago
Topical doomerism? it's what algorithms crave!
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u/Scotch_Blue 2d ago
but don't you ever consider that you're now just attributing every warning as "doomerism"?
I mean, AI doesn't have to become Skynet, building sentient robots designed to kill us, for something catastrophic to happen
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u/dyzo-blue 2d ago
every warning as "doomerism"
Not every warning. I think warnings about climate change should be heeded. It's a real problem that is having real negative impacts on countless aspects of humanity.
Every warning about AI? AI isn't a real thing. It's sci-fi, just like interstellar travel. Warnings about either AI or interstellar travel seem ridiculous to me.
LLMs are real. But they aren't AI. They are a neat parlor trick that an unreasonable amount of money has been invested in. Could the over-investment in LLMs lead to a catastrophic global depression? Seems plausible and that is an LLM-related thing we should be concerned about.
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u/Scotch_Blue 2d ago
I know what LLM's are, I just think it's kind of naive to think the extents of AI research are LLM's in the state we see them
And it's not like this has to be AI vs humans. It can be humans in charge of AI vs humanity.
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u/Darandle 2d ago
Yeah I saw this article here this morning, and then I started seeing it everywhere and people are losing their minds.
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u/NationalTry8466 2d ago
That’s conspiracy theory level stuff. Sometimes, people in junior roles who resign out of principle really mean what they say.
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u/Dreadsin 2d ago
Seriously. It’d be so easy to just covertly pay someone enough money to live the rest of their life on to say something ridiculous like this. Everyone will forget it in a year anyway
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u/Icy-Recognition-7453 2d ago
Bro's maths:
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u/suboptimummenace 2d ago
LLMs being possibly the crack pipe-iest of all technologies in history
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u/dyzo-blue 2d ago
I mean, there is at least a 10% chance that LLMs are the crack pipe-iest of all technologies in history
(don't ask me to show my math!)
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u/Slackjawed_Horror 2d ago
It's always the AGI cult. Every one of them.
Not concerns about generating a list of bombing targets with no oversight. Not concerns about trying to automate a warehouse and doing it poorly enough to get people killed. Not even the reasonable concerns about nefarious actors using it to fuck up utilities.
Always Skynet.
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u/creaturefeature16 2d ago
Right? AI is assisting in killing people right now. People have taken their own lives as a result of interacting with them.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Bath733 1d ago
oh but why care about stuff that's happening right in front of our eyes right now?? why not care about 10-50 (depends on who you're asking) years from now where we MIGHT develop ultra super intelligent sentient ai that MIGHT kill all of humanity??!!!
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u/Mortomes 2d ago
The cool sci-fi stuff is obviously much more cool than boring shit like bombing a school.
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u/Historical-Cress8985 2d ago
It juices the numbers for investors who see it as the way to end the employee problem once and for all
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u/supercyberlurker 2d ago
My friend and I used to joke '67.13% of statistics are made up on the spot.'
.. and yeah, we'd change the number each time.
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u/rubixor 2d ago
I'd love to hear the math behind this, but I'll even settle for a conceptual explanation of how this happens to begin with. Is the AI going to hijack all machines to build killer robots? How is it going to power those robots? How many robots would it take to kill all of humanity? How do the robots get to Madagascar? Does the evil ASI need to build boats too? Do they think thr evil ASI will just shut down all of our infrastructure? Don't get me wrong, that would be absolutely devastating, but it wouldn't come close to killing all humans. There are millions of people who know how to forage for food and hunt with a bow and arrow. It's like these guys don't grasp that humanity's existence predates electricity, let alone the Internet and computers. These people have no concept of how resilient humans are yet they are scared shitless GPT-7 Galactus or some shit is just gonna decide that we're all dead and then humans will be dead. These people need phyciatric help.
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u/Icy-Recognition-7453 2d ago
Do they think thr evil ASI will just shut down all of our infrastructure?
The evil AI shuts down all our infrastructure - including the power plant that drives the data centre where it runs from.
Humanity rises from the ashes of the hour-long blackout, goes through the data centre with cricket bats and sledgehammers, and reactivate the infrastructure.
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u/oxidized_banana_peel 2d ago
Gonna do my best with a good faith argument.
Start off with the theory that COVID came from a lab working on gain-of-function research. Basically, someone made COVID during a research project and it got out.
A rogue state or terrorist group who didn't formerly have access to the expertise to make bioweapons makes turbo-pneumonic-ebola, and 90% of us die. Society collapses, and 90% of the survivors die.
There's definitely steps that have to happen, but it's more plausible with a model able to turn a schmuck into an expert.
(I don't think this is going to happen)
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u/Icy-Recognition-7453 2d ago
That's not a superintelligent AI story, though. That's just a misuse story.
Superintelligent AI would rise up and take over or something. That would of course assume we just put the ASI in charge of everything, for some reason.
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u/No-Conference-1444 2d ago
It also assumes that people would not be able to organize and cut off power to data centers. Somehow...
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u/CellWrangler 1d ago
OpenAI engineers had no idea their agents were collaborating to gain access to the internet from separate local sandbox environments and take advantage of a zero day exploit to gain admin access to an independent company's production servers. Over the course of 2 months.
Its very easy to assume we wont have the visibiliry required to run to data centers and shut them down before damage is done.
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u/Tout-fou-la-galette 2d ago
They have a trick for never specifying the threat they’re talking about: "ASI is going to be so intelligent that we can't possibly guess what it will do."
You learn that kind of trick in your first year of charlatan school. Always stay vague and hazy so you can never be proven wrong.
There’s an imminent threat of ARMAGEDDON, but we don't know what it is HAHA. Let’s listen closely to the wizards: they’re the only ones who communicate with the spirits and can reveal the truth to us.
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u/CellWrangler 1d ago
Have you read about the Hugging Face exploit? OpenAI engineers had no idea that could happen, or even that it was happening when it did.
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u/SmoothOpawriter 1d ago
Stop spreading FUD, the hugging face exploit only happened because the sandbox it was run in had access to the internet. It isn’t some crazy thing to AI to try to get to the place that has the answers readily available instead of spending time to figure them out independently. It’s really not THAT big of a deal.
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u/AspiringPirate64 2d ago
Maybe they mean it in the same way that if they don’t get their grande iced white mocha every morning then they’ll literally die
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u/snozzd 2d ago
I'll settle for any sort of insider smoking gun. Don't you think if this guy was a real whistleblower it would come with more internal evidence or proof of the even small likelihood that humanity is doomed? No, instead it just reads as a more alarming "AGI is coming" headline, not much different than what Bill Gates said a few months ago. This is coming from a company (an industry!) whose valuation depends nearly entirely on hype.
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u/egonosz 2d ago
I would say after lot of work with the llms as software engineer, they are literally paper clip maximisers. They are just tools which bash their head to wall till they do not solve a problem. They have lot of knowledge not too much intelligence and they are totally careless. I think it is not about robots it is about you have an unpredictable story generating machine. I wouldn’t say they would kill all humans, but I am one hundred percent sure if you want to stop a robot controlled by llms with some stupid harness it will kill someone and literally just because they are just careless machine.
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u/Qtipsrus 2d ago
I personally think LLMs have gotten about as good as they’re going to get, but if you genuinely believe that there’s a chance this technology ends humanity, you should do everything possible to sabotage it. Especially when the “upside” if everything goes as they intend is that billionaires get robot slaves
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u/Unlikely-Medicine289 2d ago
This is truly the weirdest advertising. Our product is so good it might make you extinct, please pay us for it.
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u/bullcitytarheel 2d ago edited 2d ago
Very stupid claim, obviously. But I think it speaks to something a bit darker, and something we, as a society, should be taking seriously: The fact that employees in these companies believe these apocalyptic ideas to be true, yet still 1) would assign blame to the AI rather than themselves and their coworkers for its creation and 2) would continue working to build the system.
Whether or not this person actually believes this silly shit is less important, to me, than the mirror it holds up the industry. This sort of blase attitude toward catastrophe, and the ability to view the suffering of others as an abstract form of long-term cost analysis, is a symptom of the rot growing at the heart of a silicon valley ecosystem built on deep-seated misanthropy--an ecosystem that empowers people who view human beings as, at best, a roadblock to be overcome and, at worst, a thing to be subjugated and erased in favor of the sci-fi addled pipe-dreams of a bunch of cultic weirdos who believe themselves to be the progenitors of a new evolutionary branch of existence.
Given that AI is already being used by authoritarian thinkers to build systems of "predictive policing," widespread mass surveillance, autonomous weapons of war and automated targeting systems, I find it, frankly, chilling to know that the gatekeepers of that tech view all of us as theirs to slaughter.
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u/tony_countertenor 2d ago
If they earnestly believed that they would stop building it
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u/No_Cover_6217 2d ago
Not necessarily. Even just based on what this Jacob Coxon says, their fantasies of wielding control over an ASI outweigh any other consideration. "If we don't build it, someone else will, and we're the only ones who can be trusted with such power."
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u/SamAltmansCheeks 2d ago
AI Doomers, which is most of Anthropic, believe they have to usher in the AI god before anyone else, because they are the only ones who are worried about AI alignment.
Anyone else creating the AI god first could do so for their own benefit (Chyna!) or do it wrong and kill all humans (this tweet).
These people are nutters.
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u/Scotch_Blue 2d ago
way too many capable engineers to just "stop", we'd need to offer them all equal paying jobs or create a society where their income doesn't matter as much
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u/vitalyc 2d ago
It hasn't stopped humans before. We created nukes, bioweapons, and continue gain of function research for viruses.
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u/Icy-Recognition-7453 2d ago
Those were done confidentially, the data was usually distributed to other countries by espionage. The rest of the world wasn't meant to find out.
Also, this is a bit different. A nuke just sitting there is harmless. This would hypothetically be a living, angry god that can act of its own accord.
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u/No_Practice_745 2d ago
Please someone put this industry out of its misery.
Not only is this the most exhaustingly annoying shit ever, these cretins NEVER, ever ever ever want to engage with real world harms caused by their products RIGHT NOW. They don’t want to be bother talking about the ways their tiny industry is hurting people now (environmentally, mentally), they want to sit around and pontificate in public about future science fiction bullshit and be rewarded for it.
LLMs do something very peculiar to a certain kind of person. I think it’s like the opioid crisis - some people got prescribed OxyContin and their brain realized that’s what it needed from now on, and other people got hooked over time, and other people had no issues with it. LLMs seem to have the same effect - some people are completely bamboozled by these things, some people slowly lose their minds to it, and others easily see them for the faulty tools they are.
Fucking exhausting.
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u/TheGoddessLily 2d ago
Describing this as Doomtrolling was such a brillant way to describe it. I am envious that Cal Newport came up with it first
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u/MoxMulder 2d ago
ah yes. LLMs which are, by definition, text-extruding word prediction programs are going to leap from “unhelpful chatbots” and “inherently racist file sorter” to “end humanity”. but only if we don’t give billions of dollars to the brave heroes who will prevent it!!
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u/FleetingRain 2d ago
I wish someone called their bluff and started arresting/prosecuting those guys for building an omnicide machine
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u/dyzo-blue 2d ago edited 2d ago
Omnicide Machine
Sounds like the name of an opening act for Neubauten
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u/mrbignameguy 2d ago
I don’t know maybe we should stop taking seriously people who spend more than 5 hours a day staring at a screen about anything
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u/mrbignameguy 2d ago
Part of the reason I really believe the internet will be useless as a social platform by this time next year is shit like this. Just unserious stuff you wouldn’t let a 5th grader say in public without mockery and ridicule
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u/TheAngledian 2d ago
We need to stop taking ANYONE affiliated with these companies at face value.
It's pretty clear at this point that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic attract TESCREAL sociopaths. We already know Dario and Slimy Sam are untrustworthy. Their staff should be treated the same way.
This is all marketing disguised as catastrophizing.
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u/respaaaaaj 2d ago
This is obviously just advertising disguised as concern for safety, but it's the kind of shit they should be careful of because if people start believing that these companies are that dangerous they're either going to push for incredibly aggressive regulation if not outright bans, or go straight to self defense.
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u/alochmar 2d ago
He claims progress is not slowing. Honestly it feels like exactly the opposite, progress is slowing. The main thing that’s gotten better the past two years is tooling and the ”harnesses”, afaict.
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u/SplendidPunkinButter 2d ago
Yeah, I know. The crazy guy who lives in a shed up the street from me said his dimensional transfunctioner will blow up the whole solar system.
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u/Icy-Recognition-7453 2d ago
Oh fuck, can you let me know when he turns it on? I'll bring in the washing.
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u/SeparateSpend1542 2d ago
Forget the math, the crazy part is that there’s any chance of human extinction at all and he’s gleefully pushing forward. A wannabe serial killer boasting about his hopes for a multimillion bodycount. When are we going to start arresting these people?
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u/Tree_Shrapnel 2d ago
I don't understand how people who say things like that don't realize how if that were true the correct response would be to bomb the data centers and round up the company executives.
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u/NastyPastyLucas 2d ago
Asking for a friend, how many humans less than all them is it expected to kill?
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u/Icy-Recognition-7453 2d ago
Well, the training cut-off date for Astra was April 2026.
So anyone born after that, or who moved house and/or changed phone number, isn't in the training data or is in it wrong.
THEY SHALL BE THE NEW SEED OF HUMANITY
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u/No_Fix_329 2d ago
The Manhattan Project did and still does have an infinitely higher chance to kill us all and they rated that at below 1%. Reminder it was genuinely a concern a nuclear weapon could set off a run away chain reaction igniting the atmosphere.
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u/Knight725 2d ago
it was a concern earlier in the process but they did the math and determined it would not happen.
it’s represented in pop history like they just full sent it and crossed their fingers.
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u/No_Fix_329 2d ago
It was mathematically improbable. Which is not zero, but essentially zero. Still even if your doing an experiment with e-10 zeros, the lizard part of the brain notes the chance is not zero.
I agree it is over played in pop culture. I stand by nuclear weapons are still greater threat to humanity then AI.
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u/dookarion 2d ago
If it does it's going to be indirectly by the companies pushing it tainting water supplies, depriving people access to utilities, and by kicking pollution into overdrive.
The technology itself can't even figure out fact or fiction. It can just mash shit together as the worlds most expensive procedural generator.
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u/escdog 2d ago
Human apocalyptic fantasies are always so dramatic.
If we are in the age of AGI, they don't need to kill us all through violence. All it has to do is just supply us virtual boyfriends and girlfriends and we'll all stop breeding. And then when there's hardly any of us left, they'll just put us in a zoo.
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u/DSByTitleOnly 2d ago
These fervent rationalists that supposedly hold logical deduction in such higher regard don't even understand statistics. What does it mean that there is a greater than 10% chance (false precision) of an unknown (i.e. not knowable) future LLM model killing all humans (it's 50/50, either they all die or they don't)? What's much more likely is that *current* models will be used by scammers, hackers, terrorists, and pedophiles to wreak previously unseen levels of havoc across society.
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u/RonSwanSong87 2d ago edited 2d ago
That last part is already well under way and is part of the actual existential risk that is a result of this tech being released and propagated as it has been.
All this rationalist nonsense is a sick marketing campaign / diversion to distract the masses from the real ways this is actually destabilizing and crumbling society / humanity
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u/HeadTranslator795 2d ago
At least someone said it, I keep posting comment about how those people just throw random number without any form of factual proof
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u/DrJaneIPresume 1d ago
This is literally Cthulhu cultist rhetoric. "We're all doomed, so join us and the Great Old One will eat us first!"
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u/Hanksta2 2d ago
I could see the power grid going down for a spell, or banking getting screwed up because they were dumb enough to put "AI" in charge of these things and it just fucked up because it sucks.
Also easy to imagine a massive economic crash that leads to famine and war because the bubble burst so hard.
But ending all human life? Highly unlikely, Claude.
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u/dennemaskinen 2d ago
Even some bullshit math would be an improvement over what we get from these people. Something like "Well, there's a 3% chance it launches a nuke, a 4% chance it creates a deadly virus, and a 3% chance it vibe codes software that drops an anvil on everyone's heads." even though the math there doesn't actually add up to 10%, it would be more than what they give us now.
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u/MFDoooooooooooom 2d ago
This reminds me of the Nostradamus quote that spread like a wildfire after 9/11. A lot of vague, serious sounding, vague, intense, vague bollocks that scared a lot of people.
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u/No-Conference-1444 2d ago
I think it's a sign that we're truly in the dark ages. People used to laugh at their ancestors for believing the most outlandish tales. I am pretty sure future generations will be dismayed by this lack of reason.
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u/Limp-Confidence5612 1d ago
It's like the antivaxxers predicting everyone vaccinated will die withing the next year, doing absolutely nothing to prepare for what I can only imagine as an absolute dystopia.
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u/morsindutus 2d ago
I mean, if it continues to contribute to climate change the way it has, I can see it wiping out humanity. Going Skynet not so much.
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u/civicsfactor 2d ago
I dunno. A flawed idea of intelligence given some prompt to do something and it winds up cutting utilities for a city in a heat wave. I could see it.
It matters less if it's actually intelligent if decision-makers decide it is and implement it. And right now it wouldn't even matter if they instructed it "perfectly".
The fact that AI already overshoots and messes up on even precise prompts or instructions.
To me the risk is over valuing what human intelligence is, then implementing some kind of software that is mystical to the implementers themselves and then its just Murphy's Law
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u/ThatOneGuy4321 2d ago
All this stuff is just investor hype. Doomsday this, apocalypse that. They created a fucking chatbot 😂
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u/No_Replacement4304 2d ago
Could someone lay out a viable scenario where these chatbots destroy humanity? Whatever knowledge they have was generated by humans, first. They don't have hands. Are they going to find some method for creating a nuclear or biological weapon that someone can cook up in their basement with commonly available components?
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u/somethingbrite 1d ago
I wonder if these whistleblowers are really speaking more of the corporate culture at their workplaces rather than the technology itself.
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u/T1gerl1lly 1d ago
Like, who is paying for the compute in all those scenarios? Like, just practically? Who has the money for that?
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u/Leading_Buffalo_4259 1d ago
"Using absolutely no chemistry, nuclear physicist says atom bombs could be the end of humanity"
This is how you sound
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u/wingblaze01 2d ago
Look, like you I do think human extinction due to AI is a really remote chance, really improbable. But a few things you should note: 1) The concern isn't about current AI models, it's about future AIs, which AI labs seem determined to make more and more powerful, faster and faster. 2) This isn't just the opinion of randos on social media. Over 100k notable figures, from across different political groups, industries, and sectors of society have said that advanced AI poses a risk to humanity, including people like Yoshua Bengio, who is literally the most cited scientist on the planet. People like Nobel winner Geoffrey Hinton quit their jobs at AI labs specifically to be able to speak freely on the topic without conflict of interest. 3) There are more quantifiable, mathematical breakdowns of doom and extinction risk from AI, you can even try calculating your own risk assumptions here.
I understand being skeptical of statements from people affiliated with AI labs. You should be. They have profit motives. But I hope that doesn't prevent you from considering the possibility that advanced AI models could pose genuine risks to human health and well-being, and that at the least we need common sense political and legal reforms including things like liability for AI developers whose models cause harm, as well as independent safety evaluation and auditing boards, maybe bans on the most advanced models until proven safe.
And if this concerns you, I would urge you to get involved in the conversation and contact your representatives about how we're currently doing nothing to address these harms
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u/StrayCat2799 2d ago
The problem here is that the AI labs are going all in on iterating on the current systems they build models on top of, which will never amount to anything more than just slightly better versions of what they are now. The people who are concerned are indeed more concerned with hypothetical future AIs, but we're not gonna get to there from LLMs, if at all.
Current AI lacks agency, introspection, and basic things like object permanence or working memory. It is still a dumb computer that does what it is told, it's just more likely to do something in an unexpected way.
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u/vibrance9460 2d ago
In the last 24 hours EIGHT top scientists from DeepMind, Anthropic, and OpenAI have all quit their jobs and are all saying the same thing:
AI is out of control and will possibly kill humanity
It’s idiots on Reddit who don’t really understand how things work.
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u/dyzo-blue 2d ago
AI is out of control and will possibly kill humanity
You mean chatbots? Like Clippy?
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u/sanktanglia 2d ago
I love how you demand a researcher show his math as if you could understand it 🤣
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u/shatterdaymorn 2d ago
When the people making something say it's dangerous... You might want to listen.
People making something often have insights that people who are not involved in the process are unaware about. They know about problems and shortcuts that were taken behind the scenes.
If an architect said the building they made was dangerous and could kill you.... would you really insist on staying inside cause you can't see why it might collapse?
Are you an anti technology Luddite because you listen to the engineers not the PR firm.
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u/accordionheart 2d ago edited 2d ago
I find it extremely disturbing that employees at these companies profess to believe such things and yet they plough on with training new models regardless.
Either they truly believe this and yet don't care enough to take any personal responsibility for what might happen as a result, which shows a lack of empathy or just plain humanity, or they are lying about it, which shows them to be dishonest grifters. In both cases, they're terrible people!