Anthropic Whistleblower Says AI Could “Kill Us All”

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Ed Elson (1:42)

Welcome to Prof G Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is September 10th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The major indices fell as fighting in the Middle East escalated. Brent Crude topped $101 per barrel for the first time since May. The yield on 10-year treasuries hit its highest level since 2023 After the treasury announced it is tripling debt buybacks to $6 billion. On CalShe, the odds of a rate hike next week climbed to 57%.

And finally, Metashares rose more than 6% after the company released its Muse AI agent.

Okay, what else is happening? A mass extinction event could be upon us. A former Anthropic researcher announced his departure from the company on X late Tuesday night. He revealed that employees at both OpenAI and Anthropic believe that AI could, quote, kill us all by the end of the decade. He went on to say that at OpenAI, many have not, quote, deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. While at Anthropic, the stakes are, quote, well understood, but they are locked in a race. He ended the message calling for an increased amount of safety cooperation between labs urging other researchers to do the same. In response to this message, another current Anthropic researcher chimed in, saying that he is, quote, correct, and that Anthropic researchers, quote, really do earnestly believe that AI could kill all humans. They also put the chances of that happening within the next decade at greater than 10 percent. So is AI really going to kill us all? Here to help us break it down, we're speaking with Alex Kantrowitz, author of the Big Technology Newsletter and host of the Big Technology Podcast. Alex, thank you for joining us on the show. This tweet has gone insanely viral.

It now has about 100 million views and that's in less than 24 hours. This guy is basically saying that anthropocene open AI developing technologies that are going to kill us, probably, maybe, in the next few years. What do you make of it? Do you think he's right?

Alex Kantrowitz (3:52)

Well, I don't think he's right. I mean, I would say that it obviously has garnered a lot of attention because some of the AI activity we've seen might lead you to that conclusion. We've obviously seen over the past couple of weeks swarms of AI agents doing things like solving Millennium Prize problems.

And open AI had thousands of bots that attacked an infiltrated hugging face against its wishes. So we're clearly seeing some crazy activity from bots right now. But as to the question of will AI kill us all, I am strongly on the side that it will not kill us all. Now could it sort of take on financial institutions and hack into companies? Absolutely. But at least for now, AI needs us to exist. Like right now, we're taking so much of the economic activity that humans create and using it to build data centers and power the data centers and feed these bots. So I think offing us would be a terrible decision on their part. And I think they know that. So this idea that they're about to kill us with now or within the decade is wrong. And unfortunately, it really muffles the message of the AI safety advocates. Because there is a there there. It's just not this take all humanity and turn us into paper clips there that I think a lot of them believe in.