‘AI will end humanity’ — the most successful PR campaign in history

Published September 23, 2026 10:00am ET



In the space of one week, the people building artificial intelligence told the world it could end all of humanity. This month, Evan Hubinger, lead of Alignment Science at Anthropic, put in his own odds, “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.” He also made a distinction: the risk from today’s models is low. 

Jacob Coxon, a researcher who had worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, posted that “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” He resigned that day, saying the labs were “gambling with our lives.” 

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