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The latest warnings about AI seem intended to boggle minds and shock everyone into action.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a leader in the AI race, on Saturday called for a conscious slowdown in AI development in an essay posted to his website. AI is developing faster and faster and could outrun humans’ ability to manage it, he wrote.
“Left unchecked, it could outrun our ability to understand and control these systems, and so must be pursued very carefully, if at all,” Amodei wrote.
The call for action comes just days after a former engineer at Amodei’s company went even further, saying AI could bring about the end of humanity.
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” said Jacob Coxon, who had worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic before he posted his viral warning on social media.
Nobody knows how exactly AI would end humanity, as Coxon explained to CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
Former Anthropic researcher warns AI could ‘kill us all’
Former AI researcher Jacob Coxon tells CNN’s Anderson Cooper why he quit Anthropic over fears that rapidly advancing AI could become impossible to control.
The argument is that AI is getting smarter all the time and will soon make itself smarter on its own, be able to outwit humans and unleash … something. Hack nuclear weapons? Let loose a devastating virus? Plunge the world into darkness? Create a lame society in which unfulfilled people can’t find work? Take your pick.
It should be comforting, maybe, that while the Pentagon is relying on artificial intelligence, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has said, “AI is not making lethal decisions.” Beyond that, the law does not place explicit limits on where AI can be used in the so-called kill chain.
Coxon’s message was amplified by public interest groups and lawmakers looking to heed the advice of the AI companies that want the government to impose a framework and limits on how AI is developed.
Companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI have publicly called for the government to regulate them so it can slow down their current race for AI domination, which coincides with their race to initial public offerings.
What we’re seeing is “a very small and powerful group of companies, linked arms together, running toward what they say is a cliff they cannot seem to stop themselves from running off,” the tech journalist and CNN contributor Jacob Ward told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on Thursday.
He argued that calls from these people who are in the process of making a lot of money should not be ignored.
“They are saying, ‘Hey, we’re building this thing, and it’s exciting, but it might not just cost you your job, but your life.’ I think it is important that we start paying attention,” Ward said.
Among those calling for government action is Sen. Bernie Sanders, who takes the warnings seriously.
“Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results,” Sanders said in announcing proposed legislation to ban artificial superintelligence. “It is irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced.”
Sanders also talked about his proposal with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
David Sacks, a tech investor who is also co-chair of President Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, has pushed in the other direction, toward an open market-based approach to AI.
Appearing on Fox News Thursday, Sacks questioned Coxon’s motivations and seeded the idea that his warning was part of a conspiracy by “doomers,” maybe financed by China, to thwart AI innovation in the US.
On Saturday, President Donald Trump echoed that sentiment, saying during a news briefing in Ireland that people worried about the ultimate impacts of AI “are bringing up things that won’t happen.”
Asked whether the industry needs to be regulated, Trump said repeated his earlier statement about competing with China.
“We’re leading China in AI,” he said. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins. And we can put guard rails.”
Sacks is among those who argued American companies must continue to innovate rather than allow China to achieve AI supremacy.
“They don’t have this giant influence operation of these doomer groups in China,” Sacks told Fox News’ Bret Baier. “What we have here in the US, though, is we have this huge media campaign against AI and it is turning the public against AI.”
Sacks added of China: “They would love for us to stop AI development over here.”
In a video from his “All-In” podcast, which Sacks posted to his account on X, he argued the AI companies want regulation so that they can effectively control AI. He called it a “frontier market duopoly.”
Government officials aren’t going to have any idea how to regulate AI, he argued.
“So they’re going to turn to the leading labs to say, ‘Hey, how should we regulate it?’ And of course, Anthropic is going to have all the answers on that,” he said, suggesting warnings of AI run amok are part of a play for market domination.
Rather than push the idea that AI has the potential to end humanity, Sacks sees a conspiracy to place power over AI in a few select hands. That, he said in another X post, would be the true danger.
“Keeping innovation decentralized and accessible is the key to avoiding an unsafe and dystopian future where advanced AI capabilities are centralized and controlled by only a few hands,” he said.
That kind of mindset is in line with Trump’s efforts to stop states like California from imposing their own AI regulations in the absence of movement from Washington.
When efforts to ban state regulations stalled in Congress last year, Trump signed an executive action trying to do the same thing.
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The Trump administration has so far viewed AI regulation more as part of a race with China over the technology than as an effort to protect humanity, as CNN’s Hadas Gold explained in her recent story, ‘It feels a little like early Covid’: The messy scramble to regulate AI.
The administration blocked export of some Nvidia chips to China, for instance, or temporarily delayed release of products to assess their impact on national security.
To those who see existential danger in AI, all of this may echo the nuclear arms race of the Cold War, when countries ultimately set aside differences to impose a series of treaties in the 1960s and beyond for Nuclear Non-proliferation, test bans, strategic arms limitations, and more.
But it’s hard to imagine the Trump administration — or China — getting involved in any worldwide treaty effort, although Europe has tried to go the route of a treaty for AI regulations.
The threat posed by nuclear weapons still animates US foreign policy and is a main reason cited by Trump for his war on Iran.
While the most dire warnings about AI have to do with the end of humanity, it is most potent as an issue motivating voters worried about AI encroaching in their backyards.
Americans are unnerved at unsightly data centers that power the hive mind of AI and which tech giants would have dot the landscape, impacting water quality, driving up energy bills, and swallowing up farmland.
The populist, pitchfork-style opposition to the massive construction projects has been the political story of the summer, crossing party lines and uniting people on the left and right, even as it confuses policymakers like Trump, who see dollar signs.
American voters cannot typically be accused of looking long-term.
They express concern about climate change, but seem to vote based on gas prices. They shudder at the $40 trillion national debt, but often vote for lawmakers who cut taxes and increase spending. And with AI, they appear to be far more motivated by concerns about data centers rather than the potential existential threat.
But it’s also possible that distaste for data centers reflects their role as the most obvious physical manifestation of generative AI. Tech companies promise the technology will change the world, and some experts worry it may end humanity — but many ordinary Americans just find it clunky and off-putting, and they didn’t ask for it to invade so many areas of their lives.
