{"id":766742,"date":"2026-09-11T01:22:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T01:22:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/766742\/"},"modified":"2026-09-11T01:22:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T01:22:12","slug":"more-anthropic-researchers-warn-of-ais-perils-as-musk-terms-fears-a-psyop-ai-artificial-intelligence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/766742\/","title":{"rendered":"More Anthropic researchers warn of AI\u2019s perils as Musk terms fears a \u2018psyop\u2019 | AI (artificial intelligence)"},"content":{"rendered":"

A day after a former researcher at Anthropic<\/a> made an apocalyptic declaration about artificial intelligence, more researchers and staff members at the AI startup publicly agreed with him and posted their own dire warnings.<\/p>\n

In response, Elon Musk and other conservative figures on X, formerly Twitter, called the chorus of concerns a \u201csetup\u201d and a \u201cpsyop\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Anthropic insiders fear the technology they are building could become so advanced and dangerous as to cause human extinction within the decade, and they assert many of their colleagues feel the same but haven\u2019t said so publicly.<\/p>\n

These researchers and staff are posting in response to a now-viral thread from Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who said on Wednesday he was resigning from the company because neither Anthropic nor its competitor OpenAI, also his former employer, were building AI models responsibly and are \u201cgambling with our lives\u201d.<\/p>\n

Anna Wang, who works on Artificial General Intelligence Safety at Anthropic and previously worked at Google\u2019s DeepMind, said Thursday that many people at Anthropic want to slow down development to come up with a plan to mitigate the risks that could come with these AI models.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is not yet a viable scientific plan to solve risks from recursively self-improving AI,\u201d Wang wrote on X.<\/p>\n

Drake Thomas, another Anthropic employee, said that he respected Coxon\u2019s choice to abstain from building these models if he worries they could pose planet-scale risks.<\/p>\n

\u201cThings are moving way too fast, we don\u2019t have anywhere near the degree of assurance we\u2019ll want for ASI [artificial superintelligence],\u201d Thomas said.<\/p>\n

Musk took a more adversarial stance. \u201cSeems like a setup,\u201d he wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Coxon replied to the world\u2019s richest man with a selfie, writing, \u201cI\u2019m real and these are my real beliefs. You could ask your xAI researchers about me if you hadn\u2019t fired them.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a statement to the Guardian, an Anthropic spokesperson defended the company\u2019s strategy. \u201cWe have always been transparent that AI will bring both enormous benefits and unprecedented risks. To address these risks, we continue to build models with some of the strongest safeguards in the industry,\u201d the statement said.<\/p>\n

Musk and others with a more positive view of AI have started to spread theories that Coxon\u2019s post and the resulting fallout are part of a \u201cpsyop\u201d to negatively influence the public\u2019s feelings about AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the groundwork for this psy op (for lack of a better term) has been prepared for a long time,\u201d Musk posted on X. \u201cThis was just the match that lit the fire.\u201d<\/p>\n

Musk was responding to a post by Parker Thayer, a researcher at conservativethinktank Capital Research, in which he floated a theory with little evidence that Coxon\u2019s post was the start of a \u201cVERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion\u201d. Other notable figures took notice.<\/p>\n

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Bill Ackman, the billionaire CEO of the hedge fund Pershing Square, also quoted Thayer\u2019s post, simply saying \u201cInteresting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other Anthropic employees had posted their agreement with Coxon shortly after he declared his resignation on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

\u201cAI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes),\u201d wrote Samuel Marks, who works on safety research at Anthropic. \u201cThis could happen in the next few years. In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Evan Hubinger, who describes himself as a lead in the company\u2019s alignment division, which works on ensuring Anthropic\u2019s AI models function in line with human goals, said Coxon was \u201ccorrect\u201d and that the industry was falling behind in attempts to deal with the apocalyptic potential.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!\u201d Hubinger wrote<\/a>. \u201cI personally think it is >10% within the next decade.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not exactly clear how Coxon and others expect AI models to usher in the demise of humanity. Some experts doubt that the technology will become so intelligent as to cause the apocalypse. Gary Marcus, a scientist and leading voice in AI, said that it\u2019s time to boycott AI, but because it\u2019s already causing harm.<\/p>\n

More than extinction, Marcus said he worried about the \u201crisk of catastrophe\u201d from \u201cfrom AI-generated pathogens, from wars started or escalated by AI-generated disinformation, from hacks that destroy critical infrastructure, and so on. Nothing I have seen gives any indication that any of that is under control\u201d.<\/p>\n

The same day, Anthropic released a report documenting how the company dismantled an operation attempting to build a biological weapon using its AI models.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A day after a former researcher at Anthropic made an apocalyptic declaration about artificial intelligence, more researchers and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":766743,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-766742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=766742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/766743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=766742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=766742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=766742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}