A wave of public warnings from inside Anthropic intensified this week as multiple researchers at the AI company echoed a former colleague's apocalyptic assessment of artificial intelligence — drawing a scornful response from Elon Musk, who suggested the outcry was a coordinated "psyop."
According to The Guardian, the escalation came one day after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation in a viral post, writing that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI — his former employer — were building AI models responsibly and were "gambling with our lives." Rather than fading, the controversy grew as current Anthropic staff posted their own dire assessments in support. For more context on this story, see our ongoing breaking AI news.
The Warnings Pile Up
Anna Wang, who works on artificial general intelligence safety at Anthropic and previously worked at Google's DeepMind, said Thursday that many people at the company want to slow development to plan for the risks posed by increasingly capable models.
"There is not yet a viable scientific plan to solve risks from recursively self-improving AI," Wang wrote on X.
Another Anthropic employee, Drake Thomas, said he respected Coxon's decision to step away from building the technology. "Things are moving way too fast, we don't have anywhere near the degree of assurance we'll want for ASI [artificial superintelligence]," Thomas wrote.
Samuel Marks, who works on safety research at the company, argued that the concerns are widely shared inside the industry — and that seniority correlates with alarm. "AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes)," Marks wrote. "This could happen in the next few years. In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are."
Evan Hubinger, who describes himself as a lead in Anthropic's alignment division, went furthest. "We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!" Hubinger wrote, adding that he personally puts the probability above 10 percent within the next decade.
The Insider notes follow reporting by CBS News that an Anthropic researcher assigned a greater than 10 percent chance to AI causing human extinction, and coverage by The Japan Times that the warnings have renewed calls for new AI rules in the United States.
Musk: 'Seems Like a Setup'
Elon Musk took a sharply adversarial view. "Seems like a setup," the world's richest man wrote on X, his own social platform.
Coxon replied with a selfie: "I'm real and these are my real beliefs. You could ask your xAI researchers about me if you hadn't fired them."
Musk and other sympathetic voices amplified a theory floated by Parker Thayer, a researcher at the conservative think tank Capital Research, who suggested — with little evidence, The Guardian notes — that Coxon's post was the opening move of a "VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion."
Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman quoted Thayer's post with a one-word reply: "Interesting."
Musk later elaborated. "I think the groundwork for this psy op (for lack of a better term) has been prepared for a long time," he posted. "This was just the match that lit the fire."
Anthropic Defends Its Approach
Caught between its own employees' warnings and attacks from outside, Anthropic offered a measured public response.
"We have always been transparent that AI will bring both enormous benefits and unprecedented risks," a company spokesperson told The Guardian. "To address these risks, we continue to build models with some of the strongest safeguards in the industry."
The company pointed to its track record of documenting and disrupting misuse. On the same day the warnings went viral, Anthropic released its September threat intelligence report, which detailed how the company dismantled an operation attempting to build a biological weapon using its AI models — alongside disrupted campaigns spanning cyberattacks and influence operations. Al Jazeera and the BBC were among the outlets highlighting the bioweapons findings on Friday.
Skeptics See a Different Risk
Not everyone accepts the extinction framing. Gary Marcus, the scientist and longtime AI critic, argued that the technology is already causing harm that warrants action regardless of superintelligence scenarios — calling for a boycott of AI over present-day damage.
More than extinction, Marcus told The Guardian he worried about the "risk of catastrophe" from "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."
His position underscores a split within the AI safety debate itself: between those focused on long-run, civilization-scale risk from future systems, and those focused on concrete harms from today's models.
A Debate That Refuses to Stay Internal
What began as one researcher's resignation letter has become a very public referendum on how the AI industry is building its most powerful systems. Inside Anthropic, employees are openly debating whether their own timelines for safe development have slipped. Outside it, the warnings are being folded into an increasingly polarized political fight over whether and how governments should intervene.
The Guardian's reporting suggests many Anthropic staff share these concerns privately but have not spoken publicly. If more of them follow Coxon, Wang, Thomas, Marks, and Hubinger, the pressure on leading AI labs to slow down — and on regulators to act — will only grow.
_This article is based on reporting by The Guardian, with additional context from CBS News, The Japan Times, Al Jazeera, and the BBC._
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