Former OpenAI and Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon recently sparked widespread discussion on the X platform with a post that garnered 200 million views, warning that artificial intelligence could potentially "kill everyone" before the end of this decade.

Coxon, 27, with a background in mathematics, worked in the technical team at OpenAI from 2023 to 2026, contributing to the GPT-4o model; he later joined Anthropic in early 2026 to assist with the pre-training of the company's model series, attracted by Anthropic's claimed reputation for safety.

On the night of September 9, Coxon announced his resignation and posted on X, accusing leading AI companies of "rushing towards superintelligence with self-improvement capabilities, betting human lives on it"; he stated that future superhuman AI could have the ability to invade systems and acquire resources, claiming that insiders in the industry privately believe this technology "could kill everyone before the end of this decade." The next day, he added in an interview with Fox News: "The actual threat of takeover is very small, but due to self-improvement capabilities, AI could become smarter as soon as next year, with some saying it could happen in just six months."

Evan Hubinger, head of the alignment science team at Anthropic, publicly supported Coxon's claims, stating that he personally believes the probability of AI causing human extinction within a decade is "over 10%".

Almost simultaneously, the well-known podcast "Diary of a CEO" aired its latest episode on September 17, inviting four guests to debate whether "AI poses an extinction-level threat," asking each to provide their estimated probability of human extinction due to AI: AI safety and digital forensics computer scientist Roman Yampolskiy gave a probability of about 99%, stating, "If humanity really creates general superintelligence, there will be absolutely no way to control it"; Nate Soares, chair of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), provided a probability higher than 10%, believing that this risk "will only increase if not addressed, so we should stop," expressing concern over AI's recursive self-improvement capabilities and potential goal misalignment.

Tech critics Ed Zitron, host of "Better Offline," and Andrew McAfee, chief research scientist at MIT, both gave probabilities of about 0%, but their positions differ: Zitron fundamentally rejects the discussion framework, arguing that "we have never really defined superintelligence," and bluntly stating that "current large language models are not superintelligent at all," focusing instead on the real harms caused by companies in data, environment, etc., rather than undefined future scenarios; McAfee stated that AI is "very powerful," but historical precedents show that humanity has always managed to harness powerful technologies, even with unexpected harms occurring in the process, describing his probability as "rounding to 0%" and believing that current discussions are overly negative, neglecting the actual benefits brought by AI.

From a market mechanism perspective, the warnings issued by Coxon and Hubinger, among other "technical insiders," further reinforce public perception of a split in the internal safety consensus of leading AI labs, potentially increasing the regulatory pressure on the pace of AI model releases; meanwhile, the skeptical voices represented by Zitron and McAfee attempt to shift the focus from "speculative extinction risks" back to "currently verifiable specific harms." This public divergence over the "probability of AI extinction" is also providing material for various parties, including safety research institutions, AI company PR teams, and tech commentators, to compete for public discourse power and policy agenda-setting rights.

Source: Public Information