Dramatic insider warnings over AI fall flat with some in Silicon Valley

Each September, a who's who of executives from across Silicon Valley descends on San Francisco's Palace Hotel to charm investors at a conference hosted by the investment bank Goldman Sachs.

This past week, between talk of growth and potential returns, tech titans found themselves addressing the abrupt resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon.

Coxon, a 27-year-old who worked at OpenAI before joining its chief rival Anthropic, said on Tuesday that people building artificial intelligence (AI) believed the technology could destroy humanity.

They are "gambling with our lives", he said, "these will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything".

Coxon is by no means the first AI insider to publicly sound the alarm. There have been a string of high-profile resignations from both Anthropic and OpenAI in recent years over apparent safety concerns, and some current Anthropic employees even echoed Coxon's post.

"We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade," a team lead at Anthropic, Evan Hubinger, posted on X.

While Coxon said explicitly in his posts that his warnings were "not marketing", some executives and investors in Silicon Valley have reacted with scepticism to a recent flurry of insiders sounding the alarm.

Anthropic and OpenAI are reportedly preparing for potentially record-setting initial public offerings, and some in the tech sector have suggested the latest stark comments about the dangers of AI may be designed to generate hype by signalling the power of these products.