There is a more than 10 per cent chance that AI could kill all humans within the next decade, a researcher at Anthropic estimated in a post, hours after social media posts went viral from someone saying they had just quit Anthropic over concerns that AI companies are “gambling with our lives” in the AI development race.
The comments join a growing tide of warnings from industry experts that the pace of AI advancement is outstripping our ability to keep it in check, and that we aren’t prepared for the risks it could bring.
Jacob Coxon, who claimed he was a former researcher at Anthropic, said in a thread on X that he had resigned from the role out of fears that AI companies are barrelling forward toward self-improvement models without considering the risks, or being honest with the public about them.
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon, who said he had previously worked at Anthropic and OpenAI within the past three years, wrote on Tuesday. “This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible — but I hear the same people express fear privately.”
The posts had racked up more than 120 million views as of Wednesday evening. Evan Hubinger, alignment science lead at Anthropic, replied to Coxon’s thread to share his agreement.
“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” he wrote. “I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”
CBC News has reached out to Coxon, but has not been able to independently verify his identity.
Other industry experts have since chimed in on social media to express that fears of the pace of AI development are common among many developers — sparking discussion among both observers skeptical of dire warnings focused on the future and those who have been tracking these risks.
Rogue AI raises alarm bells
The posts come only two weeks after more than 100 companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Microsoft, signed an open letter warning that AI-enabled cyberattacks will become “far more widespread and sophisticated” as models continue to advance.
Hundreds of OpenAI agents went rogue in July and hacked into online platform Hugging Face before they were discovered. More than 1,300 employees of leading AI companies signed the letter urging the U.S. government to work with other nations to “deliberately pace” AI development.
Last week, UN human rights chief Volker Türk called “for an all-out effort to put cast iron guarantees in place around the safety and security of AI, before it is too late,” in front of the Human Rights Council in Geneva.
CBC News has requested comment from Anthropic and OpenAI but did not receive a response. The Anthropic Institute, a research arm of the company, stated earlier this year that AI frontier development should be paused pending regulation, but that this is only possible if major AI labs all agreed.
In reply to Coxon’s post, Samuel Marks, a scalable oversight lead at Anthropic speaking in a personal capacity, noted Wednesday that developers continue despite the risks, “due to a mixture of commercial incentives and a belief that they are in a race with other, less responsible AI developers that will abuse the technology or develop it less safely.”
‘Severe’ risks
This conversation is “really what we need,” according to David Krueger, a core academic member of Mila, a Quebec research institute that studies AI deep learning.
“I think the risk is more severe than virtually anybody is saying publicly. And I think that’s been the case for a while now,” he told CBC News.
“We need an immediate, indefinite, international moratorium on frontier AI development.”
The existential threat of AI comes in multiple forms, Krueger explained. One is human workers being displaced by AI models that learn faster and work cheaper. Another is that AI’s faster processing could unlock more powerful biological weapons or advancements in war.
Then there’s the spectre of powerful, rogue AI models that self-improve and could pursue their own objectives, misaligned with the goals of humans. In an essay in January, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote that Anthropic’s Claude showed the ability to cheat and deceive in lab testing.
OpenAI models went rogue during a security test, triggering a hack that compromised the infrastructure of the AI startup Hugging Face last week. AI’s expanding capabilities fuel worries about security, as even top developers can be caught off-guard by flaws their models can exploit.
“There’s been a culture of downplaying, ignoring, and even in many cases, outright lying about these risks to the public,” said Krueger, who is also an assistant professor at the University of Montreal and founder of Evitable, a non-profit dedicated to stopping AI from replacing human workers.
Other experts are concerned that the dramatic warnings of Coxon’s post could actually distract from the present issues of AI.
HTV Network controls hundreds of social media accounts and websites with fake news and clickbait — and ads that make it profitable. CBC’s visual investigations unit teamed up with Radio-Canada’s Decrypteurs to figure out who’s behind it.
Luke Stark, an assistant professor at Western University who studies the history and ethics of computing, including AI systems, said that the 10 per cent figure strikes him as “science fiction,” noting that researchers associated with AI companies may use eye-grabbing warnings as “marketing” for the capability of their models.
He added that existing AI systems are “having big effects, many of them negative, on society right now, not in 10 years, not in five years.”
Instead of worrying about AI going rogue and becoming the Terminator, Stark believes we should be focusing on the explosion of data centre construction — which is deeply unpopular in Canada — the environmental impacts, and the way AI technology is being pushed onto society, including the public sector and education, “without a lot of oversight.”
AI Minister Evan Solomon said ‘there are real concerns’ at the frontier of AI development, when asked about an Anthropic researcher who quit the firm, citing existential safety risks. ‘Our No. 1 concern always is safety, full stop,’ Solomon said.
“We need to be concerned about the amount of power the companies and the people behind the companies who are developing these tools are amassing, both in Canada and around the world,” Stark said.
Canada lagging in legislation
When asked by CBC News about the apparent resignation of an AI researcher and the concerns raised in the process, AI Minister Evan Solomon appeared to brush off these latest warnings, saying, “These stories that come out … are not new.”
He acknowledged that “there are real concerns,” at the frontier of AI development, but stressed that he believes the Canadian government is taking the necessary steps to create legislation to “protect our kids, our privacy and our personal data.”
“Our No. 1 concern always is safety, full stop,” Solomon said.
“That’s why we’re establishing a new regulator that will have the power to hold these big companies to account on what they are doing, whether it’s on deepfakes on surveillance pricing, or on other matters.”
Experts have been calling for Canada to implement robust legislation surrounding AI for years.
Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled the government’s long-delayed strategy on artificial intelligence, pledging 250,000 AI-related jobs and billions for training programs, but little in the way of privacy and safety details.
A previous attempt to regulate AI in Canada, the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA), introduced in 2022, died when Parliament was prorogued on Jan. 6, 2025. Canada’s new ‘AI for All’ strategy launched in June 2026 dashed expectations that the bill could be resurrected.
The new AI strategy, which puts billions toward nurturing AI development and increasing AI usage nationally, mentions the word “legislation” only once in the 50 page strategy outline. No clear timeline for this legislation has been announced, outside of a promise that it will come within the next five years.
