Anthropic employees warn of greater-than-10% chance AI causes human extinction

Inside the labs building the most powerful AI systems in history, not everyone is losing sleep over the apocalypse. While a handful of prominent researchers have staked out dramatic positions on the existential risks of advanced AI, a broad swath of current and former employees at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and DeepMind are greeting those warnings with something closer to eye-rolls than emergency protocols. The BBC reported on September 19, 2026, that many AI lab workers reacted to existential risk warnings with skepticism and, in some cases, outright amusement. The doomsday claims that started the argument The tension crystallized around a series of high-profile warnings in early September 2026. Jacob Coxon, a researcher who resigned from Anthropic on September 10, publicly claimed that people inside AI development believe there is a greater-than-10% chance that advanced AI leads to human extinction within the decade. Evan Hubinger, an alignment lead at Anthropic, echoed that figure, putting the risk of AI-caused human extinction in the next ten years above 10% as well. The most striking claim came from Marcus Williams, a member of OpenAI’s safety team, who estimated a 70% chance of...