Former Anthropic researcher calls for mandatory AI kill switches as extinction risk debate heats up

Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic on September 9, 2026. Four days later, he was on NBC News telling the country that the off-switches currently built into advanced AI systems might already be obsolete. His specific concern: kill switches could work fine against today’s AI models, but future autonomous systems operating in a distributed, swarm-like fashion may simply route around any centralized shutdown command. The people building this technology are also the ones raising the alarm Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment lead, has publicly estimated the probability of AI causing human extinction within the next decade at greater than 10%. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei added his own voice to the conversation on September 12, 2026, publishing an essay that endorsed slowing the pace of AI capability development and called for independent safety evaluations of frontier systems. Regulators and lawmakers are no longer just watching In June 2026, the Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to suspend foreign access to two of its more advanced models, Mythos 5 and Fable 5, triggering a global shutdown effort. Congress followed with the bipartisan AI Kill Switch Act, proposed in July 2026. The b...