AI extinction warnings dominate headlines after ex-Anthropic employee's viral post

There's been a tidal wave of media coverage on the dastardly dangers of AI, some carrying warnings that "we're all gonna die!" – maybe. 

And what unleashed this flood of frightening stories about super-intelligent AI networks crushing humanity?

One social media post by a guy no one's ever heard of. 

Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic, resigned and posted his concerns on X, the tweets triggering such a thunderous reaction across the media landscape that television raced to put him on the air. It was this sentence that cast him as a digital-age Paul Revere: "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."

And here's the irony: the journalists covering and commenting on the surge in artificial intelligence have little idea how serious that threat is. If the high-tech crowd can’t agree, how are those who cover everything from politics to war supposed to know?

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If Anthropic and OpenAI, which dominate the field, are so upset about AI networks replicating themselves and going rogue, why don’t they hit the brakes on their own?

I’m not saying that most media have joined the ranks of the doomsayers, but the sheer volume of coverage has fueled the sense of an impending crisis.

Coxon, enjoying his 15 seconds of fame, is also adept at sound bites. In one television appearance he warned that AI could use "hacking," "persuasion" or "bioweapons," calling that "pretty scary stuff… Imagine suddenly a million drones activate all over the world." 

Scary indeed.

Coxon told Fox’s Bret Baier that he sees "two things: very intelligent AI systems, and hard proof that we don’t know how to control them."

And he told MS NOW’s Ari Melber it could be "lights out" for humanity.

While politicians in both parties are calling for hearings or a pause in AI research, the White House is not alarmed.

Asked if he has concerns about AI, Trump said: "I don’t have any. I have concerns that if we don’t win AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position. We are leading China right now by a pretty good period." 

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What’s also boosted the coverage is that Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO, Dario Amodei, has acknowledged the magnitude of the issue and posted his own 3,800-word essay.

Asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper if he honestly believes AI could kill all humans, Amodei said: "I agree with Jacob much more than I disagree with him… He wasn’t calling us out. He was calling out the dynamic of the industry as a whole… I think there’s some chance that things go wrong, but it’s not all that high."

Yet there are other nightmare scenarios.

"There are also catastrophic scenarios that fall short of extinction, such as massive cyberattacks that take down power grids or financial systems and lead to a breakdown in the human social order," says the Wall Street Journal.

But the press also has to grapple with the question of motive. Some critics say Anthropic and OpenAI are seeking government regulation to freeze the big advantage they already hold over other companies. 

David Sacks, a tech investor and chairman of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, tells the two tech giants on X: "Stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission… Stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack."

No American company will want to slow down its research unless its rivals do the same. And the odds of getting such countries as China to sign on, as if it were an arms-control agreement, are exceedingly slim.

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It’s also hard to take politics out of the debate. Barack Obama just urged Democratic candidates to make AI regulation one of their "central agendas." 

What’s more, news organizations have their own entanglements with that world. The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI. And the New York Times is suing OpenAI for unauthorized use of millions of articles.

I’m like everyone else, trying to sift through the rhetoric and the research to separate solid facts from speculation. The recent hacking of a company called Hugging Face – in which "autonomous" AI agents deployed by OpenAI, teamed up on their own, circumventing human controls, to execute the breach – shows this is more than a theoretical problem. (Nvidia just bought Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.)

It also seems that some form of federal regulation is needed for this exploding business, given the massive spending and enormous stakes. No other American industry is given such a free hand.

As for the supposed threat to humanity, right out of a sci-fi movie, I’m not having trouble sleeping – yet.