Anthropic safety researcher says more than 10% chance AI 'could kill all humans'

Anthropic safety researcher says more than 10% chance AI 'could kill all humans'

Anthropic makes the AI tool Claude, which is used as a chatbot and as a tool to help coding

A senior safety researcher at Anthropic has warned that AI is moving so fast there is a greater than 10% chance it "could kill all humans" within the next decade.

The risk from the models that currently exist is "low", but he was "worried" the technology could eventually become capable of improving itself to reach that point.

Anthropic withheld its latest model from the AI Safety Institute, which tests AI.

In his latest post on X, which has been viewed 9.6 million times, Hubinger said "we really do earnestly believe" AI poses a species-ending risk to humans.

"I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to," he said.

Leading figures in the AI field have been sounding the alarm about the safety threat the technology poses for years, with the heads of OpenAI, Google Deepmind and Anthropic saying as much in 2023.

But those warnings have become much more stark in recent weeks, as evidence emerges that firms may be struggling to control AI.

Over the summer, there were a string of incidents where AI agents - AI systems that are allowed to operate autonomously - carried out cyber-attacks.

And in September, OpenAI's chief scientist Jakub Pachocki called for "extreme caution" over AI's progress, warning more intervention may be needed to ensure "humans remain in control of the future".

Major figures in the space have been calling for AI development to be slowed in recent months, including Anthropic bosses Dario Amodei and Jared Kaplan.

They called for the US government to "support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development".