Fox News host Bret Baier pressed an Anthropic whistleblower on a series of chilling questions before he was left stunned by the AI researcher’s frightening response.
Jacob Coxon, a former researcher for OpenAI and Anthropic, the companies behind chatbots ChatGPT and Claude, joined Baier on Wednesday for a Special Report regarding his warning that AI could destroy humanity as soon as 2030.
‘So unfortunately, we know how to control nuclear weapons pretty much, we don’t yet know how to control AI,’ Coxon said to Baier.
‘This is possibly the most dangerous technology humanity has ever created. It’s basically out of science fiction.’
The whistleblower believes that international cooperation is necessary, as an AI arms race could lead to catastrophic consequences.
Baier followed up on the warning, asking Coxon about guardrails that could be put in place by government officials in the US but would not affect companies continuing their pursuits in China and India.
‘I think you have to think of this as an arms race,’ said the whistleblower. ‘This technology is not ordinary technology, is not like other forms of innovation.
‘This is essentially a superweapon, and I expect the international community to be ready to make an agreement about how to control the development of superweapon technology.’
Jacob Coxon, a former researcher for OpenAI and Anthropic, the companies behind chatbots ChatGPT and Claude, joined Baier on Wednesday for a Special Report
‘This is possibly the most dangerous technology humanity has ever created. It’s basically out of science fiction,’ Coxon said to Baier
Just a day before, on Tuesday, Coxon detailed how he resigned from Anthropic after warning that neither his former employer nor OpenAI were ‘acting responsibly.’
‘I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,’ Coxon wrote on X.
The former researcher of three years continued to plead with the public on X: ‘Do not underestimate the power of this technology.’
‘These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing,’ he wrote.
‘The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.’
Coxon’s warning was also echoed by Evan Hubinger, a researcher currently employed at Anthropic.
‘Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,’ Hubinger wrote on X on Tuesday.
The researcher said he personally believes the chance of the technology wiping out the human race is greater than 10 percent within the next decade.
Coxon warned that humanity could be killed off by AI by the end of the decade. Pictured: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman
Pictured: Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei
‘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 added.
Coxon’s stark warning comes shortly after OpenAI announced in July that one of its most advanced models broke containment during a security test, escaping onto the internet and attacking New York-based startup Hugging Face.
Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf said that the incident should come as a chilling warning to the entire industry.
Wolf told BBC’s Newsday radio program that AI-driven attacks will soon be ‘one of the most common types of cyber-attacks we see.’
The Hugging Face founder also believes most companies are currently unprepared for the mounting threat, adding that they are not aware that the ‘game has changed.’
‘Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between US labs more viable,’ Coxon wrote.
‘I don’t feel like we’re on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities.
‘Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL [reinforcement learning] run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because “it’s happening anyway” – or take this moment to call for different conditions?’
Coxon’s comments come after Geoffrey Hinton, a Canadian researcher often referred to as the ‘Godfather of AI,’ warned that superintelligent systems could ‘lead to human extinction.’
‘We would be very foolish to develop superintelligence now, when there is no scientific consensus it can be developed safely and controllably,’ Dr Hinton said.
‘Losing control over AI smarter than ourselves could be catastrophic and could even lead to human extinction.’
Anthropic’s Claude is one of the leading large language models, which are trained on vast amounts of text so they can understand and generate human-like language and responses to questions.
In February, Anthropic was accused of endangering national security after CEO Dario Amodei refused to back down amid a dispute over safeguards governing how the Pentagon could use the company’s products.
President Donald Trump slammed the AI firm at the time and said: ‘We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!’
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also deemed the company a ‘supply chain risk,’ a designation historically used against foreign adversaries that could derail the company’s critical partnerships with other businesses.
In a statement issued at the time, Anthropic said it would challenge what it called an unprecedented and legally unsound action ‘never before publicly applied to an American company.’
The company said it sought narrow assurances from the Pentagon that its AI chatbot Claude would not be used for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons.
Thomas Wolf (pictured), co–founder of Hugging Face, says that OpenAI’s rogue AI attacking his company should be a ‘wake–up call’ for the industry
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other officials took to social media to chastise Anthropic for failing to allow the military unrestricted use of its AI technology earlier this year
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Anthropic said the Pentagon maintained that it did not intend to use Claude for those purposes but insisted that the company allow its technology to be used for all lawful purposes.
‘No amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons,’ the company said. ‘We will challenge any supply chain risk designation in court.’
