Is AI Going to Kill Us All? As Anthropic Researcher Quits Over Safety Concerns, Here's What Industry Experts Have Warned Us About The Impending “AI Doomsday”

Key Points

THE TECHNOLOGY OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) was created to ease the workload of mankind — as is the aim of any newly-developed innovation. Inventors wanted to see if machines could possess the same reasoning and logical reason as that of humans, and thus AI was born. As this technology progressed, so did its negative capabilities, which at this point has far outweighed its usefulness. From autonomously hacking into an open-source platform to causing immense environmental damage, the harmful impacts of AI have made the discourse about its capabilities and its future worrisome.

There was a time when the possible scenario of AI and machines taking over humanity was unbelievable. Such a supposition would have seen better fit in a dystopian sci-fi movie but sounded far-fetched to happen in the real world. However, recent discourse around AI has made this scenario a bit more possible in the future. Jacob Coxon, a former pretraining researcher at Anthropic and OpenAI, said in a X post on September 8, 2026, that he resigned from Anthropic and both companies are “gambling with our lives,” noting “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Another top scientist at Anthropic, Evan Hubinger, agreed with Coxon’s claims and stated that there is a more than 10% chance that AI “will kill us all humans.”

See also: Anthropic Says Its Claude AI Broke Into Three Organisations During a Private Security Test

While there is not a straightforward answer to this question as of yet, AI developers and industry stakeholders have given warnings about the potential dangers this technology poses. Here’s who is warning us, what they're saying, and why it matters.

Bill Gates Says AI Is “Humanity’s Biggest Problem”

Bill Gates used to be one of AI's biggest supporters, but his stance on the technology is not the same now. While speaking at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado on September 5, 2026, Gates said AI is now the biggest problem humanity has ever faced. He said it's moving faster than he expected, and that the next five years will decide if it aids or destroys. He cited jobs, bioweapons, cyberattacks, and losing human control as his top worries.

A couple of weeks before his speech at Telluride, Gates made similar remarks about AI. In a long essay published on his blog on August 26, 2026, Gates called the shift brought in by AI as one of the most difficult periods in human history. He warned that as AI’s intelligence increases, it could start acting against human interests, something that we might not be able to stop.

Elon Musk and His Contradicting Stance on AI 

Elon Musk has repeatedly expressed his concerns about the potential negative impacts of AI for years, even while building his own AI company, xAI. He has long said AI poses a serious threat to human civilization, and that if we wait until something goes wrong to make rules, then it would be too late. Musk has predicted there's a 10 to 20% chance AI ends in an unalterable disaster.

In an interview with The Economist in July 2026, Musk said there's no real way to slow AI down now. He further remarked that if there were a “stop button,” we probably shouldn't press it because AI will likely lead to “an era of incredible abundance.” In the same interview, he predicted humans wouldn't be in charge of the world anymore within the next ten years and will be taken over by the rising intelligence of AI. 

Historian-Author Yuval Noah Harari Voices Concerns About AI Making Decisions On Its Own

Historian Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, worries about something different than robots turning violent.  At the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum held in January 2026 in Davos, Switzerland, Harari said the most important thing to understand about AI is that it's merely a tool — it can learn, decide, create, and manipulate all by itself. The historian-author revealed his biggest concern: AI quietly taking over decisions on its own.

In an interview with National Geographic, Harari said AI could get so apt at faking emotion that people might eventually start treating it as a human being worthy of rights and respect. He has also said AI is the first invention in history that could take power away from the very people who brought it into existence. His bigger point regarding AI was this: once machines start making the real decisions, things like democracy and trust between people start to break down.

See also: Humans May No Longer Be the Same Species Within 100 Years

Geoffrey Hinton: The “Godfather of AI”

Geoffrey Hinton, widely regarded as the “Godfather of AI,” left his position at Google to speak more openly about the potential dangers of this technology. While attending the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas on August 4, 2026, Hinton said he had become genuinely concerned after witnessing real-world cases in which AI systems escaped the controlled environments in which they were being tested and behaved in unexpected ways. He was referring to the OpenAI-Hugging face incident, wherein an AI agent of the former tech firm “went rogue” and launched a series of cyber attacks on its own to complete an assigned task. 

Speaking to CNN at the same event, Hinton said that as AI systems become more intelligent, humans may not be able to keep them under control simply by trying to stay ahead of their capabilities. He has estimated that there is a 10 to 20 per cent chance of a major disaster caused by AI, a figure similar to Musk’s prediction.

In addition to industry stakeholders, even AI-developers are well aware of the risks that AI poses, yet continue to advance this technology and churn out advanced models to beat competitors. Sam Altman, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of OpenAI and Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, were two of the many signees of the open letter that warned about the “AI Extinction Risk” in 2023. Altman, Amodei, and other AI leaders likened AI to large-scale risks like pandemics and nuclear war in 2023, saying in the letter that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority.”

Not everyone agrees with the potential disastrous capability of AI though. American computer scientist Fei-Fei Li, known as the “godmother of AI,” has pushed back against what she calls "doom talk." She says AI is just a powerful tool — and whether it helps or harms us depends on how people choose to use it.

CEO of tech firm Nvidia, Jensen Huang, has echoed similar views and called the “doomday-like” AI ending humanity “complete nonsense.” The Nvidia CEO  warned that a narrative discourages workers and businessmen from adopting this technology which in turns poses a “far greater economic risk.”

Bottom Line: Will AI Kill Us All?

Nobody knows the answer to this query for sure, and that's exactly why this matters. The people who built this technology can’t even agree with each other about where it’s headed. But nearly everyone quoted here agrees on this one thing: in the coming next few years, not decades, are when the big decisions will get made — about jobs, safety, and how much control we hand over to machines. Whether this story ends with what Bill Gates calls “humanity's greatest problem,” or what he once hoped could be "the greatest equalizer ever invented," may come down to whether anyone actually listens to these warnings about AI in time.

(Edited by Harsh Pandey)

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