Senior staff at OpenAI and Anthropic absolutely think that AI could kill us all. They’ve said so publicly, for years! Sam Altman: “Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.” (2015) “The bad case — and I think this is important to say — is, like, lights out for all of us.” (2023) Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike (OAI at the time): “the vast power of superintelligence could also be very dangerous, and could lead to the disempowerment of humanity or even human extinction.” (2023) Jack Clark (Anthropic): AI has “a non-zero chance of killing everyone on the planet”. (2026) Dario Amodei’s comments are broader than literal extinction but hardly reassuring: "my chance that something goes, you know, really quite catastrophically wrong on the scale of human civilization might be somewhere between 10 and 25 per cent." (2023) And now Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s Alignment Science Lead, is making it very clear: “Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.” If you talk to people at the AI companies, the mainstream view is that superintelligence by end of the decade is pretty likely, and that superintelligence poses a meaningful risk of civilisation-scale catastrophe - including AI-empowered dictatorships, worse-than-COVID pandemics, AI takeover, and, yes, human extinction. OAI and Anthropic keep going so fast because they each think they can build AI more safely than the other party and antitrust limits how much they can coordinate. This is a f-ed up situation! Thankfully, they’re both now publicly asking for regulation and the pacing of frontier progress. If this worries you, you can speak up publicly, contact your political representatives, and demand action. Now’s the time.