The past week has been shameful and irresponsible for everyone involved. Read this: "this week, ex-Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon claimed — and then Anthropic Alignment Science lead Evan Hubinger agreed — that the probability that AI will "kill all humans" is ">10% in the next decade" (!!). That is, the claim is not merely that AI could kill thousands, millions, or even billions of humans (claims that themselves would be extraordinary!), but that there is a greater than ten percent chance that AI will kill all humans. That is, if you have a newborn, their claim is that there is a greater than ten percent chance that your child will somehow perish at the hands of AI before they enter middle school. These ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth, and given the obvious importance of AI, it is unsurprising that they have leapt into the mainstream, with people asking the natural question: how would that happen? The answers always rely on hand-wavy extrapolation into the future; for example, Jacob Coxon cites "hacking critical infrastructure" and "extinction-level bioweapons" without further elaboration. But Coxon is not an expert on critical infrastructure, nor on bioweapons — nor, for that matter, on extinction. What 27-year-old Coxon is an expert on — if accidentally — is the contagion of fear." "We should heed the wisdom of the late Carl Sagan that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence: the claims from Coxon and his ilk are the most extraordinary a technologist can make, and we must demand evidence commensurate with the claims."