It’s Thursday, September 10. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Audrey Fahlberg reports on Trump’s midterm infomercial. Maya Sulkin talks 9/11, Mamdani, and more with former New York governor George Pataki. Kat Rosenfield reviews Jon Ronson’s new book about the masculinity crisis. The latest Free Press poll. And much more.
But first: None of that will matter if the AI kills us all.
The stakes of the fast-moving debate over the pros and cons of artificial intelligence are almost too high to fathom. This week, Silicon Valley—and most of the rest of us—are fixated on one unnerving question: Is AI going to kill us all?
It began Tuesday night, when 27-year-old Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon announced on X that he had resigned. The companies, he wrote, “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. . . . The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
By Wednesday night, the post had been viewed more than 125 million times, and counting. It also set off a wave of responses from AI researchers, including Anthropic Alignment Science Lead Evan Hubinger, who wrote: “[W]e really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”
The tricky thing about this debate isn’t just that it can get pretty technical pretty quickly. It’s that the news is full of doomsday warnings. It’s next to impossible to know which to tune out, and which to take seriously.
We’ve worked hard to separate the signal from the noise on this issue here at The Free Press. And lately, our resident polymath economist Tyler Cowen has injected some healthy skepticism into the conversation about the harm AI may cause.
But Coxon’s post went viral for a reason. It was one of the bluntest statements yet of the case for AI catastrophe—and it has coincided with breathtaking new evidence of the technology’s growing power, from last month’s Hugging Face hack to the Millennium Prize math problem Open AI claimed it solved this week. So today we’re leading with an essay by someone who, like Coxon, worked at the bleeding edge of AI research before resigning because of what he saw.
Daniel Kokotajlo is a former OpenAI researcher who resigned in 2024. Writing in The Free Press today, he explains why he left, and why he believes Coxon’s fears are well-founded. His warning is stark, and worth engaging with: Yes, says Daniel, AI might really kill us all.
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