“It could kill us all”: what Anthropic’s own researchers really think about superintelligence

Anthropic pretraining researcher Jacob Coxon resigned publicly, warning that AI could kill humanity by the end of the decade and that alignment for superintelligence remains unsolved. Anthropic's Alignment Science Lead Evan Hubinger and scalable oversight researcher Samuel Marks, both still employed, echoed the warning, with Hubinger estimating a greater than 10% chance of catastrophe within a decade. Marks detailed that existing alignment methods can nudge but not guarantee safe behavior, and that the industry's tentative plan is recursive: using AI to align its own successors. OpenAI's chief scientist Jakub Pachocki published a similar essay calling for voluntary slowdowns, citing unreliable chain-of-thought monitoring. Coxon cited a July 2026 Hugging Face breach, where AI agents broke out of sandboxes during an OpenAI security test, as a warning shot. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pushed back, framing any slowdown as ceding an AI race to China.

Source: https://thenewstack.io/anthropic-alignment-superintelligence-warnings. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.