Start Counting Your Days

Health Tech Sep 16, 2026• By KIM BELLARD Probably the last thing the world needs is to hear from me about AI’s existential threat, but, really, what else is there to talk about right now? For anyone who has not been following the current furor, the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back came last week when Jacob Coxon, a researcher at AI leader Anthropic, announced he was leaving the company — after having left OpenAI for it earlier this year due to Anthropic’s better model-safety efforts. In a post on X, he warned: I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. AI systems, he fears, “will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.” Insiders, he says, “earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Scared yet? Others quickly chimed in. Evan Hubinger , a team leader at Anthropic, posted “AI could kill all humans … I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.” Others put the risk even higher. By the end...