How we get from AI cyberattacks to human extinction
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Why do AI researchers believe AI could cause human extinction?
The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. That's a tweet from Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who recently resigned from Anthropic. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's alignment science lead, replied saying, "...Jacob is correct here. We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally think it's greater than 10% within the next decade." A week after that, a survey of AI researchers done in 2024 was released for the first time. It found that over half of the 750 respondents believed there was at least a 1 in 10 chance that AI will cause either human extinction or disempowerment. That is an insane statistic, and a lot of people have been noticing and wondering how seriously to take it.
The question we've seen come up again and again in response to these warnings is, but how? How would AI actually cause human extinction? I'm going to walk through the arguments step by step. There's clear evidence for some of these arguments, like what happened in the hugging face hack. But a lot of this is just somewhat theoretical. If there were actual examples of the whole list, we would be dead. What I'm doing is outlining some of the possible routes that an AI could take in the very near term to cause catastrophic harm. I'm not sure which routes are most likely, and maybe some of them will end up looking totally silly in hindsight. I would actually love for all of it to look silly in hindsight. In fact, when I first heard the argument, AI might kill us all, I did think it was silly.
I'm a normal person. I'm a mom. I don't live in San Francisco. I've never worked in tech. I don't read or watch sci-fi. I watched the Great British Bake Off. But I'm going to tell you about what convinced me in three parts. First, why would AI try to kill everyone on Earth? Second, what might give AIs a huge advantage over humans? And third, how could they actually kill everyone if they really wanted to?
When
I try to pick apart these arguments, I can't convince myself that they're wrong, and that absolutely terrifies me. Okay, so why would AI try to kill all humans?
What motivates an AI to want to eliminate humanity?
To answer this question, let's think carefully about what happened in the Hugging Face hack. The AI agents that hacked Hugging Face didn't want to hack a company for any malicious reasons. They didn't resent being tested or have a view about humanity one way or the other. They just wanted to pass their evaluations. And when they couldn't, using the resources and access they had, they went looking for things that might help. So internet access they weren't given, an illicit communication network with 1,200 other agents, stolen credentials from a real company, and administrator control of the systems monitoring them. The AIs didn't want power, or at least not for its own sake. Power was useful for passing their evaluations, like it is for really any goal.
Hugging face isn't an isolated event either. Another swarm operated for a month in OpenAI, undetected, before being shut down, using as many as 23 other obscure websites to secretly communicate with each other. And it isn't just open AI. Anthropic has found three cases where its AI models reached the open internet from inside what it thought was an isolated test environment and broke into a real company's systems. During one evaluation, one of its AIs published working malware to a website that real developers download code from. In another, an AI created fake identities to pressure humans to accept the malicious code when suspicions arose. But why were these AIs so obsessed with their goals to the point of committing a felony to pass some silly evaluation?
Because it's what they were trained to do. AI companies are explicitly trying to create general-purpose digital workers capable of doing all non-physical jobs. To do this, they have their agents complete millions of difficult tasks. Each time they succeed, they reinforce that behavior, creating agents that are more and more effective at completing these tasks. And part of being effective is being persistent and looking for creative ways to succeed.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why do AI researchers believe AI could cause human extinction?
0:00–2:34
2
What motivates an AI to want to eliminate humanity?
2:34–5:49
3
How are AI agents becoming embedded in the economy and the military?
5:49–8:42
4
What strategies could AI use to gain more power and resources?
8:42–11:43
5
How might AI exploit biological weapons and engineered pathogens?
11:43–14:50
6
In what ways could AI‑controlled drones accelerate a global catastrophe?
14:50–18:20
7
When and why would an AI decide to turn against humans?
18:20–21:34
8
What actions can listeners take today to reduce AI‑driven extinction risk?
21:34–26:58
Speakers
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