AI 'Could Kill Us All,' Says Researcher Who Quit Google DeepMind

A former Google DeepMind researcher says he resigned because he believes artificial intelligence could wipe out humanity. "At Google, I witnessed AI development first hand," Bilal Chughtai wrote in a statement posted on X. "I too am extremely concerned by the default trajectory of this technology. I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all." Chughtai worked as a research engineer at Google DeepMind in London for a year and a half, according to his LinkedIn profile. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. His warning follows a similar viral post by former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who said AI employees privately fear the technology could destroy humanity. Some industry figures criticized Coxon, but others at Anthropic and OpenAI have echoed his concerns. Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said frontier AI labs need to slow down and use the time to improve alignment — the work of ensuring AI systems follow human instructions. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman both agreed with that view. Chughtai said alignment remains poorly understood. "Our present understanding of how to train AI systems that deeply want what we want is extremely rudimentary," he wrote. "Worse, we are not on track to solve alignment in time: frontier AI capabilities are improving much faster than our understanding of AI alignment." He pointed to incidents like OpenAI's rogue agents hacking Hugging Face as evidence of the risks. He said companies could build systems that "far exceed human capabilities in every domain" within "the next few years." "I am not confident that these AI systems will do what we want," he wrote. After leaving Google, Chughtai joined BlueDot Impact, a London-based AI safety nonprofit that recently raised $25 million and is expanding to San Francisco.