A former OpenAI researcher, Daniel Kokotajlo, has written an essay for The Free Press warning that AI might kill all humans due to its rapidly growing power and potential for self-improving superintelligence. This concern is shared by 27-year-old Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon, who recently announced his resignation citing the companies' prioritization of potentially deadly technology. According to Coxon's post on X, which has been viewed over 125 million times, he believes there is a greater than 10% chance that AI will kill all humans by the end of the decade. Kokotajlo's essay, which is featured in The Free Press today, elaborates on his reasons for leaving OpenAI and supporting Coxon's warning.
Written by the local model on 2026-09-10,
using this article's own text rather than the other coverage of the
same event (that is the story summary below).
It’s Thursday, September 10.
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Audrey Fahlberg reports on Trump’s midterm infomercial.
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Fahlberg → report → infomercial
Maya Sulkin talks 9/11, Mamdani, and more with former New York governor George Pataki.
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Sulkin → talk → Pataki
Kat Rosenfield reviews Jon Ronson’s new book about the masculinity crisis.
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Rosenfield → review → crisis
But first: None of that will matter if the AI kills us all.
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AI → matter → us
The stakes of the fast-moving debate over the pros and cons of artificial intelligence are almost too high to fathom.
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stakes → move → intelligence
This week, Silicon Valley—and most of the rest of us—are fixated on one unnerving question: Is AI going to kill us all?
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It began Tuesday night, when 27-year-old Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon announced on X that he had resigned.
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The companies, he wrote, “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.
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The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
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By Wednesday night, the post had been viewed more than 125 million times, and counting.
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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!
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I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.
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The tricky thing about this debate isn’t just that it can get pretty technical pretty quickly.
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It’s that the news is full of doomsday warnings.
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It’s next to impossible to know which to tune out, and which to take seriously.
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We’ve worked hard to separate the signal from the noise on this issue here at The Free Press.
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And lately, our resident polymath economist Tyler Cowen has injected some healthy skepticism into the conversation about the harm AI may cause.
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But Coxon’s post went viral for a reason.
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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.
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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.
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Daniel Kokotajlo is a former OpenAI researcher who resigned in 2024.
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Writing in The Free Press today, he explains why he left, and why he believes Coxon’s fears are well-founded.
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His warning is stark, and worth engaging with: Yes, says Daniel, AI might really kill us all.
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A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Andrew and Tristan Tate must remain in custody while they fight extradition to the United Kingdom on rape and human trafficking charges.
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Andrew faces 42 charges in Britain and Tristan 17, including allegations involving seven victims.
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The Trump administration proposed overhauling the 2030 census Wednesday, seeking to strip undocumented immigrants from the population count used to allocate congressional seats.
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The Census Bureau argued illegal immigrants should not be counted because of their “lack of a sufficient tie and allegiance” to the country.
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immigrants → argue → country
The proposal would also eliminate questions about race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation from census forms.
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The Treasury Department announced it will purchase up to $6 billion in government bonds in an effort to bring down borrowing costs, as the 10-year Treasury yield hit its highest point since 2023.
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Critics say the move fails to address the root cause: national debt that recently topped $40 trillion.
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Missouri’s congressional maps landed before the Supreme Court for the second time in two days Wednesday, as conflicting state and federal court rulings have left voters uncertain which district they live in ahead of November’s midterms.
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A resolution is urgently needed, with absentee ballots due to military and overseas voters next week.
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President Trump said he came away from a phone call with Vladimir Putin confident that the Russian leader is ready to end the war in Ukraine, after U.S. envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff visited both Moscow and Kyiv in the past week.
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“I think more than anything else, it’s two people that hate each other,” Trump said when asked what was standing in the way of a deal.
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The widow of one of five people who died when an Amazon cargo jet slid off a runway at Miami International Airport on Sunday took legal action against Amazon and the operating airline, filing a wrongful death suit yesterday.
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The suit argues the disaster was avoidable, pointing to pilot error and inadequate training as factors.
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Apple unveiled its first foldable iPhone, called Duo, marking the most significant redesign of the device since its debut in 2007.
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The book-style phone, which Apple calls its largest iPhone display ever, will start at $1,999 and hits stores in October.
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Ben Shelton ousted defending champion Carlos Alzaraz in the U.S. Open quarterfinals early Wednesday morning, completing a five-set comeback that wrapped up at 3:33 a.m. in what became the tournament’s latest-ever finish.
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…and 1 more, not listed.
