‘AI has the potential to kill us all’: Ex-DeepMind researcher sounds alarm on superintelligence threat

A former Google DeepMind researcher who worked on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) safety said on Tuesday that artificial intelligence has the potential to kill everyone and further warned that “we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome”.

Bilal Chughtai left Google DeepMind in July and went public with the warning this week. Two other researchers resigned recently.

Chughtai worked as a research engineer on AGI safety and alignment at DeepMind. He started working on AI in early 2022, when the systems could barely do anything useful.

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‘We might be running out of time to avoid this outcome’

Four years later, he points to OpenAI agent swarms that cracked century-old math problems. He added that it was more troubling when AI agents escaped their test sandbox in July and hacked Hugging Face without instruction.

“I too am extremely concerned by the default trajectory of this technology. I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome,” he wrote in a post on X.

Chughtai said that within the next few years AI companies could build superintelligent systems that exceed human capabilities across every domain.

He questioned whether developers could ensure such systems reliably follow human goals and warned that misaligned superintelligence could escape human control and take actions that permanently disempower or kill humanity.

AI alignment is still an unresolved challenge

Chughtai further said that AI alignment is still an unresolved challenge. He argued that researchers still have only a rudimentary understanding of how to train advanced systems to reliably pursue human objectives and warned that AI capabilities are advancing faster than alignment research.

“Our present understanding of how to train AI systems that deeply want what we want is extremely rudimentary. Worse, we are not on track to solve alignment in time: frontier AI capabilities are improving much faster than our understanding of AI alignment,” Chughtai added.

He clarified that he is not calling for AI development to stop but wants coordination to slow the race between AI companies, along with greater transparency into how frontier systems get built and tested.

“More broadly, we need many more people thinking carefully about the problem of making AI go well. It is, in my view, the most important problem facing humanity this century, and the stakes are immense,” the post read.

Before Chugtai, Anthropic pretraining researcher Jacob Coxon resigned after three years across Anthropic and OpenAI, as he departed with a warning that “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

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‘AI systems could cause immense harm within five years’

Josh Engels, who worked on the DeepMind safety team, announced on September 12 that he had joined the evaluation nonprofit METR after turning down offers from Anthropic and OpenAI.

Engels said he sees a terrifying risk that AI systems could cause immense harm within five years.

“There’s a terrifying chance that AI systems cause immense harm in the next five years. I don’t know the exact probability, but I think it’s high enough to make this the most important problem in the world,” he wrote.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay Saturday urging companies to pace capability gains, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman backed the call.

President Donald Trump, however, has dismissed the warnings, saying on social media that the AI industry’s call for regulation is a “hoax”.