Anthropic · OpenAI · Google · Sam Altman · Dario Amodei · Elon Musk · The Guardian Technology
Why a decade of doomsday warnings faltered to slow the AI race
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Before an Anthropic researcher resigned and declared human extinction imminent last week, tech leaders and scientists had sounded the alarm about a superintelligent AI ending humanity for over a decade.
Key facts
- The former has raised over $130bn, while the latter’s funding has reached over $190bn, and both companies have filed for an initial public offering on the US stock market
- Google was the biggest household name in the field at the time, particularly after acquiring a two-year-old AI startup, DeepMind, for $650m in January 2014
- But Google and other firms like it weren’t building AI responsibly enough, according to Elon Musk and Sam Altman
- Two weeks after the 2026 Hugging Face breach, OpenAI announced it was pausing development of some aspects of AI training
Summary
The development of artificial intelligence “could spell the end of the human race”, warned professor and astrophysicist Stephen Hawking in 2014, a little less than a decade before the public got its hands on the generative AI features of the original version of ChatGPT. It’s a now-familiar warning, echoed across the AI and tech industry by countless employees and CEOs of the leading frontier labs across the US. Every few years, a schism occurs within AI. However, no moment has created as many reverberations across the industry as the now-viral resignation of Anthropic safety researcher, Jacob Coxon, who tweeted on 9 September that Anthropic and OpenAI were “racing straight to self-improving super intelligence and gambling with our lives”.