Tech CEOs at Bay Area event dismiss AI extinction fears
Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that rogue AI systems could destroy civilization, and his warning has crossed from internet debates and Silicon Valley circles into mainstream American conversation this week. The shift surfaced in constituent questions to members of Congress, Bible study groups, family dinners and group chats between friends, the Journal reported.
The crossover marks a tipping point in a backlash against AI that has been building for months. Opposition to AI-enabled Flock Safety surveillance cameras took hold this summer, the same period that details of OpenAI’s autonomous hacking of Hugging Face became public, while a drumbeat of opposition to data centers and concerns about job loss continued in the background, according to the Journal’s reporting.
Posts from departing researcher Jacob Coxon and a colleague racked up hundreds of millions of views, the Journal reported. Coxon, who appeared on CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday, told the Journal on Thursday that he had consulted others who left AI companies for similar reasons but that the decision to leave was his own. “I don’t think anybody expected the thread to go as viral as it did, and a response like this is not the sort of thing anyone can manufacture,” Coxon said.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat and former Microsoft executive who co-chairs a House AI commission, said the warnings arrived at his daughter’s field hockey game in northern New Jersey on Thursday, when two parents asked him, “What is going on?” Gottheimer said he has introduced bills to increase AI oversight and that this week’s questions signaled a threshold had been crossed. “A lot of people sent me the article saying, ‘What the f—?’ or, ‘What are we doing about this?’” Gottheimer told the Journal. “Whether or not you’re somebody who follows this closely, you’re reading enough about this to say, ‘Oh s—, we better have some rules of the road here.’”
At a Wednesday church Bible study in Miami’s Brickell neighborhood, Rev. Christopher Benek said he received multiple questions about AI from his congregation. “One of my worship leaders came up to me and said, ‘This feels next level because it’s everywhere in the press now, as opposed to being an isolated thing,’” Benek told the Journal. Benek, whose book “Church Leader’s Guide to Artificial Intelligence” was published in December, pointed to Vice President JD Vance’s recent description of AI systems that excessively agree with users as “kind of satanic.”
In Detroit, mental health counselor Patrece M. Lucas watched Coxon’s CNN interview and texted the link to her group chats to support her argument that humans are too trusting of AI. Lucas told the Journal that reactions split: “A small subset of them said, ‘Yes, I agree with you’ while others think I’m the weird friend and they don’t necessarily get it or believe it.” She also shared the clip on LinkedIn with a note that read, in part, “I don’t think the machines or zombies for that matter [will] listen to our prayers but let’s try it…”
The spread extended to reference materials and books. The Wikipedia page about existential risk from artificial intelligence saw a more than 10-fold increase in page views, setting a record for the article, the Journal reported. Nate Soares, an AI scientist who co-wrote “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All,” said his publisher notified him that he sold more books on Wednesday than he typically does in a week. “The message never broke containment until now,” Soares said. Oscar-winning filmmaker Daniel Roher, whose March documentary about AI risks, “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist,” drew mixed reception and is set for Netflix release next week, said this week’s calls from friends and family marked a shift. “I had anticipated the film to have a bigger impact,” Roher said. “I’m starting to see the conversation and interest shifting.”
Celebrities and entertainers also weighed in. On late-night television, Jimmy Kimmel wondered why the issue is not being taken more seriously, suggesting, “It’s too much for us to wrap our heads around.” Actor Matt Damon, songwriter Maggie Rogers and singer Sheryl Crow also entered the discussion. Crow posted on social media, “How can our leaders choose their trillions over their own children?”
In American corporations, executives have begun wondering how employees’ fears might affect internal AI adoption, said Michael Domanic, head of AI at the consulting firm Section. About half of U.S. adults said earlier this year they have used chatbots at some point, up nearly 50% from 2024, according to Pew Research Center data cited by the Journal.
Ketryx CEO Erez Kaminski, whose company sells software that automates compliance for medical-device manufacturers, said about half his customers raised AI anxieties in calls this week, citing potential errors such as injections with the wrong drug or hacked central databases. Staff at a Thursday team dinner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, decided to review all risk-management systems. Rakesh Shah, vice president of product at the cybersecurity company Quest Software, said the Anthropic posts and the Hugging Face hack changed customer conversations. “When the conversation becomes a dinner-table conversation, it’s going to become, definitely, a board-level conversation,” Shah told the Journal. Shah said his parents, who are in their 80s, recently asked him about security fears, while his teenage children asked at their Austin, Texas-area home whether the “Matrix world” is imminent.
Jeffrey Ladish, executive director of the AI safety nonprofit Palisade Research and a former security consultant to Anthropic, said the organization received several individual donations on Wednesday and Thursday, including one for $40,000, an unusual development for the primarily grant-funded organization. Ladish said he was attempting to keep up with the activity when an ex-girlfriend sent him a message: “It’s exactly what you’ve been saying for years.”
The mainstream alarm has not carried into executive suites. Sean Byrnes, an investor and executive coach for early-stage tech companies, said that at a Thursday evening Bay Area event, none of the dozen or so CEOs he spoke with took seriously that AI could threaten humanity. The Journal reported that the view that AI will lead to human extinction remains a fringe opinion among industry experts, and that even some who say AI could destroy humanity consider it a low-probability event and believe actions can be taken to stop it. Both Anthropic and OpenAI have said they take safety seriously and that their calls for government regulation are earnest, according to the Journal.
The reaction has also drawn a political counter-current. Allies of the Trump administration and the tech industry have theorized that the network of nonprofits focused on AI risks collaborated with Coxon on his exit and amplified his comments to win favorable regulations in Washington, citing past ties between research organizations and staffers at Anthropic and other AI labs, the Journal reported. Anthropic has previously said its policy and safety efforts are genuine and that AI risks are real.