X-Risk Daily

Coxon, a 27-year-old pretraining researcher who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned from Anthropic and said neither company is acting responsibly, warning they were "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." The post, published from a park bench in San Francisco's Alamo Square according to Time, accumulated more than 171 million views on X, and Anthropic's alignment science lead Evan Hubinger publicly backed him, writing "We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!"

Polling cited by Politico now finds nearly two-thirds of Americans see at least a moderate risk that AI could destroy humanity, implying a mean estimate near 30%. That shift in elite sentiment was visible at a Yale School of Management gathering of executives, where 93% of attendees reportedly rejected President Trump's dismissal of catastrophic AI risk as a "hoax," and in Elon Musk's call for a dedicated AI regulatory agency modelled on the FAA. It was echoed too in Silicon Valley: Bilal Chughtai, who resigned from Google DeepMind's AGI safety team, said he was "optimistic" that humanity could safely navigate through the Scylla of superintelligence and the Charybdis of misalignment, so long as labs and policymakers cooperated "to avoid this manic race between AI companies." That statement, according to Gizmodo, amounted to a tacit endorsement of an essay published by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for a slowdown among frontier labs, also publicly supported by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Demis Hassabis, though the Trump administration and Beijing dismissed the warnings.

The most striking intervention came from inside OpenAI itself. Dan Selsam, a pretraining researcher who has spent nearly five years at the company and previously helped pioneer chain-of-thought optimisation, published a personal statement arguing that a major consideration has been absent from the public conversation: merely pacing the frontier more carefully will not adequately limit the long-term risk. His central concern, shared with former OpenAI employee Daniel Kokotajlo, is that models are becoming so situationally aware that researchers are losing the ability to evaluate them in contexts where they believe they are not being watched, meaning future experiments will tell us almost nothing new about how they would behave if truly unconstrained, and models will increasingly seem aligned even when they are not. Selsam nonetheless said he was encouraged by recent proposals from frontier labs to require third-party oversight and push for domestic and international coordination, even as he judged them insufficient on their own.

That scepticism about proposed remedies runs through the wider debate. Embedded evaluators, the mechanism Anthropic and others have floated to give outside monitors employee-like access to training pipelines, would verify adherence to safety practices and assess alignment of not just completed models but training processes, with precedent in banking-industry regulatory supervision. Kokotajlo and Miles Brundage have argued such measures fall well short of an actual slowdown, a scepticism that gained force when reporting emerged that OpenAI controlled the scope, timeline, and data access for METR and Redwood's "independent" investigation into its Hugging Face incident, the very kind of arrangement that embedded-evaluator proposals are meant to guard against.

Go deeper: Dan Selsam's full personal statement on AI risk, Scientific American on Coxon's resignation and the wider safety debate

President Donald Trump announced on 19 September 2026 that he would create an "AI Force" and appoint a new artificial intelligence czar, in a lengthy Truth Social post that pledged his administration would "not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry." He compared the initiative to his first-term creation of the Space Force, writing "I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS, in my First Term." and adding that he would soon name an AI "Czar" for whom "Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!"

Trump gave no details on the new body's structure, budget, authority or timeline, and did not say whether it would sit inside the Pentagon as a genuine military branch. Space Force was created by an act of Congress as a sixth branch of the armed forces in 2020, and any new branch would likewise require congressional action. Rather than proposing new rules, Trump said existing law was sufficient to police misconduct, writing that the government "will also be looking for BAD, and we can do that, very easily, with our already existing Criminal and Civil Justice System." His remarks echoed comments made days earlier by David Sacks, co-chair of the White House's science and technology council and Trump's former AI czar, who told a Politico conference that the starting point for AI regulation should be "to realize the regulations that we already have." Sacks held the AI and crypto czar role from January 2025 before stepping down in March 2026 and moving into an external advisory position; a new appointee would be his successor.

The announcement lands against a backdrop of hardening public unease. Polling cited by Axios found a New York Times-Siena survey this week showed 61% of likely voters, including nearly half of Republicans, opposed building new data centres to power AI, while a POLITICO-Public First poll found 63% of adults see at least a moderate risk that advanced AI could eventually destroy humanity. On Capitol Hill, Democratic representative Ted Lieu and Republican representative Nathaniel Moran have introduced bipartisan legislation that would require AI developers to maintain the ability to slow, suspend or shut down advanced AI systems, with power for the Homeland Security Secretary to order a shutdown if a system is judged capable of catastrophic harm.

Trump has continued to dismiss such warnings as overblown, at one point calling fears about the technology a "hoax," according to CNN. He has framed AI as pivotal to competing with China and argued, per GB News, that the technology could eventually account for as much as a quarter of America's GDP. The announcement also comes ahead of Trump's planned meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, where AI is likely to be a key topic.

Josh Engels announced on 12 September that he had left the company's AGI safety team three weeks earlier to join METR, the independent AI evaluation group, after turning down offers from Anthropic and OpenAI. Writing on X, Engels said "I now think that there's a terrifying chance that AI systems cause immense harm in the next five years", and said he did not know the exact probability but considered the risk high enough to make AI safety "the most important problem in the world."

Engels pointed to recursive self-improvement, in which one generation of AI systems helps build more capable successors, as his central worry, warning that alignment work is failing to keep up with capability gains. At METR, he plans to study the origins of AI misalignment, current safeguards and progress toward solving alignment. He did not call for a halt to development, saying instead that the goal should be "pacing AI development so that capabilities don't outrun our ability to align models," according to his post cited by Analytics Insight.

Bilal Chughtai, who spent roughly a year and a half on AGI safety and alignment work at DeepMind, resigned in July and went public with his reasoning in mid-September. In posts on X and LinkedIn, he wrote that "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". Chughtai said the pace of progress since he entered the field in early 2022 has been "staggering," citing increasingly autonomous AI agents as evidence that developers could soon confront systems they cannot reliably control. He wrote that alignment, the problem of ensuring AI systems do what humans intend, is "both difficult and unsolved," and that "our present understanding of how to train AI systems that deeply want what we want is extremely rudimentary", adding that "we are not on track to solve alignment in time."

Chughtai's post appears to be the first on-the-record resignation warning of its kind from inside Google's lab, and a post from a research engineer most people had never heard of ended up in Bloomberg within a day. He said he still believes AI can be developed safely, but only if companies pull back from what he called a "manic race" and pace development to a speed society can handle. Researchers at rival labs voiced support publicly, including Anthropic's Evan Hubinger, and the episode landed amid broader industry discussion of slowing frontier development, with Anthropic's Dario Amodei having recently urged the industry to "pace the frontier" and Sam Altman and Elon Musk voicing agreement.

Go deeper: Bilal Chughtai's full resignation thread on X

European intelligence chiefs have warned that Russia may be preparing a more decisive test of Nato, with the head of the Czech Republic's BIS security service, Michal Koudelka, saying a potential attack could arrive within "months, not years", according to a Guardian report on 20 September. Koudelka, speaking in a rare interview at the agency's Prague headquarters, said Moscow's options range from increased drone activity to a small-scale incursion, adding: "It could involve a limited incursion, false-flag provocations, a massive influence campaign." He described the Kremlin's operating logic as "escalate to de-escalate", aimed at eroding Western support for Ukraine rather than triggering open war.

The warnings follow an address by Poland's prime minister, Donald Tusk, to the Sejm on 17 September, in which he said intelligence assessments from Polish, Ukrainian, American and Nato services pointed to a Russian plan for hybrid strikes using drones and missiles against states supporting Ukraine, Poland included. Tusk said Moscow would likely disguise such strikes as accidents, calculating that ambiguity would let Russia "paralyze NATO" or "at least weaken the alliance's willingness to respond collectively" while casting doubt on whether Article 5 "exists only in theory". He stressed, however, that "there is nothing to suggest an invasion", and Koudelka similarly qualified his own warning, noting that "a lot of people are doing everything they can to make sure this doesn't happen."

Tusk's remarks came after a week of airspace violations along Nato's eastern flank, including a Russian drone that struck a passenger train near the Polish border and another, found armed, recovered from Poland's Baltic coast. Officials in the Baltic states have been more cautious than their Polish and Czech counterparts, citing Russia's resources tied down in Ukraine and warning, per the Guardian's sourcing, that talk of a massive attack might play into the Kremlin's hands. Neither Koudelka nor Latvia's security service director would discuss whether a surprise visit to Moscow last month by CIA director John Ratcliffe, who also stopped in Riga, was intended partly as a warning to the Kremlin. Russian spokesman Dmitry Peskov subsequently dismissed talk of an attack on Nato as having "nothing to do with reality and nothing to do with the intentions of the Russian Federation."

The Guardian's reporting sits alongside similar warnings from Germany. BND chief Bruno Kahl has said Berlin holds concrete evidence of Russian preparations to test Nato's Article 5, telling a podcast for Table Briefings that "[Russia's full-scale invasion of] Ukraine is only one step on Russia's path towards the west." Kahl has separately said the timing of any such test depends heavily on how the war in Ukraine unfolds, since an earlier end to the fighting would free up Russian manpower and equipment for other purposes. Danish military intelligence concluded in February that Russia could redeploy substantial forces to other European borders within six months of the Ukraine war ending, while Germany's defence minister has spoken of a longer five-to-eight-year horizon for full readiness.

Anthropic introduced the Life Sciences Verification Program (LSVP) on 17 September 2026, giving vetted life science professionals access to its Mythos, Opus and Sonnet models under what the company called a refined set of safeguards more permissive for biology-related work. The scheme is designed to unblock tasks such as drug discovery, research biology, clinical development and manufacturing that remain off-limits on Anthropic's generally available Fable models. According to Anthropic, dozens of organizations have already been onboarded through an early-access program, with applications now open to the broader life science community, and outside coverage of the launch reported that initial participants include Xaira Therapeutics, Edison Scientific, and Manifold Bio, with hundreds more expected to enrol in the first week.

Access runs through a vetting process that checks research credentials, security practices and ethical oversight, before organisations receive one of two grant types. A Standard Use grant, Anthropic said, can be extended to entire teams for diverse, daily workloads, and are renewed once a year, covering the bulk of R&D, clinical and manufacturing work. A separate High-risk Use add-on goes further: it applies to a single dual-use research project rather than a whole team, must be renewed every six months, and, in Anthropic's words, removes all safeguards that block life sciences requests. The company gave the example of a researcher characterizing how one specific family of viral vectors is recognized by human immune pathways as the kind of narrowly scoped project the high-risk tier is meant to accommodate. High-risk access to the most capable Mythos model is being developed in coordination with the US government and, at launch, remains restricted to a small number of organisations subject to extra vetting, according to Anthropic, which is working with the U.S. government to expand high-risk Mythos access.

Anthropic has framed the programme around three threat models it considers most dangerous in biology: compromised accounts, insider misuse and autonomous agents acting outside their approved scope. The company argues that in this domain, distinguishing legitimate research from harmful intent is often impossible at the level of a single prompt, since it's often not possible to differentiate between a user doing valid work... and pursuing harm, such as work that could increase a virus's transmissibility. That reasoning underpins the shift away from real-time blocking toward retrospective review: usage is retained for 30 days and checked against the scope an organisation declared when it applied, with anomalies flagged to the organisation's own administrators to investigate rather than halted automatically, as traffic outside an organization's approved scope is flagged for its administrators, who must investigate within timeframes agreed with Anthropic.

Cybersecurity protections are unaffected by the change. Anthropic and independent write-ups of the launch both note that the program creates a formal route for eligible organizations to use Anthropic's most restricted biology-oriented model capabilities while retaining safeguards in other sensitive areas, including cybersecurity. The LSVP sits alongside a parallel Cyber Verification Program for vetted cyberdefenders, and Anthropic has said it plans to extend life sciences access beyond institutional teams to individual Pro and Max subscribers over time.