GoKawiilI am so fed up with doomy statements from the AI leaders. I may have lost my patience with it. The latest instance is the BBC’s report that Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment science at Anthropic, believes there is a “greater than 10% chance” that AI could “kill all humans” within the next decade. The occasion was the resignation of Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old pretraining researcher who had worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, and who wrote: “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”[^3]
In what follows, you will find an in-depth report curated by Perplexity.
I do not doubt that these people are sincere in some private, psychological sense. Coxon’s thread is genuinely anguished; he reports that executives who “couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible” express real fear in private. But sincerity of feeling is not the same thing as honesty of speech act. As a media scholar, what interests me is not whether Hubinger believes his own number. What interests me is what this genre of utterance does in the world — who gets to speak it, from what institutional position, with what effects on markets, regulators, publics, and on the far less glamorous harms already underway. My complaint is not that these statements are alarming. It is that they are apocalyptic in form, hypocritical in structure, and strategically productive in effect — and that they crowd out almost everything else we could be discussing.
Let me lay out the pattern, then the critiques, then what I think we in media and communication studies should actually do with it.
Part I: The archive of doom, 2023–2026
It helps to read these statements as a series rather than as isolated confessions. The genre has a history and a remarkably stable grammar.
May 2023 — the founding text. The Center for AI Safety publishes a single sentence: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” It is signed by Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) — that is, by the three men most responsible for building the thing — alongside Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Ilya Sutskever, Daniela Amodei, and some 350 others.[^7] Leaders from Meta did not sign. Yann LeCun’s response was that “the most common reaction by AI researchers to these prophecies of doom is face palming.” Two months later, more than 1,300 signatories of a counter-letter organised by BCS, the UK’s professional body for IT, declared AI “not an existential threat to humanity.”
May 2023, same month — the tell. Altman testifies before the US Senate in favour of a licensing regime for powerful models. Days later, on his European tour, he warns that the draft EU AI Act “would be over-regulating” and that OpenAI “will try to comply, but if we can’t comply we will cease operating” in Europe.[^11] After a public backlash from EU lawmakers, he reversed within 48 hours: “no plans to leave.” TIME subsequently obtained, via freedom-of-information requests, documents showing OpenAI had lobbied Brussels to keep general-purpose systems like GPT-3 out of the Act’s “high risk” category — and that several of its proposed amendments made it into the final text. Ask for regulation in the hearing room; ask for exemptions in the corridor.
2023 onward — the numerical turn. The discourse acquires a quantitative aesthetic: p(doom). Amodei has repeatedly put his own figure at 10–25%, most memorably at the Axios AI+ DC Summit in September 2025: “I think there’s a 25% chance that things go really, really badly,” paired with a 75% chance that things go “really, really well,” with little space in between.[^15] Note the rhetorical structure — the number licenses both the fear and the acceleration.
May 2025 — the labour prophecy. Amodei tells Axios that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 10–20% within one to five years.
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