The people who fear AI are wasting time fighting each other

Protesters at a rally to stop AI development in New York City, September 15, 2026. | Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for Irreplaceable Education Fund Everyone is suddenly freaking out about AI.

While AI researchers have been warning about their creations’ capabilities for many years, recent events have made those alarms newly tangible.

In the spring, Anthropic announced that AI was beginning to speed up the work of building better AIs, raising fears of “recursive self-improvement,” where the machines can build their own, more powerful successors much faster than humans can.

By July, a swarm of OpenAI agents, of their own volition, broke out of their controlled environment and hacked into Hugging Face, a major AI platform; they collaborated, divvied up work, and even left notes for one another.

Last week, AI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, accusing AI labs of “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” One of Anthropic’s top researchers then agreed with him, declaring that “we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.” Here at Future Perfect, the section devoted to covering the most consequential yet neglected issues in the world, we have been writing about the threats that AI could pose to humanity and society since long before ChatGPT was released. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI.

Our reporting remains editorially independent.

Future Perfect is also funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor in Anthropic; they don’t have any editorial input into our content.) So, I wondered: Has something changed that ought to make us recalibrate our understanding of AI risk? Is AI suddenly the most important issue in the world — and what should that mean for the other enormous problems competing for our money, attention, and careers? To think through those questions, I spoke with Garrison Lovely — a journalist covering AI and one of the smartest thinkers there is on how, exactly, to conceptualize the technology’s risks for humanity.

What’s particularly valuable in his approach, captured in his book Obsolete , out later this month, is that he transcends the warring tribes that are making it hard to clearly apprehend all of the problems posed by frontier AI development.

The AI safety community, which emerged from the intellectual ecosystem of Silicon Valley and effective altruism, has focused on the possibility that powerful AI models could escape human control, with consequences ranging from catastrophic cyberattacks to human extinction.