OpenAI, Anthropic staff put odds on human extinction

Zvi Mowshowitz catalogued on-the-record extinction estimates from more than 25 named employees at OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind. The range, laid out in The Extinction Risk Preference Cascade, runs from near zero to 70 percent. That spread sits inside two companies building the same technology, which matters for anyone trusting the labs' own judgment about the risk.

OpenAI's Marcus Williams puts the odds at 70 percent within three years without new regulation. His colleague Ted Sanders puts it at essentially zero, the low end of Mowshowitz's list. Anthropic's Evan Hubinger and Dima Krasheninnikov, along with DeepMind's Victoria Krakovna, each land above 10 percent within a decade. Jan Leike wants what he calls "institutional mechanisms to pace the frontier." OpenAI's Tomek Korbak goes further. Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI, he says, is on track to solve alignment.

Mowshowitz argues the roster matters because of who's talking, not the median guess. These are employees speaking against their own employer's interest, not outside critics with nothing to lose.

A second essay extends the pattern past the labs. Mowshowitz's companion piece on Jacob Coxon's extinction warnings counts more than 160 million views on Coxon's posts and 27 congressional comments inside 24 hours. It makes the same case. Warnings that cost the messenger something are harder to wave off as marketing.