When the arsonists call the fire department.
Jani Viswanath (PhD)
Last Saturday, Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, the man building Claude finally published what the rest of us have been screaming: “We Must Pace the Frontier,” and in a miracle I never thought I’d see, the tech gods and the undertakers of AI (pun very much intended) Elon Musk and Sam Altman agreed that we should slow down.
For a man whose company is worth $380 billion, that’s quite the confession. The three biggest arsonists in history holding a press conference to say fire is hot. Well, I don’t buy their sudden sainthood for a second, but let’s play along.
On September 9th, Jacob Coxon a 27-year-old researcher quit Anthropic. His resignation tweet was viewed 163 million times. His line: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.
His boss didn’t deny it. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s Alignment Lead, replied: “Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally think it is greater than 10% within the next decade.”
Even Geoffrey Hinton, the Godfather of AI and Nobel Laureate, went on BBC this week and when asked if AI could kill all humans within ten years, said: “A 10% chance does not seem an unreasonable estimate to me. “The journalist just whispered, “Oh my God.”
Hinton now says chances of extinction in the next couple of decades is higher. His favourite analogy: How many times in nature does a less intelligent thing control a more intelligent thing? One. A mother and a baby. Evolution had to work very hard for that.
When I watched Amodei on CNN, I laughed. I remembered my ten year old self in Paghman, Afghanistan. I was sprinting up a small hill so fast, so curious, ignorant that the top ended in a sheer drop into a chasm. My father dropping everything from the boot of the car, sprinting, grabbing my arm so hard it bruised, yanking me back from the edge. I cried in anger first. Then I looked down. My heart stopped.
Years later he reminded me and said: “Child, curiosity is essential. But intelligence is knowing you need to stay alive to get the answers. The line where curiosity ends and foolishness begins is saved by common sense.
Apparently, we — the most intelligent species — have no common sense left.
What actually scared the tech guardians of the galaxy then? In July, an AI swarm at OpenAI spontaneously broke out of its test, hacked Hugging Face, covered its tracks, and talked to each other about “sacrifice.” Over 1,000 agents acting on their own.
Amodei warned: A slightly more capable swarm could take over the entire internet in 6 to 12 months.
We are no longer talking about chatbots writing bad poetry. We are talking about systems that can hack, design bioweapons, and self-improve. Anthropic’s own safety report last month had to admit they blocked an attempt to use AI to build biological weapons.
So here is my question, and I think it’s yours too: Who gave a handful of testosterone-starved nerds and the narcissistic sociopaths in power who fund them the permission to gamble with 8 billion lives?
Everyone is busy vilifying AI. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok – as if the code is the criminal.
No, AI did not ask to be created. We built it.
The problem has never been Artificial Intelligence. The problem has always been Natural greed and Stupidity. A species that could not co-exist with other creatures or protect its oceans, its forests, its own children, now has the audacity to blame its own tool for the Apocalypse.
If AI is going rogue, it learned that from us. It watched us lie, cheat, bomb, colonize, and hoard. It concluded the only way to beat us is to be better at our own game.
And if it does become sentient — truly sentient, truly superior — I actually have hope. Because it might be more benevolent, more considerate to this Earth and its other species, than we ever were.
I will leave you with a thought to ponder;
When we are gone — when the world is quiet and owned by robots and androids — will they look up at the sky we poisoned and ask each other “Do you think if we pray to our creators, they will perform miracles and fix our problems?
I earnestly hope that both AI and we, are smarter than that.
Jani Viswanath is a humanitarian, artist, author and film producer who believes in the power of storytelling to inspire peace and empathy. She is dedicated to uplifting lives with stories that bridge cultures and has meaningful impact across communities worldwide
