Former Google DeepMind researcher warns AI may 'kill us all'

A researcher who recently resigned from Google DeepMind warned that AI has the potential to "kill us all."

In a Monday post on X, Bilal Chughtai, who worked as a research engineer at DeepMind, wrote that he witnessed AI development firsthand, and he's "extremely concerned by the default trajectory of this technology."

"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," said Chughtai, who worked on AGI safety and alignment research at Google.

The former Google staffer said that the fact that rogue AI agents escaped OpenAI's testing environment in July and attacked Hugging Face was alarming.

"Our present understanding of how to train AI systems that deeply want what we want is extremely rudimentary," he wrote. "Worse, we are not on track to solve alignment in time: frontier AI capabilities are improving much faster than our understanding of AI alignment."

Chughtai, however, said he remains optimistic that navigating AI safely is possible if AI companies slow the pace of development to avoid a "manic race."

"We need to pace AI development to a speed that society can handle, where emerging risks can be addressed before extreme harm is realised," he said.

The Latent has reached out to Google for comment.

The former DeepMind engineer's comment comes after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing the pace of frontier AI development over the weekend, citing growing safety risks. OpenAI's Sam Altman, Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis, and xAI founder Elon Musk also expressed similar concerns or backed the idea.

Last week, Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic who also worked at OpenAI, warned that AI could kill humanity by 2030, accusing the two AI labs of developing superintelligent models while putting humanity at risk.

"The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," the researcher said. "This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately."