View / We have nothing to fear but AI fear itself

When researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic this week and claimed there’s a good chance the company’s work will lead to human extinction, the world reacted with fear and outrage about AI — but most of the backlash conflates several issues, including data centers’ environmental costs, hacking, and AI’s impact on the job market.

If lawmakers, regulators and tech-company leaders don’t tackle each problem with sober precision, the industry risks having to follow rules that don’t solve anything, or worse, slow down innovation, including on developments that could make AI safer and more beneficial to the economy.

For instance, many AI safety advocates would actually prefer data centers be built here, in our own backyards. If they move offshore, they’ll be more difficult to monitor and regulate. The problem to solve is about their energy waste, not about their existence.

Blindly believing advocates who say AI could kill us means missing some real risks, like economic or societal destabilization as AI transforms how people work and communicate. These advocates, in many cases, aren’t concerned about those issues, and believe that if humanity somehow survives the AI age, we are headed for a utopian future full of abundant health and scientific breakthroughs.

We are also in the beginning of a cybersecurity crisis that the world is failing to practically address. We may face bioterrorism risk, as Anthropic warned in a blog post this week. And while AI will likely create many new jobs, we have done little to ensure everyday people outside of the tech industry benefit economically from the AI boom.

Back in March, 2024, I wrote about how the term “AI safety” was expanding to include more and more issues that go beyond “extinction.” Advocates like Eliezer Yudkowsky told me then that using that term was a bad idea. It still is. And Caxon’s resignation is being used as a catch-all piece of ammunition for anyone who has anything against AI.