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Updated on: September 9, 2026 / 4:43 PM EDT
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A troubling warning from a former researcher at AI company Anthropic is drawing attention to "superintelligence" — technology that could outperform humans at every cognitive task.In a Sept. 8 social media thread announcing his resignation, the researcher Jacob Coxon accused Anthropic and rival OpenAI of "gambling with our lives" by pursuing superintelligence. In a related post on X, Anthropic lead researcher Evan Hubinger said there was more than a 10% chance that AI "could kill all humans" within the next decade.The warnings raise questions about what superintelligence is, how close companies are to developing such technological capabilities, and why some experts believe it could threaten jobs, national security and even humanity itself.Superintelligence refers to artificial intelligence that "can significantly outperform all humans on essentially all cognitive tasks," according to a petition to halt superintelligence development from the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, which has garnered signatures from the likes of noted computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who is known as the "Godfather of AI." "Imagine, for example, some AI or massive cluster of AIs that together are smarter than all of humanity together, than all 8 billion of us," Max Tegmark, a professor at MIT who specializes in AI research, told CBS News. "That would certainly count." Researchers also express concern that superintelligent AIs would be controlled by only a few companies, giving them enormous power and amplifying the risks of misuse."We're getting so close to being outsmarted"To be sure, the idea that AI could one day exceed human intelligence in every domain isn't new — and it remains hypothetical. For example, British mathematician I.J. Good wrote about the creation of an "ultraintelligent machine" in the 1960s, defining it as something that can "surpass all the intellectual activities of any man, however clever."
