AI News Today September 9 - AI Researcher Warns AI Could Kill Humanity

AI’s biggest safety warning today is coming from someone who just walked away from one of the companies building it.

Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon has resigned, accusing both Anthropic and OpenAI of racing towards self-improving superintelligence while privately fearing it could kill humanity.

One of Anthropic’s own alignment leaders has now publicly backed his warning.

Apple is also preparing major new AI hardware, while Google is committing $15 billion to AI infrastructure.

Here’s everything you need to know today.

Anthropic Researcher Quits and Warns AI Labs Are "Gambling With Our Lives"

An Anthropic researcher has quit the company with one of the strongest public warnings yet from inside the AI industry.

Jacob Coxon, who spent the past three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, said neither company is acting responsibly.

He accused them of racing towards self-improving superintelligence and "gambling with our lives."

Coxon said people building frontier AI genuinely believe the technology could kill humanity by the end of the decade.

He also warned that future systems could become powerful enough to hack almost anything, rapidly advance entire fields and gain access to real-world power and resources.

His biggest concern is AI that can help build increasingly capable versions of itself.

Anthropic has itself said that AI is already accelerating AI development, although it says full recursive self-improvement has not yet been reached.

What makes Coxon’s resignation more striking is that senior people inside Anthropic are not dismissing him.

Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s Alignment Science lead, responded that Coxon was correct and said he personally puts the chance of AI killing all humans within the next decade at more than 10%.

Hubinger later clarified that he believes the risk from current models is low.

His concern is what happens if increasingly capable AI systems begin improving themselves faster than humans can understand or control them.

That turns Coxon’s resignation from one researcher’s warning into a much bigger question for the industry.

If the people building these systems genuinely fear the consequences, why are they still racing to build them?

Apple iPhone 18 and Foldable iPhone: What Could Be Announced Today?

Apple’s biggest product event of the year begins at 1 p.m. ET today.

The company has confirmed its September 9 event, while reports point to the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max alongside Apple’s first foldable iPhone, expected to cost more than $2,000.

AI will be just as important as the hardware.

Apple has already announced a new generation of Apple Intelligence and Siri AI, designed to work more deeply across its devices.

Apple is also reportedly developing camera-equipped AirPods that could feed visual information to Siri.

Those AI AirPods are currently expected in 2027, rather than at today’s event.

The bigger shift is Apple preparing for AI that can see, hear and act across multiple devices rather than living inside one app.

Google Invests $15 Billion in AI Infrastructure: Why Finland?

Google has announced its largest single investment in Europe.

The company will spend at least €13 billion, around $15.1 billion, on AI and digital infrastructure in Finland over the next two years.

The plan includes new data centres, clean-energy projects and a 94-megawatt battery system.

Google has also signed a 22-year nuclear power agreement covering up to 50% of the output from Finland’s Loviisa nuclear power plant.

AI data centres need enormous amounts of reliable electricity, while Finland offers low-carbon power and a cold climate that can reduce cooling costs.

Google says the investment will support more than 37,000 jobs during the initial construction phase.

The commitment shows how the AI race is becoming an energy and infrastructure race as much as a software one.

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