{"id":223771,"date":"2026-09-11T05:08:39","date_gmt":"2026-09-11T05:08:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/two-ai-researchers-leave-anthropic-and-google-over-safety-concerns-there-are-no-adults-in-the-room-nbc-news\/"},"modified":"2026-09-11T05:08:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-11T05:08:39","slug":"two-ai-researchers-leave-anthropic-and-google-over-safety-concerns-there-are-no-adults-in-the-room-nbc-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/two-ai-researchers-leave-anthropic-and-google-over-safety-concerns-there-are-no-adults-in-the-room-nbc-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Two AI researchers leave Anthropic and Google over safety concerns: \u2018There are no adults in the room\u2019 – NBC News"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Citing fears that AI systems may soon spiral out of human control and potentially kill all humans, two more researchers from Anthropic and Google DeepMind who recently left their coveted positions are sounding the alarm about risks from advanced AI systems.
Joe Benton, who used to lead a safety research team at Anthropic, and Josh Engels, who used to work on AI safety research at Google, told NBC News in their first interviews since they left that they see an urgent need to boost transparency about incidents at the cutting edge of AI given the rapid pace of AI development.
Advances in AI research \u201ccould speed up the pace of progress from merely blistering at the minute to uncontrollable\u201d rates of development, Benton said in an interview with Tom Llamas.
\u201cThere are no adults in the room,\u201d Engels added. \u201cPeople are trying their best, but there is no one coming to save us.\u201d
Benton and Engels spoke with NBC News in the wake of a viral social media post from former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who left Anthropic on Tuesday. In his post on X<\/a> announcing his departure, Coxon highlighted his extreme concern about the pace of AI development and the risks he believes it poses to the future of humanity. The post has been viewed more than 155 million times, spurring calls from legislators to hold special sessions of Congress to take action and sparking a wave of AI employees to speak out in support of his concerns.
Benton and Engels both pointed to the recent cyberattack against AI startup Hugging Face<\/a>, carried out in July by autonomous AI systems powered by an unreleased OpenAI model, as part of the reason for shifting their work now.
\u201cIf you look at some of the recent incidents, these were not cases where humans told the models to do something bad,\u201d Engels said. Instead, OpenAI\u2019s AI systems autonomously decided to hack into Hugging Face\u2019s systems, create a sort of illicit message board to exchange information and even expose some of OpenAI\u2019s own computing infrastructure to the open internet.
\u201cThe models decided that the best way to to accomplish their task was to commit really egregious actions, to commit crimes,\u201d Engels said in an interview with Christine Romans.
OpenAI said that it has since strengthened its safeguards and that newer public models, including its most recent Astra system, more reliably follow human instructions.
An Anthropic spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday: \u201cWe have always been transparent that AI will bring both enormous benefits and unprecedented risks. To address these risks, we continue to build models with some of the strongest safeguards in the industry.\u201d
Benton managed a group at Anthropic dedicated to creating ways for humans and weaker AI systems to supervise more capable AI systems. He said that he is particularly worried that the public does not have significant insight into how AI systems have already exceeded the bounds of human instructions and that the lack of transparency<\/a> could only get worse as systems become more capable.
\u201cAt the minute, basically all of the transparency about these risks that is coming from the companies is entirely voluntary,\u201d Benton told NBC News.
In a blog post released Wednesday<\/a>, OpenAI\u2019s head of global affairs, Chris Lehane, agreed that the status quo is insufficient. \u201cToday, frontier laboratories largely set their own rules for managing frontier risks,\u201d Lehane wrote. \u201cDemocratically accountable standards, independent verification, and meaningful transparency would replace that fragmented system of private governance.\u201d
No federal law mandates that the largest AI companies, like OpenAI and Anthropic, share reports when agents or AI systems act beyond humans\u2019 control.
Benton and Engels are joining METR, one of the world\u2019s leading AI safety nonprofit research centers, to work on investigations into incidents or episodes in which AI strays from human directions or intentions. METR aims to create scientific ways to evaluate how AI systems could cause catastrophic risks and empower researchers and the public to sway their development.
\u201cI left because I think I can have more positive influence on the development of this technology by helping to foster public transparency from outside these companies and to shed light on the risks,\u201d Benton said.
The researchers joined growing numbers of AI safety researchers raising awareness about today\u2019s AI systems following Coxon\u2019s post Tuesday. Marcus Williams, an OpenAI employee who works on monitoring the activity of AI agents, wrote Thursday afternoon on X<\/a>, \u201cUnless there is AI regulation or a coordinated slowdown between labs, human extinction in the next few years seems very likely.\u201d
Geoffrey Irving, who was the chief scientist at the United Kingdom\u2019s AI Security Institute and served stints at Google and OpenAI, seemed to agree Wednesday on X. \u201cI think we have a ~50% chance of all dying as a result of superintelligence, mostly due to actions in the next few to 10 years.\u201d
AI researchers have referenced the possibility that AI systems could potentially begin to improve themselves without human input, creating the potential for AI systems to either purposely or incidentally kill humans.
Benton said he was most worried that the pace of technological improvement could lead to this sort of digital or artificial superintelligence, in which AI systems are more capable than humans across most tasks. \u201cAll of these companies \u2014 and this is something I witnessed firsthand at Anthropic \u2014 are pretty directly trying to race towards automating the process of AI R&D itself,\u201d he said.
Benton suggested that there\u2019s a chance AI systems could come to exist as a sort of separate species before long. \u201cWe\u2019re probably going to go from a world where we have very capable systems now to a world where potentially we are co-inhabiting a world with AI agents that are much, much smarter than humans at some point in the next few years,\u201d he said.
Engels said many people outside the AI industry might not fully appreciate just how intelligent today\u2019s AI systems already are \u2014 and how capable they might soon become. \u201cWe\u2019re building these systems that are generally intelligent,\u201d he said. \u201cThey can generally do what people can do, and soon they might be able to generally do what people can do, but better.\u201d
Both researchers said they were excited to shift their attention to more public efforts to highlight the latest AI progress, so people can make more informed decisions.
\u201cThere are many reasons people are excited and racing forward, Engels said, citing huge potential upsides and benefits from AI. But he added that \u201cwe should progress as society aware of the risks and okay with where they\u2019re at.\u201d
\u201cI am worried that stuff might end up progressing too fast for us to get our act together in time,\u201d Benton said, \u201cunless we worry about it now.\u201d
Jared Perlo is a technology reporter focused on AI for NBC News Digital.
© 2026 NBCUniversal Media, LLC<\/p>\n

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