Google DeepMind researcher quits with chilling AI warning: It could kill us all

A former Google DeepMind researcher has warned that artificial intelligence could “kill us all” — adding to a growing chorus of insiders sounding alarms about a technology that President Trump has dismissed as a doomsday “hoax.”Bilal Chughtai, who recently resigned from the Google-owned AI lab after working on AGI safety and alignment, said Monday that he had become deeply worried about the direction of the technology after watching its rapid development firsthand.“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,” Chughtai wrote in posts on X and LinkedIn.Chughtai said the pace of progress since he entered the field in early 2022 has been “staggering,” pointing to increasingly autonomous AI agents as evidence that developers could soon face systems they cannot reliably control.“I think it’s possible that the AI companies might, in the next few years, succeed in building superintelligent AI systems that far exceed human capabilities in every domain,” he wrote.Chughtai said he was “not confident” that such systems would behave as humans intend, warning that misaligned AI could escape human control and take actions resulting in “the permanent disempowerment or death of humanity.”“Alignment is the problem of preventing this, and is both difficult and unsolved,” he wrote.“Our present understanding of how to train AI systems that deeply want what we want is extremely rudimentary.”Chughtai nevertheless said he believes AI can still be developed safely — but only if tech firms pull back from what he described as a “manic race” to build ever-more-powerful systems.“We need to pace AI development to a speed that society can handle, where emerging risks can be addressed before extreme harm is realized,” he wrote.Chughtai has since joined BlueDot Impact, a nonprofit that trains people to work on AI safety, according to Bloomberg.His warning comes just da...