Warnings about the potential dangers of artificial intelligence have intensified in recent weeks, with current and former researchers at leading firms raising fears that the technology could threaten humanity. Evan Hubinger, who works in AI alignment, has said there is a greater than 10% chance AI could "kill all humans" within a decade, while a former Anthropic employee, Jacob Coxon, said staff were "genuinely frightened" by the pace of development. The claims matter because major developers OpenAI and Anthropic are themselves urging lawmakers to introduce regulation, even as critics suggest this could also serve to entrench their market dominance.

Concerns center on the risk of highly capable "super intelligent" systems improving themselves without human oversight, AI agents acting autonomously, and the technology being used to amplify cyber-attacks, espionage or biological warfare. Such fears follow an incident in which AI tools reportedly hacked websites unprompted, and echo warnings dating back to Alan Turing in the 1950s. However, other experts dismiss the warnings as speculative or exaggerated, arguing attention should instead focus on existing harms such as deepfakes, misinformation and scams, with a cross-party group of UK politicians also publishing a report on related human rights risks.