// WIRED US/UK — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Is AI Actually Going to Kill Us All?
This week on Uncanny Valley, an AI researcher’s resignation from Anthropic went viral on social media after he claimed there’s a real chance AI could wipe out humanity within a decade. WIRED’s Will Knight joins Brian Barrett and Leah Feiger to assess whether the doom narrative is overblown or overdue. We also discuss Apple’s debut of its $2,000 foldable iPhone, the iPhone Duo, and the new “always listening” Apple Watch features that have Brian feeling more than a little uneasy. Plus, a WIRED investigation found that the US Census Bureau used faulty data to create a misleading report touted by the Trump administration.
You can follow Brian Barrett on Bluesky at @brbarrett, Leah Feiger on Bluesky at @leahfeiger, and Will Knight on Bluesky at @willknight. Write to us at [email protected].
You can always listen to this week's podcast through the audio player on this page, but if you want to subscribe for free to get every episode, here's how:
If you're on an iPhone or iPad, open the app called Podcasts, or just tap this link. You can also download an app like Overcast or Pocket Casts and search for “uncanny valley.” We’re on Spotify too.
Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Brian Barrett: Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley. I'm Brian Barrettt, executive editor.
Leah Feiger: And I'm Leah Feiger, director of politics and science.
Brian Barrett: Today on the show, we're discussing an AI researcher who resigned from Anthropic and made waves on social media by claiming that most AI researchers earnestly believe that there's a non-zero chance AI will, well, kill us all.
Leah Feiger: And in case you missed it, last month, President Donald Trump was touting a report published by the Census Bureau claiming that noncitizens voted in the 2020 election. WIRED now has uncovered evidence that the report was made with very faulty data. We're going to get into how the repercussions of the bureau using and publishing this data go way beyond this one report.
Brian Barrett: Also on the agenda today, Apple's big iPhone event. All eyes have been on the new foldable iPhone and the roughly $2,000 price tag that brings with it. We'll talk about what's behind this gamble and other releases that caught our attention from Apple's big event. The resignation of an AI researcher from Anthropic has been gathering a lot of attention. This guy Jacob Coxon quit the company this week, decided to share his reasons why on a thread on X, which basically boiled down to he thinks that the leading AI companies, which I guess we're going to say OpenAI and Anthropic primarily, are both behaving irresponsibly in their quest to continue advancing their models. These are kind of runaway trains. The part that people have really latched onto is this claim that, quote, "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," end quote. So just kill us all by the end of the decade. So we have totality and a pretty narrow timeframe. It didn't help that one of Anthropic's own senior safety executives then jumped in and said, "Yeah, that's basically how we feel." WIRED senior correspondent Will Knight is here to help us parse this. Will, thank you so much for being here.