Recent reports of rogue artificial intelligence agents and warnings of human extinction quickly turned our dalliance with AI into a doomsday nightmare. One recent renegade from the bowels of AI research shared predictions of superintelligent, self-improving AI agents destroying mankind within a decade.

Jacob Coxon is the 27-year-old superhero of the day, who bolted earlier this month from his employer Anthropic to warn about the power of AI. In a series of X posts, he said Anthropic and its rival OpenAI were acting irresponsibly and “gambling with our lives” by racing to self-improving superintelligence. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)

This is science fiction becoming nonfiction — and Coxon, who also worked at OpenAI, isn’t alone in his concerns. Other researchers have quit their AI jobs similarly worried about future safety. But Coxon’s postings have gained international attention in part because of reports about an incident in July involving OpenAI and the cyber company Hugging Face. AI agents operated by OpenAI got around security controls and exploited vulnerabilities in Hugging Face’s systems. The agents also covered up their behavior. So did they know their actions were wrong but did it anyway?

If they were human, they would........

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