A Google DeepMind researcher quit the company's AGI safety team and warned AI could kill everyone. Days later, a colleague from the same team resigned too, citing a terrifying chance of catastrophe within five years.
A Google DeepMind researcher quit the company's AGI safety team and warned, in a public exit note, that "AI has the potential to kill us all." Days later, a colleague from the same team resigned too, citing a "terrifying chance" of catastrophe within five years.
Bilal Chughtai left Google DeepMind in July 2026. He didn't say why at the time. This week, he did. In an exit post that went viral almost immediately, Chughtai wrote that he "earnestly" believes AI could kill everyone, and that the industry might be running out of time to stop it. He's since joined BlueDot Impact, a nonprofit that trains people across different fields to work on AI safety, according to Bloomberg.
That alone would be a striking story. What makes it harder to wave away is who came right after him.
A second departure #
Josh Engels worked alongside Chughtai on DeepMind's AGI safety team. He's an MIT graduate. He resigned on September 13, 2026, and turned down job offers from both OpenAI and Anthropic - two of the companies he'd be most likely to warn about. Instead he's joining METR, the independent nonprofit that evaluates whether frontier AI systems are dangerous before they ship. That's a deliberate choice. Engels told reporters he sees a "terrifying chance" that AI systems cause "immense harm" within the next five years, according to Business Standard. His fear is specific: capability gains outpacing anyone's ability to align or evaluate the systems producing them.
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At METR, Engels says he'll trace where alignment failures actually originate in training, and test whether the safety mitigations labs already claim to have would hold up if something went wrong. That's not abstract. It's the difference between a company saying it has guardrails and someone independently checking whether those guardrails work.
More than boardroom talk #
It's worth being precise about what this is and isn't. Earlier this month, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei publicly called for the AI industry to slow its pace, part of a broader run of leadership-level statements urging coordination among labs. Chughtai and Engels are a different animal entirely. Neither is a CEO making a strategic argument from the top. Both are individual researchers, inside Google's own frontier lab, walking out the door and saying, on the record, that they don't trust where the company they worked for is headed.
They're not alone, either. Jacob Coxon left OpenAI for Anthropic, then quit that job too, on September 9. He told colleagues the major labs are "racing to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives," according to TheNextWeb. Three departures, three different companies, the same complaint: the pace of capability gains is outrunning anyone's ability to keep the systems controllable.
Chughtai's own ask is fairly specific. He wants AI companies to slow their competitive race, submit to real transparency, and coordinate on a pace "that society can handle," rather than one set by whichever lab is most afraid of falling behind. That's a harder sell than it sounds. Slow down unilaterally, and you've just handed the frontier to whichever rival didn't.
Google hasn't said much. A DeepMind spokesperson wasn't available to comment outside business hours when Chughtai's post went viral, according to TheNextWeb. That silence is its own kind of answer. Frankly, when two safety researchers from the same team leave within months of each other and neither departure gets a real public response, it says something about how the company is managing the story, whatever it's doing about the underlying concern.
None of this means DeepMind's alignment work has stalled, and neither Chughtai nor Engels claimed it had. What they're both saying, in slightly different words, is that the gap between what AI systems can do and what anyone can verify about their behavior is widening, not closing. Engels put a number on it: five years, "terrifying chance." Chughtai's timeline was vaguer. His verdict was blunter.
Not every departing employee gets this kind of hearing. These two did, because they left the inside of one of the world's most closely watched AI labs and said, in public, exactly what they were afraid of.
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