{"slug": "a-google-deepmind-safety-researcher-quit-and-warned-ai-could-kill-us-all", "title": "A Google DeepMind Safety Researcher Quit and Warned AI Could Kill Us All", "summary": "Bilal Chughtai left Google DeepMind's AGI safety team in July 2026 and publicly warned in a viral exit note that \"AI has the potential to kill us all,\" joining the AI safety nonprofit BlueDot Impact, according to Bloomberg. Days later, on September 13, 2026, his DeepMind AGI safety colleague Josh Engels resigned as well, turning down offers from OpenAI and Anthropic to join the evaluator nonprofit METR, citing a \"terrifying chance\" of immense harm within five years. The departures come as Google DeepMind's arrivals-to-departures ratio fell from about 12-to-1 in 2023 to roughly 2-to-1 in the third quarter of 2026, per Fortune, with Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Noam Shazeer, and Nobel laureate John Jumper among recent exits.", "body_md": "*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.*\n\nA 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.\n\nBilal 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.\n\nThat alone would be a striking story. What makes it harder to wave away is who came right after him.\n\n## A second departure\n\nJosh 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.\n\n[Google DeepMind Is Losing the AI Talent War It Used to Win Easily](https://startupfortune.com/google-deepmind-is-losing-the-ai-talent-war-it-used-to-win-easily/)\n\nGoogle DeepMind's arrivals-to-departures ratio has fallen from about 12-to-1 in 2023 to roughly 2-to-1 in the third quarter of 2026, according to Fortune. Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Noam Shazeer, and Nobel laureate John Jumper are among the recent departures to rivals and startups, with Anthropic pulling in the largest share. - [why top AI researchers are leaving Google DeepMind](https://startupfortune.com/google-deepmind-is-losing-the-ai-talent-war-it-used-to-win-easily/) - [Google DeepMind losing talented scientists to competitor companies](https://startupfortune.com/google-deepmind-is-losing-the-ai-talent-war-it-used-to-win-easily/)\n\nAt 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.\n\n## More than boardroom talk\n\nIt'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.\n\nThey'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.\n\nChughtai'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.\n\nGoogle 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.\n\nNone 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.\n\nNot 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.\n\n[Google launches Gemini 3.7 Flash and halves its price as Gemini 3.5 Pro waits](https://startupfortune.com/google-launches-gemini-37-flash-and-halves-its-price-as-gemini-35-pro-waits/)\n\nGoogle released Gemini 3.7 Flash on August 13, 2026, just three weeks after Gemini 3.6 Flash, with major coding benchmark gains and prices cut in half through year-end. The launch comes as Gemini 3.5 Pro, Google's actual flagship promised at May's I/O, remains delayed after DeepMind reportedly scrapped its original build over tool-calling failures. - [Gemini 3.6 Flash price reduction details](https://startupfortune.com/google-launches-gemini-37-flash-and-halves-its-price-as-gemini-35-pro-waits/) - [why Google released Gemini 3.6 Flash](https://startupfortune.com/google-launches-gemini-37-flash-and-halves-its-price-as-gemini-35-pro-waits/)\n\n**Also read:** [MiniMax's H3 Max Video Model Topped Sora and Veo, Then Its Price Quadrupled](https://startupfortune.com/minimaxs-h3-max-video-model-topped-sora-and-veo-then-its-price-quadrupled/) • [Bill Gates Pledges $1 Billion So AI Doesn't Leave the Poor Behind](https://startupfortune.com/bill-gates-pledges-1-billion-so-ai-doesnt-leave-the-poor-behind/) • [BlackRock Reverses Course and Bets Big on Korea and Taiwan Chip Stocks](https://startupfortune.com/blackrock-reverses-course-and-bets-big-on-korea-and-taiwan-chip-stocks/)\n\n*This article is posted in [AI News](https://startupfortune.com/category/ai/), check it out for more related stories.*\n\n## Join the discussion\n\n[Open in the community →](https://startupfortune.com/community/)\n\nAlmost there. Sign in and your reply posts straight away.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-google-deepmind-safety-researcher-quit-and-warned-ai-could-kill-us-all", "canonical_source": "https://startupfortune.com/a-google-deepmind-safety-researcher-quit-and-warned-ai-could-kill-us-all/", "published_at": "2026-09-15 08:49:28+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-15 09:08:38.679969+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-safety", "ai-policy", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Google DeepMind", "Bilal Chughtai", "Josh Engels", "BlueDot Impact", "METR", "OpenAI", "Anthropic", "Jeff Dean"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-google-deepmind-safety-researcher-quit-and-warned-ai-could-kill-us-all", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-google-deepmind-safety-researcher-quit-and-warned-ai-could-kill-us-all.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-google-deepmind-safety-researcher-quit-and-warned-ai-could-kill-us-all.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/a-google-deepmind-safety-researcher-quit-and-warned-ai-could-kill-us-all.jsonld"}}