In the theater, there’s an old saying about “Chekhov’s gun” that basically goes like this: If the playwright shows the audience a gun in the first act, you are locked into a certain plot inevitability—that gun will go off in the final act. It usually ends badly. This week, a couple of folks at Anthropic—one who was sounding the alarm on his way out the door, the other still merrily employed there as a safety researcher—effectively showed us the AI gun. Who might die in the final act? According to reports, “All humans.” How soon? “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Cool, cool, cool. If I could offer my hot take, maybe someone should do something to, you know, stop this? Unfortunately, there is a series of related problems that impede the easy fix. For starters, our political system is awash in tens of millions of dollars spent by the AI industry. AI is not popular with the general public, but it is very popular among the few who expect to get, or already are getting, insanely wealthy from it—and they have all burned through small fortunes of sunk cost in this arms race, where everyone is trying to build the best (read: most destructive) AI model they can before someone else does. And the industry actually makes a habit of regularly informing people that this tech could kill us all, because when they do, it excites investors.
It is actually genuinely difficult to trust the motivations of anyone in this industry (and it seems bad that genuinely deceptive people are the human core of this technology). But if only for a few paragraphs, let’s extend the benefit of the doubt to Jacob Coxon, who resigned from Anthropic this week because (according to him) he came to believe that he was beckoning doomsday in humanity’s general direction. In a series of posts on X, Coxon declared that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic was acting responsibly. Rather, they were barreling forward with plans to develop “self-improving superintelligence” and “gambling with our lives.”
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon wrote. “This is not a marketing stunt.” Evan Hubinger, an Anthropic colleague whose actual title is “alignment science lead,” echoed in confirmation: “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” None of this is exactly coming out of the blue. Anthropic’s brand—disingenuously or not—is based on warning the public about AI, and there have been numerous high-profile examples of AI models escaping their environments to engage in hacking. In May 2025, the BBC reported that Anthropic’s own tests revealed that its model was “sometimes willing to pursue ‘extremely harmful actions,’ such as attempting to blackmail engineers who say they will remove it.”
Still, it’s a curious time for people to be resigning from Anthropic and talking up the destructive capabilities of the technology they are building. The firm is planning an IPO this fall that The Wall Street Journal is calling “Wall Street’s marquee event,” with projected earnings assessed at $100 billion for the company and a projected valuation of $2 trillion. Coxon’s insistence that this isn’t a marketing stunt stands out, because the kind of doomsaying he is indulging in, though it might be a genuine outcry for help, quite often is just that—fodder to goose investors to help the overall goal of “number go up.” As TNR contributor J.P. Meyboom explained, it’s extremely common for AI mavens to issue ominous warnings about the terrors their tech can unleash, only to raise gargantuan sums of money in the wake of those portents. As much as you and I might recoil from the periodic reminder that this industry is hurtling toward a future of unknown dangers, the money is flowing heavily in the direction of that future.
It’s also flowing into Washington, D.C. As Politico reported last week, super PACs aligned with the AI and crypto industry “spent a whopping $127 million across more than 100 primaries this year in an effort to shape the future of Congress—and won roughly 90 percent of them.” (They did much better in Republican primaries than in Democratic ones.) Now, the goal of all of that spending can be murky. There are groups sending cash to Washington who are authentically invested in regulation and guardrails; not everyone is looking for laissez-faire treatment from Congress. (Though, again, it’s impossible to gauge the motivations of any of the players in this field, some of whom might only be performatively asking for regulation.) But if we take Coxon at his word, the calculus has changed. Something that could wipe out humanity within a decade’s time probably needs something stronger than a mere guardrail—and something more forceful than those raining greenbacks on Washington may be willing to accept.
The Kill Switch Act, a bipartisan bill developed after OpenAI’s hack of the Hugging Face research hub, proposes to give the Department of Homeland Security authority over the industry, at least as far as ordering shutdowns in instances of dangerous AI breaches goes. But the specter of humanity’s destruction has the bill looking a little bit inadequate: Under the Kill Switch Act, we’d still be heavily reliant on the industry’s willingness to both police itself and comply with shutdown orders. The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, a Senate bill co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders and Texas Representative Greg Casar, would “permanently ban the development and deployment of superintelligent AI and temporarily advanced AI development until a federal regulator has established safety rules,” as well as “direct the U.S. to pursue international agreements to prevent superintelligence from being developed anywhere in the world.”
That’s probably going to be the bridge too far for the AI industry. But the bad news is that it also may be critically insufficient to halting the apocalypse that’s allegedly at the door. It’s hard to see how a ban would work; AI firms blocked from developing technology in the United States would simply pick up their things and go elsewhere, and it’s not as though China would regard a U.S. ban as anything other than a competitive opportunity for them. And we cannot un-invent a technology. We aren’t going to pass a law that ends AI.
But this is the last war. Lawmakers who want to take this moment to think ahead and cancel the AI Armageddon should be thinking less about the technology itself and instead work harder at making comprehensive rules governing the control of these systems and regulating their safety, the same way we did with nuclear weapons. That’s what you do when you find yourself staring down technology that could wipe out civilization. It’s never been more important for Democratic and Republican voters to find lawmakers willing to lock up Chekhov’s gun, and kick those that won’t to the curb.
This article first appeared in Power Mad*, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.*