Should we be skeptical about the AI panic?

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

Death is scary and all. But there are non-speculative problems with AI we should be addressing now.

In Silicon Valley, it’s not such a novel question. But after Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon quit his job last week and posted on X that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade,” a lot more people are asking.

“This is not a marketing stunt,” Coxon wrote. “If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible - but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”

Coxon is far from alone in his assessment — some current Anthropic employees agree — but his post struck a particular chord. The AI industry quickly weighed in, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calling for an industry-wide slowdown on frontier AI research. Other AI leaders, including Sam Altman and Elon Musk, have done the same.

To break down whether we really need to worry about a robot apocalypse, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke to Wired senior writer Maxwell Zeff. According to Zeff, “there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley right now who are warning that that’s a real possibility.” But not everyone agrees, and they certainly don’t agree on what to do about it.

Below is an excerpt of Sean’s conversation with Zeff, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley right now who are warning that that’s a real possibility.

The thing that people have to understand is that Silicon Valley has been calling for added attention on AI safety for years. So when this Anthropic researcher said last week that he was worried that AI could kill humanity in the next few years, that was shocking to many people. My parents, my family called me, and they were worried, understandably. They asked me the same question: “Are we going to die?”

And I had to tell them, these people have been worried about AI killing all of us for years, and now it seems to be breaking through.

I interviewed Jacob, and the thing he said to me is that he thinks this is just the right time. Anthropic is about to go public in what could be the biggest IPO ever. The Trump administration is focused on AI in a way that no other presidency has ever been before. And of course, yes, the Hugging Face incident everyone just heard about, you talked about it on your show a few weeks ago.