On 8 September 2026 the researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, declaring that the two largest companies in the field are ‘gambling with our lives,’ and the people building these systems ‘earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.’His concern was not an isolated one. Tens of thousands of people, among them leading scientists, have signed an international statement demanding a ban on the development of ‘superintelligence’ until there is scientific consensus that it is safe.