Former Google DeepMind researcher says he resigned because ‘I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all’

A former Google DeepMind researcher said he left the AI lab over fears that AI “has the potential to kill us all” and humanity “might be running out of time to avoid this outcome.”

“At Google, I witnessed AI development first hand,” Bilal Chughtai wrote in a statement that he posted on X and other platforms. “I too am extremely concerned by the default trajectory of this technology.”

Chughtai’s comments come after former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon reignited focus on AI safety with his own viral post, which warned that employees at AI companies privately fear the technology could wipe out humanity. While some in the industry have criticized Coxon, others at Anthropic and OpenAI have echoed his concerns.

Over the weekend, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said frontier AI labs need “to pace” development while using the time to advance alignment. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman later expressed agreement with that broad view.

Alignment, the work to ensure AI systems’ goals and behavior comply with their instructions, has proven to be difficult, Chughtai wrote.

“Our present understanding of how to train AI systems that deeply want what we want is extremely rudimentary,” he wrote. “Worse, we are not on track to solve alignment in time: frontier AI capabilities are improving much faster than our understanding of AI alignment.”

Chughtai said that episodes like OpenAI’s rogue agents hacking Hugging Face underline the risks of misaligned AI models, particularly if AI companies can build models that surpass human intelligence. He said that “it’s possible” companies could build such systems that “that far exceed human capabilities in every domain” in “the next few years.”

“I am not confident that these AI systems will do what we want,” he wrote.

Chughtai’s LinkedIn profile says he worked as a research engineer for Google DeepMind in London for a year and a half. A Google representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

After his resignation, Chughtai joined BlueDot Impact, a London-based AI safety nonprofit that said it recently raised $25 million and is expanding to San Francisco.

“We’re excited to welcome Bilal to the BlueDot team,” the company wrote on X, quoting Chughtai’s resignation post. “He’s joining us to build the institution that will make it easy for great people to gain context, upskill and get to work on AI safety in a fast and effective way.”