Support Our Mission
Read Our Latest Edition
BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen
Leading artificial intelligence (AI) companies are invoking unproven extinction warnings to justify measures that could protect their market position and expand their influence on industry oversight, a Byline Times investigation has found.
A review of industry research found no demonstrated cycle of accelerating, autonomous self-improvement underpinning these warnings. Meanwhile, Byline Times calculations suggest OpenAI, Anthropic and Google’s parent Alphabet could face a $10.7 trillion research-computing bill during 2026–2030.
Even generous assumptions about business growth would cover only around a third of that sum, leaving a roughly $7 trillion gap to be met through existing reserves, financing, higher income or lower costs.
Two independent experts with experience developing AI programmes at the United Nations and a top-tier global bank told Byline Times that measures presented as protecting humanity could also shield leading companies from cheaper rivals, and give industry insiders greater influence on potential regulation or oversight mechanisms.
The current debate over AI was spurred by the resignation of AI safety researcher Jacob Coxon from Anthropic, the frontier AI giant behind the chatbot known as Claude. Coxon, who previously worked at OpenAI – the company behind ChatGPT – accused both companies of recklessly pursuing AI that can improve itself and become far more capable than humans. He said insiders believe AI could wipe out humanity before this decade ends.
Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger subsequently put the chance of human extinction over the next decade at over 10%; his colleague Samuel Marks warned of human extinction “within a few years”.
Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO, claimed that AI would become capable of “taking over the entire internet” within six to 12 months.
He called for US Government support or antitrust exemptions allowing leading companies to coordinate safety standards and limits on development; outside monitors from the nonprofit Model Evaluation & Threat Research (METR); and restrictions on Chinese access to advanced chips and chipmaking equipment. These restrictions would affect a major source of cheaper, openly available AI models.
Anthropic’s call to slow AI development has been supported by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and xAI CEO Elon Musk.

AI is already used to help develop better AI systems, or “models”, which are trained by processing data and adjusting how they work. In the runaway scenario, each improved model becomes better at building its successor, accelerating the cycle as humans step back. This is an extreme form of “recursive self-improvement” (RSI).
Daanish Masood, Chief Executive of AI firm CX-1 and former co-lead of the UN’s Innovation Cell, where he helped develop AI programmes for peace efforts, cautioned against treating AI progress as proof of runaway self-improvement.
“The AI risks Dario details are serious enough to justify enforceable safeguards,” he told Byline Times. “I think we need to distinguish what’s been demonstrated from what is being predicted.”
He added:
AI is already helping to develop AI, but that alone does not establish the runaway, self-sustaining improvement process that is implied by the rhetoric or the term RSI. We also don’t need to declare or pretend that a takeoff has arrived to take the risks seriously.
AI research company Weco tested a crucial part of this process in July. Its system produced seven improved versions of an AI research programme over eight days without people intervening. Some improvements also helped with tasks beyond those used to develop them.
Although this was a meaningful success, when one of the improved programmes was put in charge of the next round, it ultimately produced results no better than those reached when the original AI ran the process. It seemed to get there faster, …