AI Researcher Says He Left Google DeepMind Over Concern That ‘AI Has The Potential To Kill Us All’
A former researcher for Google’s DeepMind said he resigned from his post due to being “extremely concerned by the default trajectory of this technology.”
Bilal Chughthai said in a social media post that he believes “that AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome.”
Chughthai joined top industry figures who over the past days have issued similar warnings, which now dominate the public conversation.
Joe Benton, who led a safety research team at Anthropic, and Josh Engels, who worked on AI safety at Google, said they are joining independent research organization METR to investigate incidents in which AI systems stray from human instructions or intentions. Their departures come days after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and publicly accused leading AI companies of moving too quickly in their pursuit of more powerful systems.
I recently resigned from Google DeepMind, where I worked on AGI safety and alignment research. At Google, I witnessed AI development first hand. I too am extremely concerned by the default trajectory of this technology. I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us…
— bilal 🔶 (@bilalchughtai_) September 14, 2026
Chughthai, on his end, said that the pace of development “will only get crazier.” “I think it’s possible that the AI companies might, in the next few years, succeed in building superintelligent AI systems that far exceed human capabilities in every domain” and he is not confident that they will “do what we want.”
“Our present understanding of how to train AI systems that deeply want what we want is extremely rudimentary. Worse, we are not on track to solve alignment in time: frontier AI capabilities are improving much faster than our understanding of AI alignment,” he warned.
Chughthai went on to say that he is optimistic about the possibility of containing AI, but there needs to be coordination “to avoid this manic race between AI companies.”
“We need much more transparency into AI development to ensure that AI companies are not imposing unacceptable levels of risk on us all,” he added. And concluded by saying he wants to “help people interested in working on mitigating catastrophic AI threats do the most effective work that they can.”
Top industry leaders have agreed on the need to pace development, and have reportedly discussed a new industry-wide AI safety body that could establish common standards.
The private discussions among OpenAI, Google and Anthropic have been underway as their leaders publicly call for slowing the development of increasingly capable AI, The Information detailed.
Such a body could potentially establish checkpoints that AI developers would have to meet as their models become more powerful. Amodei has proposed tying increasingly advanced capabilities to corresponding safety requirements, including evaluations, interpretability testing, and audits of the environments used to train models.
