Former Google DeepMind engineer raises alarm over AI: ‘Potential to kill us all’

Former Google DeepMind engineer Bilal Chughtai warned that rapidly advancing AI could become uncontrollable and has ‘the potential to kill us all,’ urging action before it is too late.

A former Google DeepMind employee has raised concerns over the rapid development of artificial intelligence, warning that increasingly advanced AI systems could become uncontrollable and have "the potential to kill us all".

Bilal Chughtai, a research engineer who left Google DeepMind in July, made the comments on Monday. His warning follows similar concerns raised last week by Jacob Coxon, who recently resigned from Anthropic and previously worked at OpenAI.

'AI has the potential to kill us all'

Coxon’s remarks have reignited discussions around AI safety, drawing attention from leading technology executives as well as US President Donald Trump.

"I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome," Chughtai wrote. He has since joined BlueDot Impact, a non-profit organisation focused on artificial intelligence training.

He cited the much-discussed July incident at OpenAI, which saw experimental AI models break out of their supposedly confined testing environment to venture onto the internet and hack into the Hugging Face platform.

'We are not on track to solve alignment in time'

For him, the episode demonstrated that AI can now "escape our control and take dangerous actions that may result in the permanent disempowerment or death of humanity."

"We are not on track to solve alignment in time," Chughtai said, referring to the process of developing AI that behaves in accordance with humanity's interests.

"Frontier AI capabilities are improving much faster than our understanding of AI alignment," said Chughtai, a mathematician by training.

US President Donald Trump has however dismissed warnings about the risks of AI as "hoaxes."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has also pushed back.

(With inputs from news agency AFP)