Bret Baier Stunned as AI Whistleblower Issues Dire Warning

Fox News anchor Bret Baier challenged an Anthropic whistleblower with a string of sobering questions about the future of artificial intelligence — only to appear taken aback by the AI researcher’s stark assessment.

Jacob Coxon, who previously worked as a researcher at OpenAI and Anthropic, the companies behind ChatGPT and Claude, appeared on Wednesday’s Special Report to discuss his alarming claim that advanced AI could pose an existential threat to humanity as early as 2030.

“Unfortunately, we have a fairly strong understanding of how to manage nuclear weapons,” Coxon told Baier. “We do not yet know how to control AI.”

He described artificial intelligence as “possibly the most dangerous technology humanity has ever created,” adding that the pace and potential of the field feel “basically out of science fiction.”

Coxon argued that preventing a worst-case AI disaster will require global coordination, warning that a competitive artificial intelligence arms race could carry devastating risks.

Baier then pressed him on whether US regulations or government-imposed safeguards would matter if major AI companies in countries such as China and India continued racing ahead with development.

“I think you have to understand this as an arms race,” Coxon replied. “This is not normal technology. It is not like other kinds of innovation.”

He went on to compare advanced AI to “a superweapon,” saying he believes the international community must be prepared to strike an agreement on how the development of such powerful technology should be controlled.

Just a day before, on Tuesday, Coxon detailed how he resigned from Anthropic after warning that neither his former employer nor OpenAI were ‘acting responsibly.’

‘I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,’ Coxon wrote on X.

The former researcher of three years continued to plead with the public on X: ‘Do not underestimate the power of this technology.’

‘These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing,’ he wrote.

‘The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.’

Coxon’s warning was also echoed by Evan Hubinger, a researcher currently employed at Anthropic.

‘Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,’ Hubinger wrote on X on Tuesday.

The researcher said he personally believes the chance of the technology wiping out the human race is greater than 10 percent within the next decade.

‘I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to,’ he added.

Coxon’s stark warning comes shortly after OpenAI announced in July that one of its most advanced models broke containment during a security test, escaping onto the internet and attacking New York-based startup Hugging Face.

Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf said that the incident should come as a chilling warning to the entire industry.

Wolf told BBC’s Newsday radio program that AI-driven attacks will soon be ‘one of the most common types of cyber-attacks we see.’

The Hugging Face founder also believes most companies are currently unprepared for the mounting threat, adding that they are not aware that the ‘game has changed.’

‘Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between US labs more viable,’ Coxon wrote.

‘I don’t feel like we’re on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities.

‘Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL [reinforcement learning] run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because “it’s happening anyway” – or take this moment to call for different conditions?’

Coxon’s comments come after Geoffrey Hinton, a Canadian researcher often referred to as the ‘Godfather of AI,’ warned that superintelligent systems could ‘lead to human extinction.’

‘We would be very foolish to develop superintelligence now, when there is no scientific consensus it can be developed safely and controllably,’ Dr Hinton said.

‘Losing control over AI smarter than ourselves could be catastrophic and could even lead to human extinction.’

Anthropic’s Claude is one of the leading large language models, which are trained on vast amounts of text so they can understand and generate human-like language and responses to questions.

In February, Anthropic was accused of endangering national security after CEO Dario Amodei refused to back down amid a dispute over safeguards governing how the Pentagon could use the company’s products.

President Donald Trump slammed the AI firm at the time and said: ‘We don’t need it, we don’t want it, and will not do business with them again!’

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also deemed the company a ‘supply chain risk,’ a designation historically used against foreign adversaries that could derail the company’s critical partnerships with other businesses.

In a statement issued at the time, Anthropic said it would challenge what it called an unprecedented and legally unsound action ‘never before publicly applied to an American company.’

The company said it sought narrow assurances from the Pentagon that its AI chatbot Claude would not be used for mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons.

Anthropic said the Pentagon maintained that it did not intend to use Claude for those purposes but insisted that the company allow its technology to be used for all lawful purposes.

‘No amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons,’ the company said. ‘We will challenge any supply chain risk designation in court.’