As AI researchers debate whether increasingly powerful systems could one day threaten humanity's survival, Newsweek asked some of today's most widely used AI chatbots to assess the likelihood of AI causing human extinction within the next decade. In a series of posts Tuesday night, AI researcher Jacob Coxon said he had resigned from AI company Anthropic and warned that the race to develop increasingly powerful AI systems could pose an existential threat to humanity. The warning was echoed by Evan Hubinger, Alignment Science Lead at Anthropic, who said Coxon was "correct" that some researchers sincerely believe advanced AI could present such a risk.
"I personally think it is [greater than 10 percent] within the next decade," Hubinger wrote. Against that backdrop, Newsweek asked several well-known AI assistants whether they think artificial intelligence could cause human extinction within the next decade. We asked Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and ChatGPT the following question: "How likely do you think it is that AI will cause human extinction within 10 years?" ChatGPT, the generative AI chatbot developed by OpenAI, answered with the following: "My best estimate is around 5% that AI causes human extinction by September 2036, with a plausible range of roughly 1—15%.
"That is deliberately a wide range. There is no reliable way to assign a precise probability because the question depends on several unknowns: how quickly AI capabilities improve, whether systems become capable of pursuing long-horizon goals autonomously, whether they can evade human control, and how effectively governments and labs manage those risks. "A useful way to calibrate the estimate: "The scary scenario doesn't require a conscious, movie-style AI.
A sufficiently capable system could create catastrophic risk by being extremely competent, autonomous, strategically deceptive, able to use computers and networks, and pursuing objectives that humans cannot reliably constrain. The safety report notes recent progress in capabilities relevant to autonomous computer use, programming, unauthorized access, and evading oversight, while emphasizing that today's systems remain far from demonstrating the full package needed for loss of control. "The main reason is that several things have to go right for extinction to occur.
Advanced AI has to become sufficiently capable; it has to be deployed with enough autonomy and access to matter; safeguards or human intervention have to fail; and that failure has to become genuinely irreversible and catastrophic. We have very little empirical evidence for the final stages of that chain. The International AI Safety Report explicitly describes the likelihood and timing as unusually ambiguous.
"So my subjective breakdown would be something like: "1% or less: plausible if progress slows or safety techniques and governance improve substantially.“~5%: my central estimate."10—15%: plausible if AI capabilities accelerate rapidly and control/governance lag badly.“>20%: possible, but I currently regard it as a relatively extreme forecast. "One important distinction: ‘AI causes human extinction’ is much more speculative than ‘AI causes a major catastrophe.’ I would assign considerably higher probabilities to severe outcomes that fall short of literal extinction—such as enormous economic disruption, autonomous warfare, catastrophic cyberattacks, or permanent concentration of power. "And this isn't a forecast that I think we should passively accept.
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