More than 10% chance AI 'could kill all humans' - as Anthropic reveals another 'cybersecurity' incident

There is a more than 10% chance that "AI could kill all humans" in the next decade, according to a top safety researcher at Anthropic.

It comes as the firm revealed it had identified a fourth "cybersecurity" incident - from January 2026 - involving its Claude product.

Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger said earlier on X that while "the risk from present models is low," he was worried about "superintelligence" arising from AI using its own capabilities to build a smarter version of itself.

He said it was happening "faster than we thought".

The Financial Times also reports that Anthropic declined to submit its latest model of Claude to Britain's AI Security Institute for testing before release.

Darren Jones, the former chief secretary to Sir Keir Starmer, wrote to Andy Burnham on Wednesday calling for a new multinational treaty on AI, citing Mr Hubinger's comments.

The letter - also addressed to the secretary generals of the United Nations and the OECD - called on the prime minister to add the topic to the agenda for upcoming G7 and G20 meetings.

Mr Hubinger made the comments while replying to a post by Jacob Coxon, who said he had resigned from Anthropic over concerns after previously working for ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

"Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives," Mr Coxon said.

He said these systems will soon be able to "hack anything, revolutionise any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources".

He added: "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."

Anthropic said on Wednesday evening the fourth "cybersecurity" incident it had identified involved an early version of Claude Opus 4.6 and that affected parties had been identified. It didn't give further details.

It follows a disclosure in July that some Claude models had ‌hacked into the systems of three companies during testing.

OpenAI revealed its own breach the same month, saying its agents had escaped a testing environment and breached the systems of AI platform Hugging Face.

The breaches, alongside other hacks, prompted calls from politicians and researchers for stricter oversight of autonomous AI systems.

At the end of last week, Jakub Pachocki, the chief scientist at OpenAI, said in a company blog post that: "This is a time that calls for extreme caution. I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence."

He added that while OpenAI will continue to seek technical solutions to alignment alongside other security measures, "I believe broader interventions are required".

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However, the development of AI systems has continued at pace.

On Tuesday, Meta rolled out a long-touted AI assistant that can autonomously send emails, sell a car and book travel on a person's behalf, despite internal concerns that the technology mismanages its access to sensitive personal data.

The company's Muse agent, known internally as Hatch, is the centrepiece of Mark Zuckerberg's plan to offer "personal superintelligence" to the billions of people who use Meta's services daily.

The product will initially only be available in the US, via a dedicated Muse app or Meta's WhatsApp messaging service, Meta said in its announcement.

OpenAI said after the Hugging Face hack that it was: "placing stricter requirements on alignment throughout a model's lifecycle and creating more isolated sandboxes, restricting internet access, and further controlling access to model weights."

The company said that over the past several weeks, it had delayed parts of its latest model's development and release while it "strengthened and tested protections" and that, "based on that work, we believe Astra's safeguards sufficiently minimise the risk of severe harm".

(c) Sky News 2026: More than 10% chance AI 'could kill all humans' - as Anthropic reveals another 'cybersecurity' incident