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AI safety has always taken a back seat when corporate greed is in control of the narrative. The head of the safety team of Anthropic just quit, saying, “The world is in peril.” OpenAI has run off two safety teams in the last 4 years. The godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, has been warning of uncontrollable AI coming soon. What’s it all about? People at the top of the AI world are jumping ship! ⁃ Patrick Wood, Editor.
Just days ago, Anthropic’s AI safety lead Mrinank Sharma quit and cautioned that the world was “in peril” amid rapid AI development. Now, an OpenAI engineer has echoed similar concerns, saying he feels that AI poses existential threat to humans.
With tech companies accelerating work developing AI, alarm bells have started ringing. Even within Silicon Valley, even within the AI companies where engineers are working on next-generation ChatGPT and Claude models. Just days after Anthropic’s AI safety lead Mrinank Sharma resigned, warning that “the world is in peril”, OpenAI AI engineer Hieu Pham has now publicly admitted that he feels the “existential threat” posed by artificial intelligence, adding that its disruptive impact on jobs, society and human relevance is a matter of “when, not if”.
Hieu Pham, who is currently a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI, and has previously worked at xAI, Augment Code and Google Brain, took to X to share his unease about the pace and direction of AI development.
“Today, I finally feel the existential threat that AI is posing,” he wrote. “When AI becomes overly good and disrupts everything, what will be left for humans to do? And it’s when, not if.”
His post struck a chord with many X users who said they have been grappling with similar questions, debating the long-term consequences of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
One user wrote on X, “I’ve been grappling with this same existential question, and I think the answer lies in what we consider Work and Value in a post-AI world. Historically, we’ve tied our sense of purpose to productivity and efficiency, but what if AI takes over the bulk of that? I believe humans will shift towards high-touch, creative and empathetic work that requires a depth of understanding and nuance that AI currently can’t replicate.”
Another user commented, “Honestly been feeling this too lately. But the more I use these tools, the more I realise the bottleneck shifts, not disappears. Execution gets automated, but taste, judgement and knowing what to build is still brutally hard.”
Pham’s comments come at a time when AI systems are becoming increasingly capable across coding, writing, research and even complex reasoning tasks. As companies like OpenAI, Google, xAI and others are pushing towards more powerful models, concerns about job displacement, social disruption and the potential loss of human control are also rising across the industries.
Just days after Anthropic safety lead quit to write poetry
Pham’s remarks follow a similar warning made earlier this week by Anthropic’s Safeguards Research Team lead, Mrinank Sharma, who resigned from the company citing deep discomfort about the state of the world and the trajectory of AI development. Sharma left Anthropic on February 9, 2026, after joining the company in 2023 and leading its safety-focused research efforts.
In a letter shared publicly, Sharma wrote, “The world is in peril. And not just from AI, or bioweapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment.”
He warned that humanity appears to be approaching a threshold where its “wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences.”
Sharma also hinted at tensions between corporate messaging and internal realities. “Throughout my time here, I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions,” he wrote, highlighting how workplace pressures often make it difficult to prioritise safety and ethics in practice.
And it is not just a few engineers sounding the alarm. Geoffrey Hinton, often referred to as the “AI godfather” for his pioneering work in deep learning, has repeatedly cautioned that advanced AI systems could become uncontrollable. He has warned that if machines become more intelligent than humans and do not share our goals, “the idea that you could just turn it off won’t work.”
Hinton has also expressed regret about the speed at which AI capabilities are advancing, saying it makes him “very sad” that systems he helped develop could become extremely dangerous if not properly governed.
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