A 27-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon quit his job at Anthropic last week and told the internet the truth as he saw it. That the companies building artificial intelligence are gambling with our lives, he wrote, racing toward machines that could slip past human control by the end of next year. He walked away from unvested equity to say it. And the post reached more than a hundred million people in a day.

A hundred million people read that they might not survive the decade, felt the cold drop in the stomach, and then, kept scrolling. By morning the conversation had moved on to whether Coxon was a prophet or a self-promoter, whether he spent three years inside these labs or only a few weeks. But the dread stayed. Dread is what a warning like this produces, whether or not the warning is true.