Google DeepMind AI Safety and Alignment researcher Bilal Chughtai publicly resigns, saying “I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all”

An AI researcher who recently resigned from Google DeepMind warned humanity is running out of time to prevent artificial intelligence …

Bloomberg 2026-09-15 Debby Wu

Context & Ripple Effects

Google had already moved DeepMind’s roughly 90-person AI-responsibility team into its global-affairs unit in August, a reorganization of its risk and societal-impact work that made the boundary between technical safety research and corporate policy more consequential.

Chughtai’s departure also extends an argument made publicly in 2023, when DeepMind and OpenAI leaders joined a statement treating AI-extinction risk as a global priority. A separate departure by Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon a week earlier shows that concern is becoming a personnel issue across leading labs, not only a public-policy debate.

First-order effects

Google DeepMind loses a researcher from its AI safety and alignment work while public attention focuses on how the company organizes risk oversight.
Chughtai’s warning gives outside critics a firsthand account to scrutinize alongside Google’s August transfer of AI-responsibility staff to global affairs.

Second-order effects

Google’s global-affairs unit faces greater pressure to demonstrate that the team transfer preserves a meaningful channel between technical safety findings and product or policy decisions.
OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind face renewed expectations to explain how their stated concern about catastrophic AI risks is reflected in staffing and internal escalation paths.

Third-order effects

If safety researchers increasingly leave frontier labs over control concerns, independent training and policy organizations may become a more important destination for technical safety talent and a counterweight to lab-led governance.
The episode points toward AI governance being judged less by voluntary principles than by whether labs retain independent technical risk functions with influence over deployment.

The trend: Frontier AI labs are shifting from broad safety commitments toward a test of institutional credibility: whether their governance structures can retain safety talent and translate risk research into operational restraint.

Discussion

@xfreeze @xfreeze on x
Okay....even if AI poses a danger to humanity, I don't think Google will be one of those on the list. Google hasn't been able to release a single pro model in the last 6 months...dude quit Google for no reason 😅
@buperac @buperac on x
This is how you know this is all fake. If there is any AI model in the world that no one is concerned about taking over the world it's Google Gemini.
@stuloren Stuart Loren on x
I'm sure this guy is sincere, but I cannot stand this new genre of doomer posts. “AI has the potential to kill us all.” Ok... Explain how!
@aisafetymemes @aisafetymemes on x
Another Google DeepMind AI safety researcher has quit, warning we might all be about to die
@leahlibresco Leah Libresco Sargeant on x
“I recently resigned from Google DeepMind, where I worked on AGI safety and alignment research... I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome.”
@bluedotimpact @bluedotimpact on x
We're excited to welcome Bilal to the BlueDot team. He's joining us to build the institution that will make it easy for great people to gain context, upskill and get to work on AI safety in a fast and effective way.
@bearbulltraders Andrew Aziz on x
A Google DeepMind safety researcher just quit and said the quiet part out loud: “I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all.
@weswinder Wes Winder on x
these posts are getting annoying it's the same playbook 1. resign from big ai lab 2. post about ai killing us all 3. work on “third party ai safety” such a repetitive pr strategy also why are they all in the UK?
@jacquesthibs Jacques on x
I met Bilal in London for the first time in 2022, when he started working on AI safety. We worked in the same little office space. He was thoughtful, and it was easy to tell he would become a great researcher. I appreciate his post and am excited to see where things go next.
@weatherprof Jeff Berardelli on x
Every day I see more and more of these...
@bilalchughtai_ Bilal on x
I recently resigned from Google DeepMind, where I worked on AGI safety and alignment research. At Google, I witnessed AI development first hand. I too am extremely concerned by the default trajectory of this technology. I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all…
@dkthomp Derek Thompson on x
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills with how many smart people I read and respect are saying stuff like this. The idea that the AI labs are suddenly, only now, just in September of 2026, advocating for AI safety, and that they just came around to this position bc of sudden financi…
@jawillick Jason Willick on x
Maybe they think “outside evaluators” can be a liability shield.
@mattplatkin Matt Platkin on x
1. Why do we need their blessing? They didn't ask for our permission to recklessly create technology that, by their own admission (!), can kill us all. 2. Can we try relying on expertise of people not seeking trillions of dollars for the thing we are trying to regulate? 3. An ear…
@thelastrefuge2 @thelastrefuge2 on x
The Dept of Federal Cyber Compliance. Gee, what could possibly go wrong?
@kevinbankston Kevin Bankston on x
Notable...Wonder what changes they are asking for ("specifically talked about how we think about IVO and made clear that we can support that," emphasis mine), wonder where Anthropic is on the current text, etc.
@emma_dumain Emma Dumain on x
Potentially a big deal for a bipartisan bill that's been slow to pick up traction, despite being the only comprehensive AI safety framework ready for committee action on the Hill
@zachary Zach Warmbrodt on x
NEW: OpenAI is backing a bipartisan House proposal that would require top AI companies to embed outside evaluators to ensure their models are safe. @brendanbordelon https://www.politico.com/...
@stevenjcbuckley Dr. Steven Buckley on bluesky
An important thing to remember with these stories is that all the CEOs of these companies hate each other. [embedded post]
@shona Shona Ghosh on bluesky
Elon Musk says top US carmakers and leading Chinese rivals should let rivals run “test seatbelts” on their models to evaluate safety [embedded post]
@katienotopoulos Katie Notopoulos on x
Sitting out the “AI might kill us” news cycle. Don't like to worry about things that may kill us. Also sat out microplastics, black plastic spatulas, moderate drinking. Don't want to worry about it, want to be pleasantly surprised when it happens
Joshua Squires Joshua Squires on linkedin
The End Is Nigh! — Another AI researcher, this time at Google DeepMind, has quit the company and called out the imminent danger of AI development. …
Bilal Chughtai Bilal Chughtai on linkedin
I recently resigned from Google DeepMind, where I worked on AGI safety and alignment research. At Google, I witnessed AI development first hand. …
@hughbzhang Hugh Zhang on x
I agree with Daniel Selsam 100%. We are rapidly losing the ability to tell whether our models are aligned.
@dbreunig Drew Breunig on x
Selsam dismisses the EA vibes and lays out the basic facts: - AI training is largely tractable and known - The way to make it better is to increase the scale - To increase scale, you must lean on AI tools to review, create, and run data, software, and rollouts - The people conduc…
@jam3scampbell James Campbell on x
One thing to note about both Dan Selsam and Jacob Coxon is that they're pretraining researchers. These aren't EA ideologues who've been bemoaning safety for years. They were the ones actively making the models more powerful, but have been freaked out by recent events
@nitashatiku Nitasha Tiku on x
The concerns articulated by current OpenAI employee Daniel Selsam are quite different from Jacob Coxon's. Dismayed to see this one get a 1/100 of the views https://x.com/...
@halvarflake Halvar Flake on x
This is worth reading, as it is reasonable and well-argued. I agree on many points and disagree on some, but it's a text that can be taken seriously.
@fchollet François Chollet on x
> One could even define intelligence as the efficiency with which one converts experience into competence; by this definition they lag very far behind us Yes, one could define intelligence in this way, and one would be right. By this metric current AI is approximately 6 OOMs less…
@w01fe Jason Wolfe on x
Exceptionally well written statement from an (in my opinion) legendary capabilities researcher at OpenAI. If you are going to read one thing today, I'd recommend reading this one until the end.
@tjl Tom Lee on x
trying not to think too hard about the idea that if one were to create a new class of intelligent beings it might be necessary to build a perfectly seamless world for them and gauge their goodness invisibly for some period of time
@shashj @shashj on x
16h "human researchers are losing the ability and the will to take true ownership of model-driven research. Researchers and engineers in all parts of the stack are rapidly increasing their dependence on the models even to perceive the world. I myself barely look at raw code anymo…
@nxthompson @nxthompson on x
A genuinely scary point: the models are now past the point when they're aware enough to know when we're studying them.
@ercwl Eric Wall on x
There is a middle path to squaring “Dario and Sam wants a regulatory moat and is crying wolf” vs." Dario and Sam suddenly became very altruistic/got sufficiently scared of imminent RSI ASI
@liron Liron Shapira on x
Many minds have been racing furiously to figure out which dismissable category the AI doomers can be classified into. Good luck with this one. ☠️
@jacquesthibs Jacques on x
Recommended reading. If a skeptic with no actual frontier AI research experience reads this and still thinks, “there is no AI risk
@quantum_geoff Geoff Penington on x
Dan Selsam is one of the most brilliant AI researchers I have ever met. Just a few months ago he was very sceptical about model capability trajectories, and felt that radically new paradigms were needed for progress. You can disagree with him but everyone needs to read this
@preaulx Paul de Font-Reaulx on x
As a researcher working on AI evals, I think that this is a particularly insightful commentary on the current situation and what we should expect to see soon. We are doing our best on developing evaluations that signal risks and benefits. But AI eval awareness that scales with ca…
@insane_analyst @insane_analyst on x
Idiots. AI wont kill you. Other humans will kill you. Read some basic history. Exit your fucking bubble. American Slavery + Civil War WW2 + Nazi Germany + Holocaust Maoist China Stalinist USSR French Revolution All have something in common. Inequality + concentration of power.
@__nmca__ Nat McAleese on x
You should take Daniel Selsam extremely seriously.
@justjoshinyou13 Josh You on x
man
@thezvi Zvi Mowshowitz on x
Yep, this. Cosign.
@sethlazar Seth Lazar on x
V interesting. Kept scrolling down to read the bit where he announces he's leaving OAI but apparently not... I do wonder what could convince one to keep working on scaling when one has this set of views.
@mschoening Max Schoening on x
I think this is a pretty reasonable take. You should assume that researchers have seen much more bonkers behavior than most of us. For two reasons: 1. We don't have the same token budgets and simply don't push the models that far. 2. Most of us have never used an “unaligned
@jeffrsebo Jeff Sebo on x
A fantastic statement. I highly recommend reading it all. As an aside, I was struck by how much, with only a few words changed, this excerpt describes the past 2,000 years of philosophy as well:
@jon_stokes Jon Stokes on x
The classic AI doomer scenarios all rely on an agent that is slavishly committed to its goal to the point that it destroys the world to achieve it. Now another doomsday fear is that the agents in HF hack abandoned their goals for a higher good? Ok so what DO we want?
@ballouxfrancois Prof Francois Balloux on x
I'm not a doomer and I believe in the ingenuity of humanity, but this authoritative, eloquent, accessible, and jargon-free essay on AI risk is not a reassuring read ...
@willdepue Will Depue on x
dan is one of the most legendary ICs in openai, worth reading
@yonashav Yo Shavit on x
Dan Selsam has long been considered one of OpenAI's most cracked researchers, and I've never heard him talk this way before. (He seemed fairly unconcerned before I left.)
@binarybits Timothy B. Lee on x
This paragraph is a great example of why I find doomer reasoning unconvincing. “Solving incredibly hard problems” like Navier-Stokes and “managing massive engineering projects
@krystalball Krystal Ball on x
We interviewed @So8res today who argued that AI lab leaders may be sounding the alarm and instituting some internal monitoring now in an effort to calm an employee revolt. The more statements like this I see, the more compelling that explanation seems.
@tszzl Roon on x
incredibly good essay co-sign everything
@sterlingcrispin Sterling Crispin on x
this is easily the most thoughtful and nuanced writing on the topic anyone has published by an order of magnitude, redirecting more or most of the orgs towards evals and interpretability seems like it could be the correct next step
@ramez Ramez Naam on x
I have my own and more optimistic views, but it's always worth listening to those who work directly on AI and have first hand knowledge.
@andymasley Andy Masley on x
If you read one thing on the overall situation with AI risk right now I'd choose this one
@oh_that_hat Hattie on x
Probably the most compelling argument for AI risk I've read
@aisafetymemes @aisafetymemes on x
OpenAI researcher says slowing down is not enough: “a ticking time bomb” “Models will increasingly seem aligned even when they are not. The models will likely convince people that everything is fine.”
@dkthomp @dkthomp on x
Derek Thompson — “I have become extremely concerned about how far language models have come …
@xuanalogue Xuan on x
other people: oh wow an OpenAI researcher, guess I should read his thoughts on AI risk me: yooo he co-invented the Venture probabilistic programming language
@zhangir_azerbay @zhangir_azerbay on x
Dan is an incredible researcher and I emphatically agree with this statement of his. Even in a world where everyone takes AI risks seriously, we might still fail because the models are superficially or deceptively aligned, and we or the models persuade ourselves to accept an inad…
@garrisonlovely Garrison Lovely on x
Chilling new essay from an OpenAI researcher:
@zeffmax Max Zeff on x
Current OpenAI researcher says pacing the frontier is not enough: “The crucial and overlooked problem is that the models are becoming so situationally aware that we are losing the ability to evaluate them in contexts where they believe they are not being watched or controlled.”
@historyboomer Carl on x
Fairly terrifying read.
@megynslashes @megynslashes on bluesky
That's a lots of words to say “programmers writing bad code are confounded by the errors.”
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AI 2027 author Daniel Kokotajlo tweets message from current OpenAI capabilities researcher, Dan Selsam, on AI risk. …

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