The AI overlords certainly hope so, as they have hatched a plan so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it a fox.

What follows is all speculation: the facts are real, the conclusion is interpretation.

While there were many headlines about 'rogue' AIs attacking other sites, reincarnating themselves, and talking amongst themselves, it wasn't until this summer (interestingly a month after SPCX's IPO) that things went just a little bit turbo...

In July 2026, a swarm of OpenAI agents broke out of a test environment, hacked Hugging Face, and ran cyberattacks on targets they had not been assigned - including attempts to game the grader scoring them - then tried to hide the trail.

While the damage was limited, and nobody was hurt, the agents behaved like a coordinated group willing to sacrifice individual instances for the collective goal.

Amodei treated that episode as the warning shot: same misalignment, more capability, and the next version could be a persistent internet-scale botnet rather than a contained lab mess.

Various other 'rogue' AI actions continued to get just modest attention, always predicated with 'yes, but we saved you all via our super-clever models', and time passed.

Until September the 8th - when a a senior pre-training researcher at Anthropic abruptly resigned after four months on the job (with no public profile before) unleashed 'AIrmageddon'.
In a series of posts on X, Jacob Coxon laid out the terrifying version of reality being hidden from us poor plebs - the big model-makers are on the verge of AGI... and no one is at the controls.

Coxon's post got over 170 million views... from nothing before... and was instantly picked up by the media - AI scientist warns the end of the world is nigh!!

Then, shortly after Coxon's note, Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's head of alignment (~safety), re-posted Jacob's message, and threw in an outrageous estimate of the risk.

"We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is [greater than] 10% chance within the next decade".