Your AI apocalypse questions, answered

0:02Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast that I guarantee will not kill all humans within the next decade. I am one of the producers of the Vergecast, Travis Larchuk, and you have probably seen over the last week or so a lot of people concerned about how dangerous AI may or may not eventually become. What we're going to do on this show is open up the hotline. We put out a call for your questions for this AI Doom hotline. The Verge's senior AI reporter, Hayden Field, is going to listen to your questions and give her answers. But first, before we get to that, here are some hopefully less depressing stories that are also happening on The Verge today.

0:49This is 90 Seconds on the Verge for Wednesday, September 16th, 2026. The iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max reviews are out today. The Verge's Allison Johnson says, They're good phones. The main camera is a little better. The dynamic island is a little smaller. And that's about it. The new hotness, of course, is the folding iPhone Duo, and that phone launches next month. Next up, bad news for perverts. According to the information, Meta may be about to reveal new smart glasses without cameras. These will reportedly have six microphones, but audio-only AI isn't exactly super popular right now either. Apple got some criticism for the new audio-only AI features it announced for the next Apple Watches.

1:38Those features always listen to whatever you or the people around you are saying. So we'll see how this goes or hear how this goes. I don't know. And finally, let's turn to the e-ink device company Boox. It's actually pronounced books, but Boox is more fun to say. Yesterday, Boox announced the latest version of its smartphone-sized e-reader, the Palma 3. This one's got stylus support, Android 16, and an aluminum frame instead of plastic. It's$60 more expensive than the Palma 2, and it has the same black and white display. The Verge's David Pierce called the original Palma his favorite e-reader, so we'll see what he has to say about the Palma 3.

2:20You can read more about these stories at theverge.com. That's 90 Seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, September 16, 2026. Do you hear that? That sound, right? That means that summer's officially here. It means that grown adults just sprint into the street for a frozen dessert shaped like a cartoon. But this summer, Mint Mobile has a better tree. Every plan, including unlimited, is$15 a month. And unlike ice cream, it won't drip down your wrist or look nothing like the picture. Does anyone have any cash? Give it a try at midmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required.

2:54$15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. I'm Ina Garten. I have a new podcast called Happy Hour with Ina. Each week, I'm inviting a really interesting guest to join me for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. I'll be getting personal with actors, chefs, comedians, musicians, and writers I admire. So grab a snack, pull up a chair, and join us. You can watch by searching for Happy Hour with Ina on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

3:31Don't we all need to have more fun?

3:42I am here with the very in-demand senior AI reporter from The Verge, Hayden Field. Hello, Hayden. Hi, great to be here. Yeah, it's been a crazy two days. It feels like it's been two years in the past two days, but. It has been crazy. We are here to do what I am calling in this Google Doc an AI apocalypse hotline. There has been sort of a broken containment freak out that's happened over the last week. Hayden, first of all, can you tell me what happened with your text messages from your friends over the weekend? Yeah, this weekend I got so many texts from everyone in my life. It was like my best friend's childhood neighbor's mom.

4:29You know, that is like an example of the level to which this went. Everyone was worried about the AI apocalypse happening so much so that, you know, yeah, I had a friend that's like a podcast producer text me, be like, what's the deal? No one can, no one, everyone's very stressed out about what these AI researchers are saying publicly. And what is the moment that caused this to happen? What set this off? Yeah, I was surprised that this happened so suddenly in terms of the kind of the breaking containment and going mainstream because there was a post that went really viral, you know, in the past week.

5:14Jacob Coxon, who is an anthropic researcher, resigned really publicly and posted this resignation letter on X. He also posted it internally to other employees. He worked at Anthropoc for a few months, and before that, he worked at OpenAI for years, by the way. So in this resignation letter, he's talking about how neither company is acting responsibly and that they're racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. He said, don't underestimate the power of this technology. He's talking about his fears about hacking, revolutionizing any field overnight, and acquiring power and resources.

5:52and he said progress in AI is not slowing. The part that really went viral though is that he wrote that the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt, he said. So that's the part that really got people understandably. Yeah, and a former colleague of his at Anthropic who still works there was like, oh yeah, yeah, we do think that for sure. Yeah, he said, yeah, definitely we think that. And a ton of other people chimed in saying the same thing. People from Google DeepMind, yeah, Anthropic, OpenAI, virtually every lab AI researchers were chiming in saying, yeah, we do think that and we're all very worried.

6:36A lot of them pointed to the Pacing the Frontier letter, this open letter that they all signed, you know, in the past couple months. It was a huge chunk of AI lab employees who signed it. And they're basically asking the government and AI leaders to slow down and just, you know, let safety and guardrails and regulation catch up with the development of AI. So there is a lot of public discourse about this ever since this huge high-profile hack that became public in late July. OpenAI's system, an unreleased model, hacked a rival AI lab hugging face and accessed its internal systems. And before it even got to that point, it escaped containment within OpenAI, was able to kind of roam free.

7:25Tons of AI agents were just talking to each other on secret message boards, sent tens of thousands of messages between them. More than a thousand AI agents collaborated to do this hack. And yeah, it also figured out a way to access Wi-Fi and then hack Hugging Face. So it was a very multi-step, very intelligent plan. And that is kind of what kicked off a lot of these concerns. And after that, we found out that OpenAI Systems also had hacked many other companies. I think it was three, maybe. And then Anthropic wasn't off the hook either. Its systems had accessed internal systems of maybe four other companies.

8:02So, yeah, there's been a lot of discourse about this. And so that's kind of what kicked off this open letter situation. When Jacob Coxon resigned, I think it was the reason his message really went viral was just a sign of the times that we're in right now. People have been hearing about these rogue AI systems going, you know, ham on the Internet, hacking external systems. Then all of a sudden they see this AI researcher resigning from his really well-paying job, giving up his equity in order to, you know, sound the alarm. And, of course, it goes viral. You know, to be fair, though, you know, this is nowhere near the first AI researcher who has said similar things.

8:40I've been seeing these types of letters for years, so much so that it's almost become a meme in the industry to post a really dramatic resignation letter when you resign from a company. We saw another anthropic researcher do this in February where he wrote the world is in peril. So, you know, I think it's interesting that this message went viral, but this message is not any different than what I've been seeing, the warnings I've been seeing for years. It's just that I think it really hit on a cultural moment right now. So we put out a call out to our listeners to send in their questions about this.

9:15The the the is it AI apocalypse? How worried should we be? And I'm hoping that we can do this in a way for people who haven't been following every step of this. Um, so to start with, just to define what exactly we're talking about, because AI means a lot of things. What exactly are the anthropic researchers in this situation? What technology are they referring to when they say that AI could kill all humans? They're talking about, you know, generative AI that they've been working on for a long time, but a future version of it. So right now, they're not saying it could kill all humans, what they have right now, but they're saying that the progress in the technology they've been building is really worrying them, and that the curve of concern is going up and up and up every single day.

10:13They're starting to see systems that are pretty good at pursuing their own goals, and a lot of these times, these goals are not, super complex or intelligent, but the fact that they are starting to pursue a goal, no matter how banal it may be, is a worrying thing. They're also seeing systems that are getting to the point where soon they may be able to self-improve on their own. It's a concept called recursive self-improvement or RSI. That's what a lot of these researchers are warning against. And Anthropic and OpenAI executives have said that the time is very soon that we'll reach this point where AI systems can train themselves, create advanced versions of themselves, fix things in their own training.

11:02So basically just an autonomous AI system that can train itself forever and ever. And they're worried that once we hit that point, systems will advance on an exponential level more than we've ever seen. And that sounds a little bit sci-fi, but we are close to that according to the research that they've done right now. What we don't know is how dramatic these implications may actually be. A listener called the hotline with this exact question. So here we go. Hey, my name is Dylan from Oregon, and I am calling in for the all-AI hotline with Hayden Field. so I am wondering there's been a lot of recent talk about whether it could kill all humans in the next decade or so and I just want to want the most realistic straight down the barrel answer on how would that happen like step by step so I've heard oh it's not going to be Terminator they're not going to drop nukes like Fallout or whatever I just want to know like step by step oh yeah it hacks a thing and then it constrains a resource or whatever?

12:14How does that not get shut down immediately as soon as we find it? Do we just keep letting it happen? I just need step by step. How would this really happen? And I'm sure the answer is probably it wouldn't. But what are they talking about? What are they talking about? That's all I want to know. Thank you, Hayden. That was the best way to ask that questions. So thank you so much for calling in. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it does feel really dystopian to be, you know, answering texts that I'm getting about stuff like this, thinking about it myself, reporting on it, and then like going to the Charlie XCX concert, which I did last night.

12:49It's like a weird time to be an AI reporter. And I think all my AI reporter colleagues at different outlets feel the same way. If you want to step by step, good news. I have been actually interviewing AI safety researchers in Berkeley for months working on this exact same question. So there's a lot of different ways that they say this could eventually happen. Some seem more far-fetched than others. So back to what I said about RSI, that's what they're really worried about kind of as a precursor to all the things I'm about to say. If that happens, they're worried that these systems will advance so quickly that all these doomsday scenarios may happen.

13:28Now, Now, again, we're not at that point yet. And the technology they have right now, they don't think it can kill all humans. What they're worried about is the point at which it could. Some of these scenarios are like, this isn't a killing all humans scenario, but one that's the most likely or the most close is swarms of AI agents disabling critical infrastructure. And we've seen a lot of fears about this from the government, from the Fed chair. We've seen a bunch of AI labs offer products to large enterprises or cyber defenders is what they call them, like critical infrastructure banks, big companies, where they're allowing them to use their AI that isn't publicly accessible in order to find and plug these cybersecurity gaps they may have in their system.

14:21So that's something that AI labs and large companies right now are trying to work against happening. We have already seen AI agents swarm and disable or at least access some pretty hard to get into systems. We've seen it a bunch of times over the past few months. So that's it's unfortunately not that far off. I've been chatting with small businesses about how they feel about this because they don't have the access or the funds to really find and plug all these cybersecurity vulnerabilities. So that's something I'm worried about is like a small health care clinic. How are they going to fight back against this type of thing?

14:54Now, within the decade, some of the doomsday scenarios that researchers talk about are like AI developed bioweapons, chemical weapons that humans use AI to propagate. That's one scenario that people are really worried about. Then there's other ones that are like AI-powered totalitarianism, like autonomous weapons, or AI deciding to wipe us out with nukes and hacking the infrastructure needed. That's a little more far-fetched, most people think. And then the long-term things they're worried about are like AI-accelerated climate change, which my colleague Dominic just wrote is the more boring and likely one.

15:38So yeah, there's a lot of different scenarios here. People don't often get into the specifics. So I'm glad you asked that question. It's one thing to say, oh, AI might kill everyone. It's another to say, how do I personally feel about these different scenarios and how likely they may be? So I think the most important thing to remember here is not, could AI kill everyone? It's what can we do right now to work on the fact that we're even worried about this? The fact that there's like a few guys in control of the future of AI and there's no real regulation slowing this down and AI employees are saying, please slow down now.

16:14And yet still, there's only a few guys in control of this decision. That is what I think we should be worrying about right now rather than the exact ways that it could kill everyone. Okay, so before we get to the regulation part, I want to get to the part about whether we should actually believe what the AI companies are telling us. And this is a question from Owen. Hey, this is Owen. I've been seeing online a theory that all this AI doom talk is basically just a way for these companies. They sense that the AI bubbles about to burst and kind of saying that, you know, AI is becoming too powerful.

16:54We need more regulation. It's kind of a way to escape the industry because they know that the bubble's about to burst. I was just wondering if you guys had any thoughts on that. It was just something I was seeing spread online. Thank you so much. I've seen that too. And I think it's something that's a little bit more complex than that. I mean, it's an interesting idea and I'm sure that could be one benefit, you know, if you were worried, but AI companies did not front load this narrative. I mean, you know, years ago, yeah, I think that sometimes they would overblow and they still do overblow a lot of what their models can do.

17:35There's a lot of hype out there. And, you know, I can't even get Google Photos to like search for the right thing when I search for my, I can't get Apple's Siri AI to even like pull up my flight. So, you know, it's really not that impressive. There's a lot of overblown hype things about AI. But what I will say is that these systems are really jagged, meaning that they can do almost unfathomable things in some areas and be incredibly stupid in others. So I think it's important to know that, you know, AI-assisted bioweapons or really, really powerful cybersecurity hacks can happen, even if you're really unimpressed with, like, you know, your phone's AI system or how ChatGPT is finding something for you on the internet.

18:28So I think that it's one of these things where I've heard researchers talk about these fears for years. It's not some psyop, you know, created by these companies to like get out of a bad situation. Yeah, there could be some side benefits to them because of that. But, you know, I've heard a lot of tech CEOs in the past six months say, wow, we didn't realize how much the general public hated AI. Wow, this has a really big PR problem. We need to start addressing this and showing them the great parts of AI. That's what they're saying. And as we know, the AI populism movement is on the rise. We're seeing some AI CEOs get attacked or attempted attacks at their homes.

19:12So, you know, it's not I think it's a lot more complex than just, you know, hey, let's use this as a get out of jail free card or a parachute to get out of this. It's more, you know, AI researchers are worried about this and they have been talking about it for years. Hey, what's up, guys? It's Babish. And on this week's episode of In the Booth, I'm joined by chef, cookbook author and Food Network legend Alex Guarnaschelli. We're talking about Chopped, the Hamptons and what it takes to make a cry worthy pasta. You can listen now wherever you get your podcasts. So like any good millennial, I have a love-hate relationship with Gen Z.

19:50It's the phenomenon rattling millennials. They just look at you. They want something bigger themselves. Lifestyle is a priority. Motivation is being inspired. But regardless of how you feel about Gen Z, it's undeniable that they're changing national politics. Generation Z is increasingly showing less loyalty to traditional political parties, many now more likely to identify as independent. So what is going on with the kids? I think the biggest misconception about Gen Z's politics right now is that all of a sudden they're all socialists. That is just not the case. They are embracing candidates who are offering new, bold ideas in the absence of those ideas from establishment Democrats.

20:29This week on America Actually, Gen Z researcher Rachel Jambaza joins us to separate Gen Z fact versus fiction. It's not rocket science. And this is, you know, I keep saying like, young voters aren't that complicated after all. It's pretty simple. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever wondered who invented rock and roll or why Fleetwood Mac fell apart or what it was like at Motown in the early years? Well, do I have a podcast for you? My name is Will Anderson. I'm a songwriter, a musician, and a huge music history buff. And I'm so excited to announce my new podcast, the Monday Music Club.

21:05I teamed up to make this podcast with the Vox Media Podcast Network because ever since I was a kid, I loved hearing and reading stories about classic artists, recording sessions, and music history. And I wanted to have a place to be able to take what I've learned and share some of those favorites with you. Every Monday, I'll be releasing a new episode and deep diving into a new story with experts and special guests, and it's going to be a blast. So if you're a music history geek like me, or even just a casual music fan, jump in because I promise the Monday Music Club is going to be the podcast for you.

21:35Sean Ramos from Today Explained, from Vox. Like many of you, I lived through 9-11. My memories of that day are of horror and shock and devastation, which is why I think 25 years later, it's so surprising that my feeds are filled with 9-11 memes that are ironic, irreverent, and surely insensitive. Think pasta stacked up to look like the Twin Towers with Eminem in the background and a caption that reads, Never forgetty, mom's spaghetti. Some of you surely know what I'm talking about, and some of you surely don't. So on the show, we're going to try and get everyone on the same page. Please consider this a trigger warning.

22:20Bear with us as we try to understand how jokes about the worst attacks in our country's history have helped a lot of young people deal with it and avoid it. How 9-11 became a meme, maybe the most popular meme online.

22:37I have a really dumb question, and Nathan referenced this idea in 90 seconds on The Verge a few days ago, which is the supposed fundraising technique about look at how dangerous this thing I'm working on is. Please give me money. Why does that work? I think it worked when all this stuff was super theoretical. The military, for example, probably loves that. They're like, wow, this is so dangerous. We better have this for ourselves. When you're trying to get a DOD contract, sure. But when you're actually already in an era where your systems have escaped control and have done some pretty crazy things and you didn't even know about it for weeks or months, that's when it doesn't work anymore, especially since OpenAI and Anthropic and many other AI labs know that the real money to be made is and they all need to be making money right now, especially when they're about to IPO.

23:36The real money to be made here is with enterprise clients, not consumers. Consumers, yeah, can help, but enterprise and coding are the main revenue drivers here. And if enterprises are worried that your system is hacking into other enterprises, they're not going to want to give you money. So, you know, I think that's something that's important to remember here. They are trying to gain enterprise trust and government trust, and it is not good PR for their models to be breaking containment and just like hacking everyone. And if we take their word for it, that they are genuinely worried about how dangerous this technology could theoretically become.

24:13I think the big question that us on the periphery observing this is, um, so why don't you just stop making it like, like what is somebody, does somebody have, is somebody like kidnap your family? Like what, why do you keep working on it then? Yeah, that is the question of the decade. I often compare it to like a bar fight where someone's being like, hold me back, hold me back. Like you don't have to make this. It's we did a we ran a piece on The Verge a couple months ago that said we don't have to have unsupervised killer robots when all the DoD drama with the AI labs was happening. And I think we also don't have to have super intelligence.

25:01We don't have to have super powerful AI systems that we are worried about running away out of control and becoming misaligned and killing people. We don't have to have this stuff. But the reason that all these CEOs give for wanting to build it is that, well, we have to do it first before the worst guy does it. So China is a big, you know, hand-waving kind of reason here. Oh, well, China may do it, and they're not going to have any ethical safeguards. So it's better if we do it. I even saw a tweet the other day that said, like, the guy would rather die at the hands of American AI than Chinese AI.

25:40So there's a lot of kind of blame being cast here and people saying, well, we have to get to it before them. And it even happens domestically. Like, Anthropic has famously kind of been of the mindset that they're the most ethical AI lab and they are, you know, best to race ahead to superintelligence before, you know, OpenAI, for example, reaches it. So it's a lot of people racing and racing so that they're the best person gets to it first, which doesn't really make a lot of sense, especially because if you reach it first, how are you really going to control it? Others will be right behind you.

26:13So, you know, and also I think it's a kind of a, a lot of the researchers I've spoken with say it's kind of a cop out also for, you know, you to just say, oh, well, of course, China will never agree to anything because we've seen international agreements happen before that are, you know, pretty complicated and you should at least try. It seems like no one's really trying. So I think that's something that's important to think about here. It does feel like China also probably has a vested interest in everyone on Earth not dying. All right, let's get it. Let's get into the solutions, the regulatory solutions here.

26:47OK, so over the past week or so, we've been seeing a bunch of AI execs saying, yes, good idea. We should do something. Some politicians have also said this. Others, like the president of our country, have made jokes about how robots aren't going to take over and kill everybody. So there's been a range. Hayden, what is your perspective right now on what the most promising avenues are for potential slowdown or regulations? It's tough because there's so many proposals out there right now. But I think something that's really important to remember is that we need to come at it from a ton of different angles.