One resignation turned the embers of AI fear into a wildfire

Nathan Lambert · 10 Sept 2026

Nathan Lambert did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
AI-caused catastrophic extinction risk is negligible, but disasters like critical-infrastructure cyberattacks and bio-risks from AI are real and worth debating.

Their wordsI put the probability of complete extinction as being so low it isn't worth discussing, but the probabilities of AI caused disasters - e.g. cyber attacks on critical infrastructure or bio-risks - as being worth debating.
Our reading
Employees at frontier AI labs, particularly Anthropic, are out of touch in ways that distort their forecasts and accounts of AI events.

Their wordsMany frontier lab employees, especially at Anthropic, are out of touch and this will impact their forecasting and/or descriptions of current AI events.
Our reading
AI progress is jagged: models are becoming superhuman at math and software engineering while remaining far weaker at intuition, creativity, and other forms of human reasoning.

Their wordsAI has always been very jagged, and we are making models which are superhuman goal-seekers at math and software engineering, but they have massive limitations on intuitions, creativity, and other types of reasoning that humans are strong at.

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