#Existential Risk

The Warning and the Filter

In 2021, seven OpenAI employees walked out to found Anthropic, the lab people leave for. On September 8, a pretraining researcher resigned from Anthropic in a thread that passed sixty million views in a day, the company's alignment lead replied that he is right and put extinction odds above ten percent in ten years, and a safety researcher backed the warning in a personal capacity. Five years of resignation letters have become a genre with settled conventions, escalating costs, and no measurable effect on the race they describe. Studying why the warnings fail tells you what kind of restraint actually works, and why 1,178 frontier-lab employees are now asking the government to build a brake they cannot build themselves.