The contagion of fear
Simon Willison’s Weblog
Subscribe
14th September 2026 - Link Blog
The contagion of fear (via) Bryan Cantrill responds to the tweet by former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon confirming that many Anthropic researchers believe AI "could kill us all by the end of the decade".
Bryan shares a story of his own youthful mistakes causing unjustified panic among less technical peers, and warns against doing the same:
These ghoulish claims strike brazenly at the hearth, and given the obvious importance of AI, it is unsurprising that they have leapt into the mainstream, with people asking the natural question: how would that happen? The answers always rely on hand-wavy extrapolation into the future; for example, Jacob Coxon cites "hacking critical infrastructure" and "extinction-level bioweapons" without further elaboration. But Coxon is not an expert on critical infrastructure, nor on bioweapons — nor, for that matter, on extinction. [...]
That said, we should not expect the public to understand LLMs, critical infrastructure, bioweapons, extinction biology, etc. — that burden must lie with those making the claim. The lesson that I learned (shamefully) decades ago is that domain experts, by way of their expertise, implicitly hold the public’s trust — and we must not abuse it. It is incumbent upon us to be circumspect in our claims — and maximally so when raising the alarm.
Bryan talked about his doubts about the bioweapons concerns in the recent episode of Oxide and Friends that I joined. You can hear more of his thoughts on that starting at 51m44s in that episode. Here's 57m04s:
I really think we need to be careful because it's so easy to be overcome with fear when we kind of make up these... it can give you biological weapons. Like, how? I mean, can we please have a biologist weigh in on this? Or can we have like someone who's got experience with bioweapons? [...] The bioweapon thing just gets under my fingernails because it leaves so much to the imagination that we insert with fear.
Recent articles
Generating running routes with GPT-6 Astra and ChatGPT Work - 12th September 2026
OpenAI agents attacked RubyGems back in May - 12th September 2026
Some thoughts on the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem - 8th September 2026
This is a link post by Simon Willison, posted on 14th September 2026.
ai 2,235
anthropic 336
bryan-cantrill 13
ai-ethics 342
Monthly briefing
Sponsor me for $10/month and get a curated email digest of the month's most important LLM developments.
Pay me to send you less!
Sponsor & subscribe
Disclosures
Colophon
©
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026