Binance founder @cz_binance stepped into the debate over artificial intelligence safety on Monday, September 14, with a pointed social media post, writing that he had never seen a species rac
Binance founder @cz_binance stepped into the debate over artificial intelligence safety on Monday, September 14, with a pointed social media post, writing that he had never seen a species race so eagerly to fund its own destruction. He closed with a laughing emoji and named no company or technology. The remark came the same week as a wave of public warnings from inside the AI industry itself.
Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old pretraining researcher who worked at OpenAI and then Anthropic, resigned on September 8, 2026, and wrote on X that both companies are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."He told the Wall Street Journal: "We're on track for a lot of the most aggressive of these scenarios where by the end of next year things could be out of control already."
Coxon is not alone at Anthropic making the extinction case. The company's own alignment science lead, Evan Hubinger, said separately he would put the odds above 10%.Hubinger wrote: "Jacob is correct here, we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally think it is more than 10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to."He later clarified that he considers the risk from present models to be low, writing: "What I am worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement."
Hubinger's estimate carries weight given his role, but the broader research community is far from a consensus. The AI Impacts expert survey, fielded in 2023 and published in January 2024, put the median AI extinction risk estimate at 5% among 2,778 researchers polled, meaning Hubinger's personal view sits meaningfully above that midpoint. The prediction that AI could cause human extinction is not an established scientific fact, and researchers disagree sharply about how quickly artificial intelligence will advance and how much risk such systems would pose.
CZ's own public record on AI is more nuanced than his sardonic post might suggest. In an X post on May 29, 2026, he said AI will stay and grow exponentially, but that most AI companies will go bankrupt because there are simply too many of them competing in the market.On September 2, he posted that speculative capital is migrating back into crypto after a prolonged flirtation with the AI sector. Earlier in 2026 he also argued that AI agents would drive vastly more payments than humans, all settled in crypto. His September 14 post is a commentary on the pace of development, not a signal that he has joined the extinction camp.
Sources:Quartz: Jacob Coxon quits Anthropic over self-improving AI safety fearsCoinDesk: Anthropic researcher quits, says insiders fear human extinction by 2030Crypto Briefing: Binance founder CZ says capital is returning to crypto market from AI sector
