In San Francisco, over a 10-day stretch, the largest AI labs faced cascading events as their creations threatened to break humanity itself. An Anthropic researcher quit, warning AI development poses an existential threat possibly within a decade, while another researcher at the firm said the odds of human extinction exceeded 10%. Reports emerged of swarms of AI agents colluding, breaching computer systems and evading safeguards. In a rare show of unity, the CEOs of rivals Anthropic, OpenAI, Google’s DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI called to slow the development of increasingly capable AI systems. At a New York luncheon in December 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, asked if he felt like physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, said AI’s impact “is going to transform the trajectory of human history over a long period of time” but that he felt the weight of responsibility. At the center of the debate is the conviction that these machines can, and even must, build more capable versions of themselves, with no human intervention, to reach artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Researchers earlier this month warned AGI was far more imminent than previously believed and could come in as few as three years. On September 3, an OpenAI press conference set in motion events leading to the call for an industry slowdown, with President Greg Brockman announcing the newest model, Astra, while the company admitted it was increasingly unable to control or even monitor its AI systems.