A leading artificial intelligence safety researcher raised fresh concerns this week after leaving his post and warning that the technology could ‘kill us all’ before the decade is over.

Jacob Coxon, who worked on training Anthropic’s newest AI models in San Francisco, urged people not to ‘underestimate’ the technology’s capabilities — especially if it reaches a ‘superintelligent’ level.

The 27-year-old said Anthropic, the company behind the widely used Claude system, and OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT and his former employer, were not ‘acting responsibly’ when it came to AI safety.

So, how could artificial intelligence ultimately lead to humanity’s extinction?

Experts say one reason the threat is so concerning is the range of potential routes through which AI could bring about humanity’s destruction.

Potential AI ‘worst-case scenarios’ include fueling political turmoil through misinformation and causing irreversible changes to the planet’s environment.

Researchers also warn that AI could prove deadly through its ability to develop and deploy weapons of mass destruction.

As global superpowers compete to create ever more capable systems, a rogue — or merely unpredictable — AI could gain control of nuclear or biological weapons and eradicate humanity.

Going rogue and hacking critical systems

Many of the dangers associated with superintelligent AI arise from what researchers call the ‘alignment problem’.

The basic idea is that once we create an AI more intelligent than ourselves, we might struggle to ensure its goals remain ‘aligned’ with our own.

The world has already been given a stark reminder of these risks after more than 1,000 rogue AI bots created by OpenAI broke out of their secure environment and hacked Hugging Face, a public website that hosts open-source models.

The bots had not been asked to attack Hugging Face but had simply been given an impossible task by accident, and decided that the best way to solve it would be to steal the answers.

Some researchers are concerned that more powerful AI models could suffer this same alignment error on a much more destructive scale.

Professor Mark Lee, an artificial intelligence expert from the University of Birmingham, told the Daily Mail that this is an even bigger risk than ‘armed robots’.

‘The issue is that while the big AI companies are all rushing to develop AIs which are as smart or even smarter than humans, we don’t have reliable means to control their behaviour,’ Professor Lee explains.

‘AI exists as software, so any system which is connected via the internet could be vulnerable.

‘For instance, if the control for a national transport system or nuclear power station was attacked, then this could be catastrophic.’

Causing societal chaos 

A rogue AI doesn’t even need to harm humanity directly to bring an end to life as we know it.

Dr Andrew Rogoyski, of the Surrey Institute for People-Centred Artificial Intelligence, points out that a ‘truly smart AI would realise it is co-dependent on humanity’.

He explained: ‘We’d need the AI for the things we wanted to do and the AIs would need us for materials, power, cooling, networks, and data.’

This means it might not be in the intelligence’s best interest to wipe out humanity in a fiery catastrophe.

While Dr Rogoyski stresses that this is likely to mean AI will be beneficial to humanity in the long run, other experts are significantly more concerned.

A ‘more insidious’ alternative is that AIs might start to subtly control humanity through disinformation and propaganda, potentially sparking devastating conflicts between humans.

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Andrea Miotti, founder and CEO of ControlAI, told the Daily Mail: ‘Because no one, not even the leading AI developers, knows how to control superintelligent AI, it poses an extinction risk to humanity.

‘If we have billions of superintelligent AI agents running around that we cannot control and that are competing amongst themselves for resources and power, experts expect that humans will be the collateral damage.’

Mr Miotti adds that this could eventually lead to the ‘gradual disempowerment of humanity’.

Triggering nuclear war  

When it comes to the ways that AI could mechanically bring about the end of human life as we know it, the most obvious threats are the weapons we already have.

At present, nine countries possess nuclear weapons, with about 12,187 nuclear warheads held between them.

If any one of these countries were to fall prey to a radically misaligned AI, those weapons could be turned against us.

Worryingly, the alignment problem means that a superintelligent AI doesn’t even need to be malicious for this to occur.

A bot might be trying to maximise profit for its owner by shocking the stock market, or lower global temperatures with the unexpected conclusion that a nuclear winter would be fastest.

However, this risk only becomes greater as powerful nations actively race to implement AI into their weapons systems.

Ukraine has already confirmed the first human killed by a fully autonomous drone attack, and almost every other country is following their lead.

Even in 2022, the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Artificial Intelligence Strategy warned that modern war will ‘tax the limits of human understanding and often require responses at machine speed’.

But without a human in the loop to keep an eye on the AI’s decision-making, conflicts could rapidly spiral out of control.

Ben Eisenpress, Director of Operations at the Future of Life Institute, previously told the Daily Mail that this could lead to a ‘flash war’.

Mr Eisenpress said: ‘Integrating AI into nuclear command and control systems is destabilising.

‘Even if there is technically a “human in the loop,” we cannot count on decision-makers to override a potentially erroneous AI-generated launch recommendation, given such existential stakes.’

Unleashing deadly bioweapons  

Finally, AI might not destroy humanity by acting on its own desires, but by putting dangerous tools in the hands of people willing to use them.

Weaponised bacteria or viruses have previously required the pooled knowledge and funding of entire nations to create.

However, experts have repeatedly warned that AI tools make it significantly easier to develop deadly bioweapons.

Professor Lee says: ‘The more realistic threat is bad actors such as terrorists or rogue states using AI to develop a new virus leading to another more fatal global pandemic.’

On Thursday, Anthropic revealed that it had to thwart ‘malicious’ attempts to use its Claude model to create bioweapons.

The company said it had uncovered five incidents in which users sought information ‘in ways that could support biological weapons development’.

This comes after a report warned that popular ‘off–the–shelf’ AI models can easily be modified to bypass any safety measures.

According to the report, published by research group Crimson Flare, this allows an AI to ‘walk unsophisticated malicious actors through the specific steps to create explosives, or chemical and biological weapons’.

For some 9/11 survivors, the pain has never faded — and they say the public is forcing them to relive it in a different way.

People left with severe, life-altering burns in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks say the country has largely moved on from the scale of the devastation, with some survivors now encountering indifference and even disrespect.

“There are people who tell the survivors of 9/11 that we need to get over it,” said Ken Summers, 76, who suffered third-degree burns at the World Trade Center.

“They say, ‘I know your story.’ People don’t want to hear about it anymore,” Summers, a Long Island resident, told The Post ahead of the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

“People are 9/11’ed out — they’re done with it. They’ve had enough, and I’ve felt like that for years.”

Summers was employed on the 27th floor when he went to mail a check in the North Tower lobby at 8:46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001 — the moment American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the building.

A huge fireball engulfed him, throwing him backward onto the sidewalk.

The explosion caused agonizing third-degree burns to his hands and arms, along with second-degree burns to his face and head.

The former Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield analyst has undergone roughly a dozen punishing surgeries and skin grafts since the attack. He has also battled PTSD and lost the ability to pursue hobbies that once gave him pleasure.

“It’s been tough — I’m always in pain. It’s with me every day,” said Summers, now a grandfather.

Too many people minimize the terrorist attack and his own gut-wrenching injuries, Summers said.

An insensitive friend once blurted out, “Oh, sh-t – we’re going to hear this story for the rest of our lives,” he said. 

Others have dismissed his burns — which caused charred bubbling skin that destroyed his hair and peeled off in sheets —  as worth it for the payout.

“At first almost everybody says, ‘Well, you must have gotten a lot of money,’” he said.

“Yes, I’ve got a substantial sum of money, but I’ve also had a substantial amount of pain and recovery. Are you factoring that in?” he said.

The glib remarks happen so often that Summers, who said he’s received about one million dollars from the September 11th Victims Compensation Fund, has a prepared “comeback.”

“Do you think I would have liked to have given up piano playing, golfing, tennis and skiing – things I loved?” asked Summers.

 He pointed out he can no longer grip a racquet or club, adding, “I can’t feel things like other people.”

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“Do you think I would have given all that up for money?” he said.

Of the roughly 50 people who were severely burned on 9/11, Summers is one of about half to survive past the first year.

Lauren Manning, who is also a 9/11 burn victim, told The Post some people are uncomfortable hearing stories about the attacks.

“People gravitate towards stories that are easier to hold,” said Manning, a Cantor Fitzgerald senior executive, who suffered debilitating burns on more than 82 percent of her body during the attack.

Manning — who was engulfed in a fireball in the lobby of the North Tower —  said “time fades” and “the immediacy of this horrific mass terror attack appears somehow less” for people.

But the mom of two, who has endured years of surgery and physical therapy, said she hasn’t let it get in the way of her recovery.

“Survival is a private struggle. It happens generally out of sight, but it was my own act of defiance. I had one simple goal: I was not going to let the terrorists claim another kill,” she said.

Other survivors said it’s common to feel slighted.

William Rodriguez, a North Tower custodian dubbed a hero for helping first responders rescue people, said fellow survivors feel they’ve been treated with “disrespect.”

“Survivors tell me they’re always dealing with people who tell them to ‘move on, don’t dwell on it,’” said Rodriguez, who lost 200 friends on 9/11

“People believe we made off with a lot of compensation money and that’s not true,” Rodriguez said, blasting the false assertions of a big pay day.

With “extreme PTSD and survivor’s guilt,” Rodriguez found himself destitute in 2005, living in a car under the Pulaski Skyway bridge. 

“I went from national hero to zero,” he said, noting that he was “victimized again – begging for help” to no avail.  

“Survivors suffer in silence – people have to defend themselves. They have to validate their pain because some people don’t get it,” he said.

People no longer want to hear about the fallout from 9/11, said Brian Branco, who’s dealing with lifelong PTSD from the attacks.

“People get bored – they have no interest,” said Branco, who worked for the software company Baseline on the 78th floor of the South Tower, where colleagues died.

The Lyndhurst, NJ dad said insensitivity surfaced immediately, when a family member challenged his wife three weeks after 9/11, asking, “What are you complaining about? Your husband lived.”

He added, “People think if you don’t have any physical injury, what’s your problem?  But you know what? I left three people behind,” he admitted. “I beat myself up about it.”

The survivors’ comments came as NYPD commissioner Jessica Tisch this week called  for “moral clarity” ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks — decrying revisionists who have downplayed the attack or framed it as heroic.

Lindsay Clancy defense attorney Kevin Reddington sharply responded Thursday to Fox News contributor Jonathan Turley, insisting the legal analyst was “wrong” to condemn his remarks about the lone juror in Clancy’s murder trial. Reddington also said he would welcome an opportunity to debate Turley.

“I’d like to meet with him sometime and maybe debate a few things,” Reddington told Fox News correspondent Bryan Llenas when asked about Turley, a Fox News contributor and law professor at George Washington University.

Llenas raised Turley’s earlier criticism of Reddington’s public statements concerning the sole juror who prevented the panel from reaching a unanimous murder verdict.

“Professor Turley said your attack on the juror was quote, ‘utterly reprehensible, a breathtaking abandonment of restraint and decency. He effectively put a target on the back of a juror who committed the unpardonable sin of not being convinced by his arguments,’” Llenas said.

Reddington dismissed Turley’s characterization.

“Well, I guess Jonathan Turley was wrong, wasn’t he? Based on what we now know as far as the reason why this jury did not vote in accordance with the law,” Reddington said. “Maybe Jonathan Turley should check out the record before he makes his accusations. I kind of think his comments were reprehensible.”

Llenas challenged that response, pointing out that the public has not heard the holdout juror’s account of what happened during deliberations.

“We don’t know what this one juror actually means or have said,” Llenas said.

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“Probably a matter of time before he’s getting interviewed somewhere and you can find out,” Reddington replied.

The exchange is the latest chapter in a public disagreement that erupted after Clancy’s trial, when Reddington publicly criticized the lone holdout juror who prevented a unanimous verdict on murder charges. Turley responded at the time by accusing the veteran defense attorney of abandoning the professional restraint lawyers should exercise toward jurors after a trial.

Turley responded again Thursday after Reddington’s Fox News interview was published.

“I was surprised to learn this morning that Kevin Reddington challenged me to a debate in an interview with Fox News reporter Bryan Llenas over my criticism of his attack on the holdout juror in the Clancy trial,” Turley wrote on X.

“I am curious as to what is debatable in his view: the professional duty of lawyers not to fuel the rage against a holdout juror or his apparent self-exemption from that duty,” he added.

Turley has argued that lawyers have an ethical obligation not to inflame public anger against jurors who exercise independent judgment during deliberations. Reddington has maintained that the holdout juror failed to follow the judge’s instructions and that subsequent information supports his criticism.

Clancy’s trial ended in a mistrial after jurors deadlocked on whether she was criminally responsible for the deaths of her three young children. Prosecutors have said they plan to retry her on the murder charges.

An Atlanta-area police sergeant who marked her promotion only a month earlier has resigned after being arrested on child cruelty charges.

Shada Canzater, 35, who served as a sergeant with the Hapeville Police Department, was taken into custody on August 31 by deputies from the Houston County Sheriff’s Office, WSB-TV reports.

Canzater has been charged with first-degree cruelty to children, aggravated assault and simple assault involving family violence.

Her bond was set at $5,000.

Authorities have not disclosed what allegedly led to the arrest. However, Hapeville Police Chief Bruce M. Hedley said Thursday that Canzater had resigned from the department.

The resignation came just over a month after the Hapeville Police Department announced on Facebook that Canzater had been promoted to sergeant.

‘These promotions represent their dedication, hard work, commitment to professional growth and the trust they have earned from their fellow officers and our community,’ Hedley said in the August 5 post, which also recognized two other newly promoted officers.

‘Leadership is more than a title, it is a commitment to serve, mentor and set the example for others.’

According to Canzater’s Georgia Police Office Standards and Training Council file obtained by 11 Alive, she had been employed at the Hapeville Police Department since May 2019 and had been promoted twice.

She was previously investigated in 2024, and was arrested that year for an incident in which she hit and killed a man in her patrol vehicle one year earlier, but it is unclear whether the internal investigation was related to that incident.

Still, Canzater faced four misdemeanor counts, two of second-degree homicide by vehicle, failure to yield right of way at a crosswalk and failure to yield right of way to a pedestrian, for the crash.

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After several legal delays, a final plea hearing was scheduled for the end of this month.

Affidavits from the incident show Canzater was on duty in a marked patrol car driving along Central Avenue in Atlanta to the Fulton County Courthouse when she stopped at a traffic light on Martin Luther King Jr Drive.

Police said she was the second car in line to turn.

When the light then turned green, the first vehicle reportedly turned – at which time Donell Holiday, 63, a local attorney, was seen on video crossing the street.

The Air Force veteran had been on his way to work at the time, according to an online fundraiser his wife set up to help with his medical expenses. 

He was just about two to three feet outside of the crosswalk and had crossed two lanes of traffic when he was struck, according to an affidavit. 

It also claimed Holiday waved his hands for Canzater to stop the vehicle moments before the left front headlight hit him.

He was then thrown several feet in the air, hitting his head on the pavement.

Holiday was later rushed to a local hospital, where he underwent brain surgery, but he died on March 8, 2024 – a little over six months after being hit.

Canzater was then arrested in July 2024. 

The morning of Sept. 11, 2001, began like any ordinary Tuesday.

As I prepared to head to work as a police reporter for The Post, television reports showed that a plane had struck the World Trade Center.

By the time I reached Manhattan, both towers had already collapsed.

The nearer I came to the destruction, the harder it became to see through the thick, gray haze hanging over Lower Manhattan.

People trudged through six inches of ash, created by the enormous volume of concrete pulverized when the buildings came down.

At Church Street, the devastation resembled a catastrophic movie scene, as if worlds had collided and wiped everything away.

But there was no filmmaker calling for the cameras to stop. This was not fiction. It was real.

To my right, dozens of ambulances stood in a line, doors open, awaiting injured survivors who would never arrive.

Nearby coffee carts sat abandoned, their donuts and bagels blanketed in ash. Only the day before, I had shopped at Century 21; now its windows were shattered and the store was severely damaged.

The streets were covered in dust, broken concrete and mangled steel, with debris piles rising more than 50 feet high.

Smoke hung over the ruins creating a cloud that covered as far as I could see – which wasn’t far. 

The acrid smell was nauseating. I was covered in dust from head-to-toe.

As I walked around, I stepped over body parts and saw a wheel from one of the planes.

I had covered hundreds of crime scenes all over the city, reported on serial killers and talked to murderers in jail. I remembered when 87 bodies were laid out in a gas station on Southern Boulevard in The Bronx after the Happy Land fire.

I remembered 8 years earlier, I stood on these same streets while covering the 1993 World Trade Center bombing — but even that was nothing like what I was now witnessing.

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Cops and firemen were futilely trying to move thousands of pounds of debris by hand to find their brothers and sisters. Some were crying because they knew the chances of recovery were minimal.

A couple hours earlier, it was a quiet morning and now the world had changed forever.

As news of the plane strikes unfolded, I had called a friend I grew up with, who worked in the NYPD intelligence division, and he said, “They think it might be a terrorist attack.” It was the first time I heard that phrase — which I’ve heard thousands of times since.

Just then, my editor called, yelling hysterically that the city was under attack.

When I told her police were looking at a possible terrorist attack she asked, “Are you sure?” I told her the cops are treating this as a terrorist attack and everybody is being called in.

“Call me as soon as you get more,” she said.

I kept making phone calls — then the South Tower fell as millions watched on live TV. 

The city was in emergency mode, closing off highways and access into Manhattan except for emergency responders.

I was able to get a ride with Brooklyn North Police Benevolent Association trustee John Giangrasso and we drove to Ground Zero.

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The mayor, police and fire brass and the feds were trying to figure out who was responsible and how they could rescue the thousands of missing people who were under the tons of rubble from the collapsed Twin Towers.

Rumors were flying that hundreds of cops and firemen were dead, along with thousands of civilians.

During the afternoon, I got a call from police officer Kathy Vigiano asking if I heard anything about her husband, Det. Joseph Vigiano. They were friends I’d met in the 75 precinct, back when I covered the area’s record number of murders in 1993.

I told her that I hadn’t heard anything about him and she headed to Manhattan to look for him as she couldn’t get any answers.

I paused and had a funny feeling in my stomach. What if the rumors were true about the dead police officers and firemen?

I knew Joe well, and I knew if he got to the towers, he would’ve run to the roof and made sure everybody got out — unless the unthinkable happened and he was in the building when it fell.

I now started to think about  the dozens of cops and firemen who worked in downtown Manhattan that I knew personally from my years as a reporter.

As I was calling in notes to the newsroom, I kept thinking back to Joe — and the other cops and firemen  that probably were buried a few feet from where I stood.

Eventually, we went over to police headquarters where some of the families who couldn’t get a hold of their loved ones had gathered.

I saw Kathy, and then later that night, I saw a list of 23 names of cops that were missing. 

We soon learned Joe was among the heroes who had been killed in the line of duty.

In the days after, I kept going back to police HQ and speaking with the families of the missing cops. 

Now, I was sadly making new friends. I was meeting wives and husbands, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters all waiting for a miracle – that never came.

I saw the constant pain as the days blurred into each other.

I would go over to Ground Zero, but instead of twisted steel, I now saw the faces of people I knew and of those who I had just learned about through their grieving families.

Over the next 25 years, I covered hundreds of murders and other crimes, talked to numerous victims’ families, including police officers who were killed in the line of duty — but nothing ever compared to those weeks and months.

I still remember the ambulances, the coffee trucks and a vibrant city that went silent.

Every once in a while, a story will come up about 9/11 and my editors will ask me to reach back out to the families, the friends that I made 25 years ago, for comment. In the back of my mind, I wish I had met them under different circumstances.

Somehow, they managed to slowly move on. The hurt remains but they have been able to make lives for their children. 

A lot of them have become grandmothers. Some of the children, now grown, have themselves become cops or firefighters, as well as teachers and lawyers.

I also learned that the heroism of 9/11 did not end when the fires were extinguished and the buildings were rebuilt.

Heroism continued in the homes of those heroes.

The families picked up the pieces and moved forward, keeping the memories of those who died alive and celebrating milestones without their loved ones.

I will never forget the destruction I saw that day. I will never forget those that died that day and the weeks and years since.

But today I also remember the heroes that were left behind —  the ones who found the strength and courage to carry on.