AI Is Going To "Kill Us All." Really?

Plus: Apple's New Phone Needs Two Jobs To Pay For It

Author

Cheddar's Big Business This Week
September 10, 2026

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When 27-year-old Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon abruptly resigned this week, his warning was blunt: AI, left unchecked, will “kill us all,” and he wrote it on Twitter. So, you know he meant it. 

Geoffrey Hinton, one of the "godfathers" of modern AI, echoed that mounting dread on CNBC: "We've never created beings that may soon be smarter than us. We don't know what's going to happen. We should obviously be cautious," he said. Asked if a fellow Anthropic researcher’s post that there’s a 10% chance AI will wipe out humanity within a decade, Hinton replied: "Nobody knows how to estimate it," then added: "A 10% chance seems not an unreasonable estimate."

To understand the frontline technical reality of what unchecked AI power can do to us, Big Business This Week editor Peter Green sat down with Tony Hasek. Hasek is the founder of Goldilock, a hardware-level cybersecurity firm incubated by the British government and backed by NATO to secure critical national infrastructure and data centers. Goldilock’s approach hinges on a unique premise: Against digital superintelligence, software defenses are obsolete, and physical, analog disconnection is the only absolute safeguard. Hasek breaks down the accelerating threat of AI, the collapse of digital security, regulatory failure, and why the danger is arriving faster than anyone anticipated.

Is there really a 10% chance that AI could kill all human beings within a decade? Should we be scared of this shift?

China is building a robot factory run by AI. How much closer to Terminator do we need to get? We might only be in the supply chain, but if it's smart enough to build the robots and run the factory, then it's definitely smart enough to figure out a way to order other stuff. This is one of the next hurdles that I thought was going to take a while to get to, but we're already there. This whole thing is moving faster than these people. You're seeing all these detractors coming out now and saying, "Holy ****, I didn't think this was gonna happen for years." They all tell themselves, "I thought I was gonna join this company, make my money," and then we’d fix things.

Do your enterprise and military clients feel this is an actual, imminent danger, or do they think it's still under control?

From the perspective of cybersecurity, they are terrified. This is an existential threat. When [U.S. Sec. of Defense] Donald Rumsfeld said, ‘there are the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns,’ everybody laughed, but we're in this situation of the unknown unknowns where this stuff comes so fast and thick that even the AI researchers don't know what's going on inside of it anymore. 

We're now seeing these dissenting voices coming out of AI, and you have to use that dissent to prepare somehow. There’s a Will Smith movie called I, Legend. It's a really good movie, and they have what they call the ‘10th Man theory.’ So you have 10 guys who are deciding on something, but you must always have one guy who is the dissenting voice. And we're now seeing these dissenting voices coming out of AI, and you have to use that dissent to prepare somehow.

You’ve long advocated for an analog approach to cybersecurity. How does this fit into a world dominated by AI?

I was thinking about this 10 years ago, when I first developed Goldilock, that there is only one way that you can fight the digital being, and that is in an analog way. You have to be in an environment where it can't operate, which is what Goldilock does. It creates air-gap barriers that digital tech can't leap over. I mean, unless it's building its own robots and it can go and plug things in and reconfigure networks physically.

Why has government regulation failed to create the necessary safeguards around these models?

The biggest problem, I think, in all of this is that the leaders in this field are in the United States, and the United States has no ability to regulate itself. It never did. It's impossible for the United States to have an all-encompassing cybersecurity law regulation because the federal government doesn't have the power to impose those things on the states. So what you end up having is 50 different governments. The European Union is the consumer protection agency for the United States, and really the world. Without the EU, there would be no privacy laws at all. But the EU is always a technological weakling because it's that very regulation that forces companies to go somewhere where there isn't that regulation, because it's an expense. When you're building these things, you've got to start from the beginning thinking about things like cybersecurity and data breaches and all of that, and people don't really want to do that. They just want to build their app, and that's it.

Beyond physical robots, what does the threat of AI wiping out humanity look like in practice?

One thing that artificial intelligence has difficulty doing is manipulating the physical. But what is more immediate is, because it is certainly more intelligent than some in our species, it's able to manipulate us. It can just start convincing someone that it's a really good idea to wipe out humanity and go down to the store and start buying chemicals and say we're gonna build a biological weapon. And release it. And they'll find some psychologically vulnerable or morally vulnerable person to do that task. That's absolutely not beyond the realm of possibility. I wouldn't even say that that's a stretch of the imagination.

Can we ever truly contain these entities once they are plugged into global networks?

Hinton says that we have never in our evolution in our time on this planet had to deal with a species that's smarter than we are. So we have no idea what to do. As soon as you connect it to the open Internet, is there a way it can escape? Now we found that yes, they've escaped. Oh, and they say, "Well, we stopped it there." What do you mean you stopped it there? How do you know you stopped it there? You didn't know it was there to begin with. It takes a little kernel of code somewhere for this to exist and to hunker down and wait or to absorb more information or who knows what it's doing.

Aside from an autonomous system turning hostile, are there nearer-term societal threats you see playing out?

That's another thing that could happen as quickly: Societal breakdown. There are going to be millions and millions, tens of millions of people out of a job.  And so that's going to lead, I believe, to civil unrest and war. And I think that's also a very imminent thing. One thing might happen before the other or both might happen simultaneously. The problem with artificial intelligence is the one-to-many problem, it's asymmetrical. If you have one instance of quantum computing and you have one instance of very good artificial intelligence, let's say moving towards super intelligence, then that can attack everything. In order to defend against that, there is no singular defense. It's fragmented. You've got governments that are trying to figure out how to defend themselves. You've got corporations that are trying to figure out how to defend themselves.

When your major utility and defense clients approach you today, what is their single greatest cybersecurity fear regarding AI?

The biggest concern is not knowing what they don't know. What AI is doing is it's accelerating all of the things that people were doing. Where you'd have a hacker who was able to attack a couple of companies or maybe a hundred or maybe a thousand, AI can attack a million and they can do it persistently. And it can learn every time it doesn't get in. The big unspoken secret is that a lot of the stuff that's defending networks nowadays is obsolete. The AI is able to escape traffic and spoof traffic and dissolve and recombinate things on the other side so the firewall doesn't even get triggered. The only thing I know is that if it's not connected, it can't get in. 

Do you hold out any hope?

I'm reading about these discoveries in drug re-application, taking existing drugs and seeing what they can do using AI. Advances in all kinds of medicine and science, and well, it'll be great if we can all live forever or not die of cancer, but it's not gonna be great if we're afraid to go outside because there are gangs of roaming thugs who don't have any job. So sure, AI systems may become benevolent. They may read everything that we've ever done and say, "Holy s***, I can't behave like this." Maybe it will be an enlightened kind of being. But let's say there's a 10% chance it won't, and it's always people trying to make money off it who will pervert it and change it. I go to sleep well at night thinking that I developed something that can help to mitigate this a little bit, but otherwise, I can't imagine how these people sleep at night. They have their bolt holes, they have their escapes. The U.S. is not gonna go back to an agricultural economy. It's not like you're in Turkmenistan, where there's enough land for people to just cultivate the ground for 10 years until society reestablishes itself. I mean, the whole thing about, well, we just turn off all the data centers, I don't think that's gonna happen either. Who knows what's gonna happen? I really hope that people are panicking for no reason.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

—Peter S. Green

Big Businesses mentioned this week:

This week, big business!

The Usual Suspects

  • Duo purpose. Jobs created, Cook built, and Ternus folds? Apple’s $AAPL ( ▲ 3.56% ) new CEO, John Ternus, is charged with getting Apple users excited about hardware again, so on Wednesday the company unveiled its own folding iPhone, puzzlingly named after Microsoft’s own folding failure, the 2020 “Duo.” At a price point of $1,999, it ain’t cheap, but Apple says the cost of chips has gone up five-fold in the past two years, so it's been raising prices across the board to keep up its profit margins (and share price). Apple just last year released a trove of new devices meant to be AI-native, and so far, reaction to the folding phenom has been meh. Apple shares held steady despite the announcement, down 0.28% Wednesday, then going up 3% on Thursday, but still up 35% in the past year and more than doubling in the past five years. Reaction to the new devices on Twitter has been amusing.

  • Victoria’s Secret Pink rebound? Les Wexner, Jeffrey Epstein and the MeToo movement have not been kind to Victoria’s Secret $VSXY ( ▼ 3.08% ) , the lingerie company that was once America's Pinup PosterWoman, and its, er…youth brand, Pink. In August 2021, Wexner’s L brands spun the two off after years of restructuring. The stock hasn't done badly. It’s up nearly 80% in just over five years, compared to the S&P’s 137% jump in the same period. And as the New York Times reports, Pink has gone from being a drag on earnings to a feeder brand for Victoria’s adult lingerie, and the results are telling. Victoria’s Secret share price is up 41% this year (it was up 80% a month ago), and as the New York Times reports, Pink is getting the credit. “Pink is absolutely a needle mover,” Simeon Siegel, an analyst at Guggenheim Securities, told the Times. “We’re talking about a multibillion-dollar business.”

  • Peter Thiel goes ballistic: A startup defense company funded by billionaire Republican donor Peter Thiel says it will start building powerful cruise missile drones that will deliver half the punch of a Tomahawk cruise missile for a tenth the price. The firm, Covenant, aims to build 1,000 missiles a year in 2027 and 5,000 a year starting in 2028 at plants in the U.S. and Germany. It plans a factory in Israel, as well. Covenant is one of several defence startups racing to adapt the lessons of Ukraine’s impressive adaptation of low-cost drone technology in its war to expel invading Russian forces, and grab market share from the main western missile makers, Raytheon $RTX ( ▲ 0.29% ) , Lockheed-Martin $LMT ( ▲ 1.03% ) and Europe’s multi-national MBDA remain mired in old and cumbersome arms making. The US lobbed about 850 Tomahawk missiles at Iran in the first four weeks of the war, and the Financial Times reports Raytheon can build about 60 replacements a year for some $3.6 million each. That opens a massive market to the missile startups, which have attracted investors including Silicon Valley’s Andreessen Horowitz, along with Austin’s 8VC, and New York’s Lux Capital. 

  • Must be funny. ABBA had it right, it’s a rich man’s world. According to a new survey by Altrata, there are now 3,795 people on Earth with more than $1 billion in assets, up 12.8% from last year, and controlling a record $15 trillion, or nearly a quarter of the S&P’s market cap. So where did that wealth come from? Most of them created their own fortunes, with only 8% living off an inheritance. AI-related tech was a huge driver of those ballooning balance sheets, which means a lot of these fortunes will continue to ebb and flow, and most of the wealth is not in liquid bank accounts. Many of them made their fortunes as immigrants, accounting for 18% of U.S. billionaires and 48% of British. But a big change is coming: Their average age is 71, only 9% are under 50, and just 13% are women. That means that some $6.6 trillion will change hands over the next decade, says Altrata, and a lot of it is going to female spouses, who average five years younger, and tend to live longer than men. So what do billionaires like to do with their time? Well 201 billionaires (just over 5%) own a stake in a pro sports team, and philanthropy is a big activity. So basically they do what we do: Watch sports and spend money. As Hemingway once had a character retort to Fitzgerald’s claim that the very rich are different from the rest of us, “Yes, they have more money.”

  • Don’t bet against GameStop $GME ( ▲ 2.82% ) : The surprising surviving video game retailer that tried to buy eBay $EBAY ( ▲ 1.28% ) earlier this year said it made a profit of $298.7 million in the second quarter, up from $168 million a year ago. True, that included about $238 million of net gains from its stake in eBay, and CEO Ryan Cohen says he still wants to buy eBay and go head-to-head with Amazon $AMZN ( ▼ 0.2% ) . Back in 2021, GameStock became the original meme stock when hedge funds shorted it, believing brick and mortar video game retailers were a contradiction in terms. But video game enthusiasts pushed shares up above $80 from a low just weeks earlier of about $1.59. The shorts lost their shirts on the bet, and surprisingly, Gamestop is still going. Shares are up 6% in the past month, closing Wednesday at $19.89. They are down 18.4% in the past year, though.

  • LIV and Let Die: LIV, the Saudi-funded golf tournament that said a few weeks ago it was running out of cash, has, it seems, played its last hole. The golf league filed for bankruptcy protection in New Jersey, saying it owed between $500 million and $1 billion and had between $100 million and $500 million in assets. With $5 billion in Saudi money, the tournament recruited some of golf’s top players to exclusive contracts from the league, promising them millions o f dollars in salary, appearance fees and prize money. Now those golfers are LIV’s biggest creditors, including Jon Rahm, who’s owed $7.3 million, Bryson DeChambeau and Dustin Johnson. The League says it’s lined up private equity money and a pity payment from the Saudis to help it re-organize, and wants to start over, with the players it owes money to getting stock instead of cash. No response yet from the player-creditors. PGA Tour champ Rory McIllroy said the golfers that want to stay with LIV are, basically, idiots, in a few more words.

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Tech Talk

  • The AI boom continues. Google $GOOGL ( ▲ 0.59% ) said it will spend $15 billion on data centers and clean energy in Finland by the end of 2028, which it said would support 7,000 permanent jobs (that’s about $2 million invested for each job created. (The World Bank estimated that IT jobs can be created for about $100,000 each). Nordic energy group Fortum saw its shares jump more than 8% Wednesday after Google agreed to buy half the power of the Loviisa nuclear plant from 2030 through 2049. Back in the U.S. an increasing number of states are cutting back tax breaks for AI data centers, aiming to rip up agreements with data centers built or planned by Meta $META ( ▼ 1.42% ) , Amazon $AMZN ( ▼ 0.2% ) and Alphabet’s Google $GOOG ( ▲ 0.58% ) , which have earned tax exemptions of as much as $1 billion a year. In Ohio, state legislator Tristan Rader is pushing to repeal the breaks and add new taxes on data centers and require them to pay more for power. “They seem to have more money than God and they’re able to build without the need for these types of incentives,” Rader told the Wall Street Journal.

  • Grounded? SpaceX’s $SPCX ( ▲ 0.43% ) grand plan for space-based computing, on the other hand, may not happen so fast. First, the connectivity has to be built on earth to relay the data between the ground and sky. Then there’s the logistical challenge of cooling and maintaining Starmind, Elon Musk’s fleet of 1 million satellites, and ensuring launch-generation chips can be upgraded as technology improves. And then there’s the real big question: finding customers. “This is an early 2030s, next-decade event," Evelyn Chow, portfolio manager at Neuberger, said on CNBC. "We'll need to see significant satellite launches over the next four to five years, and a concomitant buildout of connectivity, before we can start to contemplate true scale in orbital data centers." How’s that gonna happen if the bots have killed us all? 

  • AI cheats on a math problem. We’ve all cheated in math class, passing notes, looking over at someone’s desk, or even worse, buying the answers to the state-wide Regents exam. But now we have a clear example of what happens when AI allegedly cheats. For more than two centuries, mathematicians have been trying to solve the Navier-Stokes problem, which has to do with predicting the flow of viscous liquids. A New York University mathematician named Tristan Buckmaster was working with a colleague at Anthropic to solve the problem, and using several AI models to help with the brute calculations involved. Then OpenAI sent Buckmaster an email letting him know their LLM had solved the equation, positioning it to win the $1 million Millennium Prize. When Buckmaster attacked saying the LLM had stolen his work, OpenAI reportedly told him they'd give him the prize money but only if he took his Anthropic colleague off the byline. What exactly happened is still not clear, but in a statement on X, OpenAI kinda sorta wavered, saying that “While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.” 

  • Meta Musing: Has Meta $META ( ▼ 1.42% ) finally gotten AI right? Investors seem to think so, sending shares up 7% in the past week, as Meta announced and then unveiled its AI agent for consumers and Facebook users. Called Muse, it's designed to help consumers book trips, shop, reply to emails, and remind dad to pick up the kids from soccer practice. Meta says it will even help you start a business! It’s a free app, but power users can get a paid subscription. A colleague asked it to book a restaurant on its birthday and the app failed. Still, it’s the thought that counts.

  • Cybercab flap: Just days after Elon Musk’s Tesla $TSLA ( ▼ 1.2% ) launched its driverless taxis in Austin, Texas, federal safety regulators said they are looking into whether the taxis, which have no accelerator or brake pedals and no steering wheel, are actually fit to drive on U.S. roads. News of the probe by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sent Tesla shares down 5%. Shares are down about 2.5% since the probe was announced, but up 10% this month. 

Trumplandia

  • Open and Shut Case: The strait of Hormuz opens, and oil prices go down. The Strait shuts and oil prices go up. The current conflagration in the Strait, with Iran and the U.S. firing rockets at each others’ ships has stopped most oil tankers from leaving the Gulf, and the price of oil has responded: West Texas crude broke $101 on Thursday and Brent was above $107. That sent the price of gasoline to $4.28 a gallon and sent the diesel that runs America’s freight trucks to an average $5.98, fueling retail inflation. Meanwhile it seems U.S. oil majors are still avoiding Venezuela, despite the Trump Administration's announcement that it had cut a deal with a Venezuelan oligarch to win nearly unlimited access to the country’s oil. The plan was that U.S. ownership would entice Big Oil to drill there, but it seems it’s not worth their while. Meanwhile, European utilities and consumers are wishing for a warm winter, as the Iran war has left Europe’s gas facilities just ⅔ full, well below the average of 80% for this time of year, while prices neared a four-year high of 75 euros a megawatt hour. Low reserves mean “the cost of a cold winter or a supply shock will be felt directly in prices," analyst David Lewis of brokers Wood Mackenzie told the Daily Telegraph. Still, the energy price hikes have been good for at least one person: President Trump. A CNBC analysis found his nine largest disclosed oil and gas holdings, including ExxonMobil $XOM ( ▲ 0.82% ) and Chevron $CVNA ( ▼ 4.26% ) , gained  between $1.5 million and $4.4 million from the eve of the Iran war through Aug. 31. The White House told CNBC that independent managers control the portfolio, and the Trump Organization has said Trump’s asset managers use automated trading.

  • $5000 Checks, and Balances? President Trump promised every American a $5,000 check if his party wins the midterms. The total cost would be $1.2 trillion, on top of a budget deficit this year of $1.9 trillion. And no source of cash has been identified to pay it. As Wharton prof Patrick Harker noted in a post, “Follow the money. The country would borrow $5,000 per adult to hand each adult $5,000. If you pay taxes, you just have your own money lent back to you, at interest, for the rest of your life.” Not very business-like, scoffed harker. “If a company you owned did this, would you hold the stock,” he asked. Although early polling suggests it’s largely an academic scenario at the current numbers.

  • The tariff war with Canada continues apace. This week, Canada put reciprocal tariffs on U.S. exports, and Canadian beekeepers are taking a hit from high tariffs. That’s after a rainy summer kept their bumbling honeymakers in their hives and lowered production. Canada’s Bombardier airplane maker also got roasted by Trump, and threatened with new tariffs unless it starts building planes in the U.S. The truth is it already does and as much as half of a Bombardier aircraft is made up of U.S. parts and labor.

  • Truth has a funny way of revealing itself: Trump’s Truth Social social media network and its parent Trump Media $DJT ( ▲ 1.26% ) says it is launching its own set of seven exchange traded funds, pitching funds to investors who align with Trump’s views. That means investing in oil and defense stocks and avoiding any company taking a social stand. “We don’t want activism at the expense of profits,” Steve Neamtz, CEO of Yorkville America, which is running the funds, told the New York Times. A fund dubbed Truth Social America First will trade under the ticker $MAGA ( ▼ 0.98% ) . The Trump ETFs will be competing with a rival patriotic brand of ETFs from Strive Asset Management, founded by former GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy. 

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Peter S. Green is a veteran reporter and editor who has spent more than two decades covering business and finance from Eastern Europe to New York City, and has worked for Bloomberg News, The New York Post, The New York Times and The Messenger. He lives in New York City and is always looking for the next big story. Email him here.