# The contagion of fear

> This piece digs into a growing unease inside AI labs, using programmer and entrepreneur Bryan Cantrill's response to a striking claim: that some Anthropic researchers privately believe AI could kill us all by the end of the decade. Former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon has confirmed that many researchers genuinely hold existential worries, which makes the fear more than a public-relations posture. Cantrill's framing is about contagion, how dread spreads through a community of very smart people who spend all day thinking about worst cases, and how that mood can feed on itself. The essay draws out the odd gap between what AI companies say in public, which tends to be measured and optimistic, and what some of their own staff feel in private. It is a useful read precisely because it does not resolve the tension. You can take the internal fear as a signal worth heeding, or as evidence that proximity to the work distorts judgment. Either way, it captures the strange psychological weather of the current moment in AI.

_Section: [Interesting AI Articles](https://www.wortins.com/articles) · Source: Simon Willison · Published Tuesday, September 15, 2026_

## Wortins' read

This piece digs into a growing unease inside AI labs, using programmer and entrepreneur Bryan Cantrill's response to a striking claim: that some Anthropic researchers privately believe AI could kill us all by the end of the decade. Former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon has confirmed that many researchers genuinely hold existential worries, which makes the fear more than a public-relations posture. Cantrill's framing is about contagion, how dread spreads through a community of very smart people who spend all day thinking about worst cases, and how that mood can feed on itself. The essay draws out the odd gap between what AI companies say in public, which tends to be measured and optimistic, and what some of their own staff feel in private. It is a useful read precisely because it does not resolve the tension. You can take the internal fear as a signal worth heeding, or as evidence that proximity to the work distorts judgment. Either way, it captures the strange psychological weather of the current moment in AI.

## Source

[Read the full story at Simon Willison](https://simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/14/the-contagion-of-fear/)

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