Ripple Alum Predicts AI Doom: 'Above 10% Chance of Human Extinction Within a Decade'

Ripple's former employee Evan Hubinger, now leading Anthropic's Alignment stress-testing team, has predicted that the chance of AI killing all humans within a decade is above 10%. His claim went viral on X, earning him 30 million views. Before working at Anthropic, Hubinger had a stint at Ripple's Software Engineering department.

Hubinger's resume highlights his work designing Interledger, a trustless system for cross-currency transactions between arbitrary agents, as well as writing a tool to do cryptographically secure wallets for financial institutions and contributing to the build process of rippled, server software powering parts of the XRP Ledger.

Ripple CTO Emeritus David Schwartz has argued that AI safety rules could threaten freedom of speech. Former Ripple Vice President Emi Yoshikawa wrote in August that AI extinction risk was becoming an everyday conversation topic in Silicon Valley.