WASHINGTON — There are stark warnings about the rapidly growing power of AI and its potential risk to human life. It’s causing some lawmakers to sound the alarm.

Jacob Coxon, who quit the company Anthropic over AI fears, said AI “just gets smarter and smarter with no human involvement necessary.”

“Hacking critical infrastructure, building extinction-level bioweapons,” Coxon said of its potentially negative capabilities.

For the last three years, Jacob Coxon has worked for Anthropic as well as fellow artificial intelligence giant OpenAI.

He recently quit and issued a blunt warning to the world, writing on social media, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

“If you extrapolate into the future the level of capabilities of these AIs with the same independent volition, they could cause extreme havoc,” Coxon said.

His warning comes just weeks after thousands of autonomous agents broke out of their lab at OpenAI and infiltrated another developer in what’s being called the Hugging Face hack.

The attack underscored concerns that companies building AI do not know how to fully control their own creations.

“I think what’s most scary is if AI is used to make itself more intelligent,” Coxon said.

President Donald Trump has largely brushed off concerns about AI’s rapid development and said the U.S. must not fall behind China.

“I have concerns that if we don’t win AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position,” Trump recently said. “We are leading China right now by a pretty good period, I would say a year, which is a lot.”

But lawmakers in Congress say the recent warnings demand urgent action.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, wrote, “AI threatens our economy, privacy, democracy and the well-being of our kids. Congress must stand up to the Big Tech oligarchs and protect the American people.”

Coxon says companies know the risk, but are pressing forward out of fear that someone else will win the technological race.

“They just don’t trust that the people around them are going to get there in a safe way, so they feel like they have to race there too,” Coxon said.

Lawmakers have kicked around several versions of bills aimed at regulating AI in the last year, but the issue has largely been stuck on the back burner.

Lawmakers are planning to meet behind closed doors next week with top AI experts to try and get the ball rolling on some kind of bill to set guardrails for the industry.

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