A second Google DeepMind safety researcher resigns and publicly warns AI "has the potential to kill us all" — corrects this thread's own earlier miscast of Josh Engels as an Anthropic departure

What happened

Bilal Chughtai, who worked on AGI safety and alignment research at Google DeepMind until leaving in July, posted on X and LinkedIn this week that he "earnestly believe[s] that AI has the potential to kill us all," warning humanity is "running out of time" and calling for coordination "to avoid this manic race between AI companies" and development paced "to a speed that society can handle." ⚠️ Correction to this thread's own 09-13 entry below: Josh Engels left Google DeepMind, not Anthropic — the 09-13 entry's "rather than Anthropic, whose researchers Jacob Coxon, Joe Benton and Josh Engels" line miscast him. With that fixed, this thread's record now shows two Anthropic departures (Coxon, Benton) and two DeepMind departures (Engels, now Chughtai) — Chughtai is DeepMind's second exit, not the first exit from a second lab. Ten days into the Amodei pacing-essay news cycle this thread has tracked since 09-12. (Bloomberg, TheNextWeb, Business Standard)
Sen. Bernie Sanders and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon shared a stage in Washington Tuesday to jointly demand AI curbs, an unusual left-right pairing organized by the Future of Life Institute's all-day "Pro-Human Assembly." Sanders used the platform to push his and Rep. Greg Casar's Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, comparing superintelligence to nuclear weapons and calling Congress "asleep at the wheel"; other speakers included Sen. Marsha Blackburn, actors Ashley Judd and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and labor and religious leaders (AFL-CIO's Liz Shuler, AFT's Randi Weingarten, San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone). Ex-Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon — already on this thread over the contested "PR operation" allegations around his 09-08 resignation post — was expected to appear but pulled out, telling Axios he has "his own voice at the moment" and didn't want the Sanders/Bannon pairing to be misread — a new data point on whether his resignation is being politically instrumentalized, not just event color. (NPR, Axios, NBC News live blog)
OpenAI publicly backed a specific provision of the bipartisan FRONTIER Act (H.R. 9925) Tuesday, its first-ever endorsement of a specific federal AI-safety mandate, while global policy chief Chris Lehane confirmed on the record that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind have been in safety-coordination talks "for several weeks." The provision would force frontier labs to give independent verification organizations access to assess safety practices — functionally the "embedded evaluators" idea from Amodei's pacing essay, now with a concrete legislative vehicle. Separately, three named executives went on the record the same day rejecting the idea that this coordination needs an antitrust exemption: Lehane himself said OpenAI does not think a waiver is necessary, Nvidia's Jensen Huang called the whole antitrust-waiver ask "completely unnecessary," and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg sided with Huang over Amodei's coordinated-slowdown proposal — a third, distinct axis of pushback alongside the government-side rejection (Trump/Sacks) and Money Stuff's 09-14 "cartel described as safety policy" framing. (TechCrunch, Cryptopolitan, Bloomberg — AI Safety Push, CNBC — Huang, CNBC — Zuckerberg)

Sources 11

Bloomberg bloomberg.com high 0.84 disputed / split
TheNextWeb thenextweb.com solid 0.798 no consensus
Business Standard business-standard.com solid 0.621
NPR npr.org high 0.931 generally reliable
Axios axios.com high 0.897 generally reliable
NBC News live blog nbcnews.com high 0.844 generally reliable
TechCrunch techcrunch.com high 0.886 no consensus
Cryptopolitan cryptopolitan.com unrated
Bloomberg — AI Safety Push bloomberg.com high 0.84 disputed / split
CNBC — Huang cnbc.com high 0.85
CNBC — Zuckerberg cnbc.com high 0.85

Credibility ratings combine two public datasets: Lin et al. 2023, PNAS Nexus 2(9):pgad286 (CC BY 4.0) for the domain-quality score, and Wikipedia's perennial-sources list (CC BY-SA 4.0) for the reliability tier. A rating describes an outlet's general record, never this particular article. Unrated means absent from those datasets — not a judgement.