Risk

On Tuesday, September 8, a 28-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and said the people building the technology believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This week, the story did not fade, as stories usually do. It compounded. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment lead, said he personally believed there was a greater than 10 percent chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade, and that the field did not yet have a plan to solve alignment.1 Paul Christiano, the former head of safety at the US Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation, said the recent pace of capability gains gave him “a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term.”2 Two researchers named Wang, one at OpenAI and one at Anthropic, posted within hours of each other that recursive self-improvement was the danger “hard to overstate” and that “there is not yet a viable scientific plan” to make it safe.3 OpenAI’s chief scientist wrote that he expects the speed of progress to carry into systems that increasingly drive their own development, and called it “a time that calls for extreme caution,” adding, “I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence.”4 ...

On Tuesday, September 8, 2026, a 28-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and posted his reasons on X. He had previously worked at OpenAI. He wrote that neither company was acting responsibly, that they were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” and that the people building the technology “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”1 Two of his colleagues, still employed, backed him up. Evan Hubinger, a lead in Anthropic’s alignment division, wrote that he personally believed there was a greater than 10 percent chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade, and that the industry did not yet have a plan to solve alignment.2 Samuel Marks, Anthropic’s scalable oversight lead, added the line that should have stopped the conversation: “In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are.”3 ...

The bond market is the one institution in American life that cannot be lied to. Politicians can promise anything. The Federal Reserve can hold rates and issue statements. But the price of a 30-year Treasury is a verdict, rendered every trading day, by people putting real money behind their judgment of where inflation, deficits, and credibility are headed. In the summer of 2026, that verdict has been unambiguous: the 30-year yield touched 5.2 percent, its highest level since 2007, and the 10-year has climbed past 4.7 percent even though the Fed has not moved its policy rate since late 2025 (Cox, 2026; Peterson, 2026). ...

Ninety Days From Today Count it out on a calendar. Ninety days from this morning is December 2. Between here and there sit a Federal Reserve meeting on September 16, a midterm election on November 3, and another Fed meeting in early December. That is the window this article is about: one quarter of a year in which the world’s largest bond market has to price a war that shows no sign of ending. ...

Ninety Days From Today This article is the companion to one I published this morning about the bond market’s next ninety days. Same calendar, same premise, different victim. Ninety days from this morning is December 2. Between here and there sit a Federal Reserve meeting on September 16, a midterm election on November 3, and another Fed meeting in early December. The bond article argued that the window prices a war that shows no sign of ending. This one asks what that window does to the stock market, and the honest answer is: something the index’s current price barely contemplates. ...

Net interest on the federal debt is on pace to cross $1 trillion this fiscal year, more than the Pentagon spends, a gap the Congressional Budget Office says holds every year from 2025 through 2035 (CBO, 2025). And on the CBO’s own current baseline, the boring one, no crisis, no shock, no recession assumed, debt held by the public breaks the record set in 1946 at the height of World War II by fiscal year 2030 (CBO, 2026). That’s roughly four years out. Whatever actually fixes this needs to already be running by then, not still working its way through committee. ...

The Illusion of Control Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent frames the move as a liquidity measure for a thin summer bond market, not an attempt to suppress yields by fiat. Call it what you will: the mechanism is the same, the government stepping in to buy debt investors don’t want, at prices they wouldn’t otherwise pay. Bessent’s decision to double the debt buyback program is not a solution. It is a desperate gamble that will fail on contact with reality. The move is predicated on a dangerous illusion: that the U.S. Treasury can outmaneuver the bond market by sheer force of will. This is not fiscal policy; it is magical thinking dressed in bureaucratic jargon. ...

Three facts describe the current state of artificial intelligence infrastructure spending, and none of them are matters of opinion. The companies building that infrastructure have, over the past five years, repeatedly extended the accounting assumptions that determine how quickly their hardware loses value on paper — assumptions that flatter today’s earnings regardless of what eventually happens to the hardware itself. The revenue actually being generated by the AI industry falls far short, by any reasonable measure, of what would be required to justify the scale of capital currently being committed. And the financing structure built to bridge that gap has diffused the risk away from the technology companies themselves and onto pension funds, index-fund investors, and, in some cases, ordinary electricity ratepayers — parties who never chose to make a bet on artificial intelligence at all. ...