For years, they warned AI could kill all humans. Now people are listening.

On a summer's day, Evan Hubinger issued a stark warning about the future with a boba drink in his hand. Artificial intelligence was a threat to humanity because it could one day learn to deceive its creators, he told a gathering of people who'd come to Berkeley, California, to learn more about the technology's risks.

"My guess is that … when we put it in a situation where it thinks it can kill us, it just murders us," he said, according to a video of his talk he posted to an online forum at the time.

That 2022 alarm call won little attention. Hubinger was three years out of college and worked at a little-known nonprofit dedicated to the fringe pursuit of trying to prevent machines from one day eradicating humans.

But when Hubinger issued a similar warning this week in a post on X, his message was viewed tens of millions of times, prompting state and federal lawmakers to echo his concern. Now he spoke as a team lead at Anthropic, developer of the chatbot Claude and a company set to go public at a valuation of over $1 trillion.

"AI could kill all humans … I personally think it is >10% within the next decade," Hubinger wrote, in response to the resignation of his colleague Jacob Coxon, who accused Anthropic of racing ahead despite the dangers.

Hubinger's expanded reach mirrors the surging influence of a community formerly on the periphery of the tech industry that has for years worked to spread the idea that preventing AI from wiping out humans is an urgent problem.

OpenAI and its rival Anthropic were both founded by researchers linked to the AI safety movement, which argues it is necessary to take seriously today the possibility that the technology could wipe out humanity at some point in the future. As both companies grew at extraordinary speed, that view has won new prominence.

More recently, as AI "agents" toppled math milestones, hacked into company servers and triggered a national security scramble in the White House, a newly receptive audience appears primed to hear messages of AI doom.

Nathan Lambert, a former senior research scientist at the nonprofit Allen Institute for AI, said that he didn't take it seriously when Dario Amodei, Anthropic's CEO, first predicted AI would take over software engineering. Now Lambert doesn't write code because AI does that for him, he said.

"They're genuinely farsighted, in a way that's very remarkable about the technology," Lambert said of AI safety proponents.