Anthropic hired Stanford economics professor Chad Jones, who once wrote a paper arguing that a roughly one-in-three chance of human extinction from AI could be an acceptable tradeoff for the economic growth AI might unlock, according to the Financial Times. Jones modeled a 1% annual existential-risk rate over 40 years, calculating that a 33% chance of ending humanity was optimal against a two-thirds chance of raising living standards fifty-five-fold. Critics pushed back that existential-scale decisions shouldn’t be driven by expected-value math the way a poker hand is. Futurism argued the hire fits Anthropic’s safety-forward positioning, while noting that publicly warning about AI’s dangers also reinforces the premise that the technology, and the company building it, is powerful enough to matter.
