Anthropic Reveals Houthi Rebels Used Their AI to Design Missiles Days After Its Safety Lead Warned AI “Could Kill All Humans”
The same week an Anthropic researcher publicly warned that AI could wipe out humanity within a decade, the company quietly revealed it had already caught someone trying to use its models to build missiles capable of striking targets over 2,000…
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Two Anthropic stories collided this week. On Tuesday, September 8, researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and posted an extinction risk warning on X. On Thursday, September 10, Anthropic published its threat intelligence report titled Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026. The two developments arose from separate internal processes and are unrelated.
Coxon’s Extinction Warning
Coxon, who spent three years on AI pretraining research at Anthropic and OpenAI, wrote that “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s Alignment Science Lead, publicly backed him, saying he personally puts the odds AI could kill all humans at greater than 10% within the next decade. Both stressed that current publicly available models present relatively low risk; the estimate applies to future systems.
Houthi Weapons Disclosure
Anthropic’s report covers activity between December 2025 and August 2026 across seven harm areas, involving Claude Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus models. Al Jazeera reported Anthropic intervened against a weapons engineering cell in northern Yemen building missile guidance software, including a guided rocket and a long-range ballistic missile, with three separate weapons programs including one targeting a range above 2,000 km. Operators used Claude “in place of human software engineers,” splitting tasks across sessions to evade safeguards, according to Al Jazeera. Anthropic said it has no evidence the group managed to field a working weapon, according to Al Jazeera. The report also flags three Iranian state-aligned accounts, a Russia-linked espionage operation, and blocked biological weapons efforts, according to Al Jazeera.
Washington Tension
The disclosure lands as Anthropic seeks to restore standing in the defense industrial base. Per Al Jazeera, the Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic as a supply chain risk over its refusal to drop safeguards on autonomous weaponry; a California judge ruled last month the designation was unlawful.
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AJ has spent the past 10 years writing about financial markets at The Motley Fool. His coverage centers on technology stocks and the broader macroeconomic trends, from interest rates to geopolitics, that shape where markets are headed next. AJ is drawn to the stories where big-picture economics and individual companies collide.
