CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei attends a working lunch with G7 leaders, G7 outreach partners, and global tech CEOs on innovation and AI, during the G7 Summit on June 17, 2026 in Evian-les-Bains, France. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)A fresh wave of AI ‘extinction’ panic is dominating the headlines. It started in July with press reports that a “rogue” OpenAI model hacked Hugging Face, followed by a steady drumbeat of similar headlines about Anthropic and Meta into August. Soon after, Jacob Coxon, a former pre-training researcher at Anthropic, reportedly walked away from his equity stake in that company over fears of an AI doomsday. “The consensus is that the next year or two is crunch time for humanity,” he warned in a Wired interview.Coxon’s fears arose in part from the Hugging Face incident, which he believes the models did as “part of a general strategy” to “understand” how they would be graded. While Coxon warns that the AI industry’s competitive pressure is leading it to abandon safety protocols, it’s telling that he describes the model like an independent actor, rather than asking how those pressures shape the model itself.This way of describing large language models reflects what Daniel Dennett calls the intentional stance. It asks whether treating an object, such as an LLM, as something with beliefs is useful for predicting what it does. Dennett also describes a design stance, in which predictions are drawn from knowledge of the purpose of the system: not what…

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