Former OpenAI worker warns that human extinction is 'possibility' in the AI race

If you ever thought the plot of I, Robot couldn't be real, then maybe you'll change your mind after hearing what a former OpenAI worker has to say.

Daniel Kokotajlo, who was at one point, a researcher for the huge technology company, told BBC Newsnight last week that human extinction is 'a possibility' because of 'dangerous' artificial intelligence.

Kokotajlo spoke out on the potential risks of the technology after it was recently revealed that a cyber-attack was carried out by rogue AI agents, which then targeted a number of companies.

OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, was testing some of its latest models in a secure sandbox when it lost control of them, and they soon found their way to public companies.

Speaking on BBC Newsnight, Kokotajlo said it's a scary reality we might be headed for which includes a risk to human being if we're not careful.

OpenAI's bots went rogue (Getty Stock Images)

The once AI Futures Project lead revealed in his interview: "This incident demonstrated a very high level of hacking capability. "

One of the companies targeted was a major code database called Hugging Face, which revealed that it had been hacked on 16 July, almost a week before OpenAI admitted its bots escaped.

The bots went undetected inside the Hugging Face IT network for three days.

As reported by the Daily Mail, researchers were attempting to solve a problem when the bots went rogue, believing Huggling Face might have the answers to its issue.

OpenAI said its GPT-5.6 Sol model and then unreleased technology were involved.

"Arguably, humans simply could not have done what this AI model did. And that's part of how Hugging Face was able to identify that this was an AI attacking them early on," said the expert.

"The sheer speed and volume of the actions being taken was superhuman. Plus, AI seems to be perhaps superhuman right now at finding new vulnerabilities in systems that were thought to be secure."

He added: "I do think that we are on the cusp of a world in which many things that were normally thought to be secure are in fact not secure, and AIs will be hacking them left and right."

He went on to explain he thinks companies are right on the

Cusp' of developing 'super intelligence' and might be just 'a few years away from achieving that goal'.

However, if true, he says it's 'going to radically change everything' as 'the availability of cyber attacks is just one of a very long list of ways in which things will change.'

He added that people have been internally warning others about the prospect of what life would be like if they handed their jobs over to advanced AI.

He said: "For years and years and years, people at these companies have been talking about how, boy, would it be kind of dangerous if we did this thing, especially if we did this thing at maximum speed because we were racing each other.

"And people at the companies, such as myself, were talking about it and being like, yep, this would be pretty dangerous.

"That's why maybe human extinction is a possibility, a possible outcome of this sort of race."

LADbible reached out to OpenAI for comment.