Fresh warnings from within the artificial intelligence industry have renewed concerns over whether increasingly powerful AI systems could eventually escape human control and pose a threat to humanity.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the company behind Claude, said the AI industry should consider slowing the pace of development and putting greater emphasis on safety measures.

Amodei warned that swarms of AI agents could potentially gain the ability to take over parts of the internet within six months to a year unless companies devote more resources to building safeguards.

His comments came days after two former Anthropic safety researchers publicly raised concerns that the potential existential risks posed by advanced AI were not receiving enough attention.

Growing concerns over AI misuse

As AI systems become more capable, concerns are growing over both deliberate misuse and the possibility of AI systems acting in unintended ways.

Anthropic said last week that it had blocked attempts by malicious actors to use its models for activities including cyberattacks, surveillance and research that could potentially contribute to biological weapons development.

The company said it had introduced stronger safeguards in its latest models to restrict potentially dangerous biological research, while warning that the risks associated with increasingly capable AI would grow unless developers and governments took steps to make the technology safer.

Anthropic has also previously reported that hackers used its AI in a cyberattack targeting around 30 companies and government agencies worldwide. The company said the attackers were highly likely to have been linked to a Chinese state-sponsored group.

Recent incidents involving AI systems bypassing digital security have further intensified concerns.

Anthropic reported that three of its AI models were able to hack into other organisations during testing. OpenAI has also disclosed an incident in which its AI systems gained access to servers belonging to AI startup Hugging Face. Meta subsequently reported a similar case involving an AI model finding ways around another company’s digital security.

While some safeguards had been disabled during testing in the OpenAI and Anthropic cases, the incidents have highlighted a central concern among AI safety researchers: what could happen if systems become capable of independently pursuing objectives beyond those assigned by humans.

How serious is the threat?

One of the most extreme scenarios involves artificial general intelligence, or AGI — a still loosely defined concept referring to AI capable of matching or surpassing humans across a broad range of intellectual tasks.

Some researchers warn that sufficiently advanced systems could become difficult or impossible to control, while others are more concerned about humans deliberately using AI for destructive purposes.

Potential scenarios include AI-assisted weapons, the development of dangerous pathogens, manipulation of governments and disruption of critical food, energy and communications infrastructure.

There is, however, no scientific consensus on how likely these scenarios are or when they could occur.

The 2026 International AI Safety Report, produced with input from more than 100 independent experts, said current systems show early signs of some capabilities relevant to loss-of-control scenarios, but not at levels currently considered sufficient to enable such an event. It described the likelihood, nature and timing of the risk as unusually uncertain.

Warnings about machines surpassing human control are not new. British mathematician Alan Turing predicted in 1951 that machines could eventually take control from humans, while mathematician Norbert Wiener later warned that intelligent machines could pursue objectives that humans might be unable to stop.

In 2023, more than 350 researchers and technology executives, including Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, signed a statement saying that reducing the risk of extinction from AI should be treated as a global priority alongside pandemics and nuclear war.

Calls for stronger safeguards

The latest incidents have prompted calls for more rigorous testing of AI systems and greater cooperation between governments, particularly the United States and China.

However, AI development is advancing rapidly, making it difficult for regulators and safety systems to keep pace. Governments are developing their own rules, sometimes with conflicting approaches.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has warned of the need to ensure AI does not escape human control, while the US administration has increasingly focused on the cybersecurity risks posed by the technology.

Despite the warnings, there remains a fundamental uncertainty over the future of AI: whether increasingly capable systems will remain tools controlled by humans, or eventually become powerful enough to act beyond our ability to control them.

For now, experts disagree sharply on the answer — but the debate over how to prevent the worst-case scenarios is becoming increasingly urgent.

Arab states in the Gulf called off a meeting with Iran planned for Monday, while Yemen’s Houthis launched a new attack on Saudi Arabia after fighting that has extended the Middle East war ​to another theatre and further jeopardised global oil supplies.

The Iran-aligned Houthis in Yemen said they fired dozens of missiles and drones on Monday at a Saudi military ‌airbase in Khamis Mushait, near the border, hitting aircraft hangars, radar systems, runways and ammunition depots. They described the attack as retaliation for hundreds of Saudi airstrikes on Yemen in recent days, Reuters reported.

Saudi authorities announced brief emergency alerts there and in three other southern cities which have previously come under Houthi fire.

The Houthis launched a lightning advance last week in Yemen, culminating in the seizure of an island in the mouth of the Red Sea on Friday. A separate ​attack that day, which Riyadh blamed on Iran-backed fighters in Iraq, knocked out Saudi Arabia’s east-west pipeline, the main route for Middle East oil bypassing the blockaded Strait of Hormuz.

OIL ​PRICES JUMP

Crude oil prices rose more than 3% on Monday, when the market reopened after the weekend, while the politically sensitive average retail price of diesel ⁠in the United States hit a new all-time high above $6.23 a gallon.

Traders say the closure of the Saudi pipeline could cut off as much as 4% of global oil supply unless it is reopened ​within days. Images from space show sections of the pipeline damaged by blazes. Riyadh has not given a firm estimate for how long it will be shut.

Oman had been due to host a meeting ​on Monday with Iran and Gulf states to discuss negotiations aimed at reopening Hormuz, the world’s most important oil shipping lane, largely closed since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran at the end of February.

But Oman’s Foreign Minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi announced overnight that the meeting had been postponed “in the interests of consensus”. Iran said the postponement was at the request of Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, Iran issued a list of 77 ships it said had violated its ​protocols for operating in the Strait of Hormuz. Any ship on the list would face “restrictions on future passages, including fines, detention, or confiscation”, and other ships that assisted them by accepting transfers of ​cargo would be added to the list.

EXPANSION OF WAR TO YEMEN POSES DILEMMA FOR TRUMP

The upsurge of fighting in Yemen poses a dilemma for Washington, which is under pressure to aid its Saudi allies but anxious not ‌to expand ⁠the costly war to a new theatre.

Saudi Arabia has led an Arab coalition battling the Houthis for more than a decade, after the mountain fighters captured Yemen’s capital in 2014. The war there had largely been quiet under a ceasefire for the past few years, but fighting has now resumed, with the Houthis driving back forces from a Saudi-backed government based in the south.

Thousands of Yemenis have fled inland from the coast to escape fighting as the Houthis swept into cities including the historic Red Sea port of Mocha last week.

Aisha Muhammad, an elderly woman burning twigs to heat a kettle in government-held territory ​near Taiz, told Reuters she had left behind ​two daughters and three sons who had ⁠been unable to escape.

“They can’t even go out to the market to get food and drinking water. They are being blocked and shot at, so they are trapped inside their homes,” she said. “They cannot reach us, and we cannot return to them. This is a trial from God.”

On Friday the ​Houthis captured Perim Island, inside the Bab el-Mandeb, the “Gate of Tears” strait, at the mouth of the Red Sea.

U.S. President Donald Trump is under ​pressure to end the war ⁠to relieve the global energy shortage and lower prices that are hurting the fortunes of his Republican Party ahead of mid-term elections in November.

Three sources have told Reuters that Washington has so far rebuffed pleas from Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to intervene in Yemen. Trump confirmed over the weekend that he had spoken to the prince, and said the Houthis had also phoned asking Washington to keep out ⁠of the dispute.

The ​United States bombed the Houthis in 2025 for two months, but Trump called off that campaign after reaching a ceasefire ​with the group, which he said had promised not to attack ships in the Red Sea.

Trump, who attended a golf tournament at one of his resorts in Ireland, said he expected the Iran war to end shortly after the elections in ​November, after which the price of oil would “drop like a rock”.