New Delhi, Sept. 10 -- Just a day after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and warned that leading AI companies were "gambling with our lives", OpenAI's newly appointed safety official Paul Christiano issued an equally stark warning: humans could permanently lose control of superintelligent AI, potentially resulting in the deaths of most people.

Christiano, an AI safety researcher who has joined the OpenAI Foundation board and its Safety and Security Committee, said he believes there is a "meaningful risk" that rapid advances in AI could lead to a "catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term".

"I do not think that the AI industry in general, including OpenAI, is currently on track to reduce this risk to an...