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👋 Good morning! It’s Saturday 12 September 2026. I’m Neil McIntosh, editor of The Early Line, and it’s great to have you here.
📣 You’re reading the weekend edition of The Early Line. Paying subscribers get the full version, with six talking points and film, TV and sporting recommendations for the weekend.
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Have a wonderful weekend, all!
🌦️ The weekend’s weather: A mixed bag - more overcast and with the risk of showers today for Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen and Inverness, but tomorrow looks likely to be brighter, and more dry. London is the same, but in reverse - bright today, overcast and shower-y tomorrow. (Here’s the UK forecast).
SIX THINGS TO TALK ABOUT
Should we worry about AI killing us all? | The robots can’t make a hot dog, though | Red wine is not a cure-all | UK farming in decline | A life in Britain’s motorway services | Buying your apocalypse-proof home
🍸 How worried should we be about AI killing us all? It’s been the question of the week after AI researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, makers of Claude, and wrote a long thread on X explaining why.
The 27-year-old Briton urged us “not [to] underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.”
He warns: “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”, but remain locked in a “space race” to continue to develop their technologies because - at least at Anthropic - “they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves.”
His X thread, and reaction to it, is well covered by this Wall Street Journal piece.
Should we take all this seriously? The short answer is: yes. Today’s FT (£) goes deep on the subject, and reports: “More than two dozen senior AI researchers, investors, academics and policy figures interviewed by the FT said that capabilities once considered distant are arriving faster than expected while the companies developing them remain locked in an increasingly bitter commercial race.
“‘There’s no question that competition between companies causes them to take shortcuts on safety,’ said Stuart Russell, a professor of AI at the University of California, Berkeley.”
Reed Albergotti, Semafor’s Tech Editor, offers a sober but more AI-positive view: We have nothing to fear but AI fear itself, he contends. There are dangers in panic.
Exactly how AI could get us all is something I’ll take a deeper dive on in The Early Line next week, at some point. It takes some explaining. I hope that’s not too gloomy a prospect…
Upgrade to read the full Party Line, including
Footage of a hot dog robot failing to make a hot dog will help you relax about our future overlords
But remember: red wine is not a cure-all
Warning alarm sounded on the UK’s farms
A life in Britain’s motorway services
An apocalypse-proof home? Let’s go!
PLUS: find top TV, film and sporting picks for the weekend.
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