What a silly comparison. There is no scientific basis or mathematical formula to justify a claim of a 10% risk. That is an intellectually dishonest attempt to poison the debate.
The source for this claim is the lead of Anthropic's Alignment Science division. His actual claim is that the risk is greater than 10%. From [0]:
Jacob['s claim that "the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt."] is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. ...
Given that the major LLM manufacturers are actively using these claims of the imminent and total destruction of humanity to extort concessions from lawmakers and regulators, we are making a massive error if we do not take their claims to their logical conclusion... namely that the major LLM manufacturers are deliberately and knowingly threatening the extermination of all of humanity in order to enrich their management, employees, and investors. If you or I were in a position to credibly threaten that level of destruction, we and all of our associates would rapidly get disappeared to a CIA black site and tortured until the end of our deliberately-medically-extended lives.
To be crystal clear, I'm certain that their claims of likely, imminent doom are utter bullshit. I'm very confident that they're claiming to be holding all of humanity at nukepoint in an attempt to get Uncle Sam to give them an escape from investors who are soon to be massively angry because
* they've hit a massive increase in the cost required to get better models
* a huge fraction of the GPUs that have been purchased to power this project are sitting in warehouses, and it's only a matter of time before the right people start asking why all that money was so ill-spent
* they have been and continue to lie so much about how much datacenter capacity is coming online in the near future, and that those claims are lies is becoming obvious
* they habitually lie about the capabilities of their newly-released products
* they're staring down the barrel of so many lawsuits that aim to hold them to account for the shitty and illegal behavior they've engaged in over the past many years
But the US Congress not only is almost entirely uninformed about how this shit actually works, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 fiasco demonstrated that -if you get them scared enough- Congress has no problem making behavior that's plainly illegal and obviously a huge bucket of civil liberties violations retroactively legal... instantly mooting all ongoing lawsuits regarding the illegal and unconstitutional conduct. That is the big prize that the major LLM manufacturers are after.