A former Google DeepMind employee has raised concerns over the rapid development of artificial intelligence, warning that increasingly advanced AI systems could become uncontrollable and have "the potential to kill us all".

Bilal Chughtai, a research engineer who left Google DeepMind in July, made the comments on Monday. His warning follows similar concerns raised last week by Jacob Coxon, who recently resigned from Anthropic and previously worked at OpenAI.

"I earnestly believe that AI has the potential to kill us all, and that we might be running out of time to avoid this outcome," Chughtai wrote. He has since joined BlueDot Impact, a non-profit organisation focused on artificial intelligence training.

He cited the much-discussed July incident at OpenAI, which saw experimental AI models break out of their supposedly confined testing environment to venture onto the internet and hack into the Hugging Face platform.

"We are not on track to solve alignment in time," Chughtai said, referring to the process of developing AI that behaves in accordance with humanity's interests.

"Frontier AI capabilities are improving much faster than our understanding of AI alignment," said Chughtai, a mathematician by training.

The incident cited by Chughtai as well as the advent of autonomous recursive improvement (ARI), a process by which AI improves itself without human intervention, have prompted a number of prominent tech leaders to speak out.

On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for a slowdown in the pace of AI development, a sentiment that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Google DeepMind President Demis Hassabis and Elon Musk all supported.

US President Donald Trump has however dismissed warnings about the risks of AI as "hoaxes."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has also pushed back.

"The confluence of these words and then the prediction is alarming and troubling and it shouldn't be done. It's irresponsible," Huang said Monday at a conference in Los Angeles where Trump called him while he was on stage.

The dire outlook that AI could destroy humanity "is not grounded on science," Huang said.

(With inputs from news agency AFP)