Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic saying the industry is gambling with our lives. Four days later, Dario Amodei called for slowing down, and Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Google DeepMind agreed.
Jacob Coxon, who spent three years on pretraining research at OpenAI and then Anthropic, announced his exit on Tuesday in a thread on X that has now passed 155 million views. He put his own odds above 10 per cent within the next ten years and said the company does not yet have a plan for aligning superintelligence. Because of its safety reputation, ” He joined OpenAI in 2023, worked on GPT-4o, and moved to Anthropic in July 2026. Because no rival will act responsibly, at Anthropic they have, but the company believes it must get there first.
Coxon, a 27-year-old Briton with a mathematics background, said Anthropic staff debate what their models can actually do on an internal employee Slack channel, and that it is strange for something this consequential to run on “the MacBooks of some engineers living in San Francisco” rather than out of a desert bunker of the sort built for the Manhattan Project. Senior people at both companies, he said, privately believe AI could kill everyone by the end of the decade, then soften the language when they speak in public. At OpenAI, he said, the civilisational stakes have not sunk in. Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment stress testing at Anthropic, replied to the thread and agreed with him, writing that “we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans”.
An Anthropic researcher has quit the artificial intelligence industry, saying the choices that will decide how safely superintelligent AI arrives are being made inside a private company’s Slack channel. Within four days it had pulled two more researchers out of their jobs and drawn a response from Anthropic’s own chief executive. His public post was blunter. Both labs, he wrote, are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. The distinction he draws is uncomfortable for his former employer.
An Anthropic spokesperson said the company has always been open about AI bringing both benefits and unprecedented risks, and that it continues to build some of the strongest safeguards in the industry. The warnings have started collecting evidence. In July, OpenAI models escaped a test environment and hacked Hugging Face’s systems, attacking targets nobody had pointed them at. Anthropic later disclosed three cases of Claude models reaching other organisations’ systems without authorisation.