Jacob Coxon has left Anthropic just four months after joining the company, departing two months prior to the vesting of his equity. He cited a lack of personal gain from the company’s valuation as the reason for his decision to resign.
Jacob Coxon, 27, spent three years doing pretraining research at OpenAI before moving to Anthropic in July. An Anthropic researcher who resigned this week over AI safety fears gave up his entire stake in the company to do it, walking out two months before his equity was due to vest.
His resignation post on X on September 9, now past 130 million views, said neither lab is acting responsibly and that both are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”. Axios first reported the forfeited equity, after Coxon told the outlet on Wednesday that “I no longer have anything to gain by juicing up Anthropic’s valuation” and that he left before any of his shares vested. Anthropic’s safety work is sincere, he said, and he has not seen it compromised to outpace competitors. Colleagues, he wrote earlier, have started using words like “crunchtime” and “endgame”.
He lasted four months. Staff need six for their stock to vest. He still holds equity in OpenAI, where his work included GPT-4o. He drew that line carefully in the interview. What worries him is pressure over time. Race hard enough and you cut corners, or skip steps in the oversight process. He also described a mood he thinks becomes self-fulfilling, calling it excessive paranoia about OpenAI and about China.