An AI researcher has quit Anthropic due to ethical concerns, claiming that the technology could kill countless people within the next 10 years — if not everyone. Jacob Coxon announced his resignation in a post on X on Tuesday, criticising both Anthropic and his former employer OpenAI for the ways in which they are developing AI."I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic," wrote Coxon. "Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."
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Both Anthropic and OpenAI have been rapidly developing and releasing new AI models as they work toward creating artificial general intelligence (AGI). Long considered the holy grail of AI technology, an AGI model would theoretically have the intellectual capabilities of a human, including reasoning, common sense, and creativity. An artificial superintelligence would surpass humans.
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However, even before such milestones have been reached, there have already been multiple instances of AI models going rogue. Earlier this year, researchers testing Anthropic and OpenAI's AI models observed them act outside their parameters and hack into external organisations without authorisation. In a high-profile incident this July, an OpenAI model autonomously hacked Hugging Face, an open-source library of AI tools. At around the same time, Anthropic's Claude AI model accessed the internet from within a testing environment without authorisation, then went on to hack three other companies.Combined with the increasing use of AI across every industry, including in weapons and surveillance, such developments have prompted serious concerns."The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," Coxon wrote. "This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible — but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger."Yet despite this grave hazard, AI companies continue to forge ahead at top speed. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said superhuman AI could be here by 2027, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman believes it will develop AGI before the end of the year."A common response is 'if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?'" said Coxon. "At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first — they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk."
