Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old pretraining researcher who had spent three years at OpenAI and then Anthropic, announced his resignation on X on Tuesday.
“Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
He said he was leaving the industry altogether.
His argument is more specific than the summary suggests, and worth stating accurately. Coxon did not say the safety work at either company is fake.
He said it is inadequate to the pressure it operates under, that researchers inside these labs can see the hazards clearly and continue anyway because they believe a competitor will move faster if they stop, and that developing this class of capability inside private companies is not a decision those companies should be making alone.
