A researcher who spent three years building the systems behind some of the world's most powerful AI models has quit the industry entirely, warning that the companies racing to build ever-more capable AI "are gambling with our lives".
Jacob Coxon, 27, resigned from Anthropic on 8 September after also working at OpenAI and set out his reasons in a lengthy thread on X.
"Neither company is acting responsibly," he wrote. "They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence."
In his thread, Coxon argued that AI systems are approaching a point where they could "hack anything, revolutionise any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources," and said the pace of progress in each of those domains "is not slowing".
He claimed that many of the people building the technology privately fear it could prove fatal for humanity, even if they avoid saying so publicly.
