In a follow-up post citing the company’s latest risk report, Hubinger said current models pose a low threat and that his concern was “superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement, as we have said is happening faster than we thought”.Coxon’s central claim was that the danger is understood inside the labs even as work continues. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt,” he wrote, adding that executives and senior researchers “couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible—but I hear the same people express fear privately”. He said the systems being built would “hack anything, revolutionise any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources,” and that progress was not slowing.
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.— Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) September 9, 2026
He distinguished between the two firms he worked at. “At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalised the civilisational stakes,” he wrote. “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.”Entering what he called the “endgame,” he wrote, “is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack.”Coxon said coordination was still possible and pointed to a recent security failure. “Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between U.S. labs more viable,” he wrote, while adding that he did not think the industry was “on track to prevent a global race,” which “may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities”.He ended with a question to fellow researchers: whether to “kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind” or “take this moment to call for different conditions”.
