Anthropic researcher’s resignation sparks broad AI safety discussion
An Anthropic PBC researcher has resigned over concerns that artificial intelligence labs are “gambling with our lives.”
Jacob Coxon was part of the company’s AI pretraining team until today. He announced his resignation in a series of X posts that has been viewed millions of times. Coxon wrote that his decision was motivated by concerns over recursive self-improvement, or RSI. That’s a term for a hypothetical future AI with the ability to automatically improve its own capabilities.
“These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources,” Coxon wrote. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s alignment science lead, reaffirmed the latter point in an X post. “Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” he wrote.
