Wednesday, September 9th 2026 - 20:28 UTC
The company's alignment science lead backs the warning and puts the odds of catastrophe over the next ten years above 10%
Jacob Coxon, a model pretraining researcher at Anthropic, announced his resignation on Tuesday, accusing the company and OpenAI, where he also worked, of “not acting responsibly” and of “gambling with our lives” in the race to build artificial intelligence systems capable of improving themselves.
In a thread posted on the social network X, Coxon, 27, who spent three years split between the two companies, wrote that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” The researcher rejected the idea that this was a publicity move: he argued that many executives soften their language for the press, but that he has heard those same people express that fear in private.
Today's models, he warned, will soon give way to “superhuman systems” able to breach any digital defence, transform entire fields in a short time and accumulate real resources and power. Coxon drew a distinction between his two former employers: at OpenAI, he said, the civilisational stakes have not been “deeply internalised,” while at Anthropic they are well understood, but the company is “locked in a race to get there first.”
