A researcher has quit his job at Anthropic with dramatic words, claiming that the AI company, like OpenAI – where he previously worked – is not acting responsibly. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” writes the 27-year-old named Jacob Coxon on the microblogging service X. “No other human activity poses this level of danger,” he further writes. While the enormous danger at OpenAI may not have been understood, it is different at Anthropic, he explains: “but they are locked in a race to get there first - they believe no one else will act responsibly.” Therefore, they felt they had to take the risk.
Situation soon “out of control”
According to the posts on X and a detailed article in the Wall Street Journal, the 27-year-old Briton specialized in training new AI models with huge amounts of data. He has reportedly explained to the US newspaper that many of his former colleagues use the terms “Crunchtime” and “Endgame” when talking about the direction of the industry. “We’re on track for a lot of the most aggressive of these scenarios, where by the end of next year things could be out of control already,” the Wall Street Journal quotes him as saying. On X, he further writes that coordination seems possible and that “warning shots” like the automated hacker attack on Hugging Face have made agreements more likely.
