Anthropic researcher quits saying AI firms ‘gambling with our lives’ | Al Bawaba

Published September 10th, 2026 - 12:41 GMT

ALBAWABA - Jacob Coxon, Anthropic AI researcher who previously worked at OpenAI quit his job and raised the alarm about AI firms being dangerously reckless in their AI technology race.At OpenAI, Coxon was a member of the technical staff from 2023 working on GPT-4o until earlier this year when he moved to Anthropic as a researcher – he quit last Tuesday."Neither company is acting responsibly," Coxon wrote on X, explaining his decision. "They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.""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. "If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible — but I hear the same people express fear privately."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 made a distinction between the two rival AI firms, Anthropic and OpenAI, saying: "At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes," Coxon 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."The AI giants have not responded to Coxon’s post and declined to comment on the matter, according to Business Insider.Some analysts and insiders tended to agree with Coxon while others criticized the statements he made, highlighting the contradiction of AI builders warning about AI while racing to develop it."This is like Exxon scientists in the 70s warning that global warming could cause human suffering and destroy the planet," wrote Phil Aroneanu, the executive director at Irreplaceable, an AI policy nonprofit.