When Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from Anthropic this week, warning that the company and rival OpenAI were “gambling with our lives” in a race toward superintelligence, he was saying something that has been said, in one form or another, by more senior and more credentialed people at least four times since 2023. What’s different this time is not obviously the argument. It’s the reach, and the political ground it landed on. The Overton window, for some reason, is more open than ever on the AI apocalypse narrative—and the wisdom of crowds is speaking loudly.
Views of Coxon’s post exceeded 100 million within days. For comparison, Jan Leike’s nearly identical resignation post from OpenAI in May 2024, in which he wrote that “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products,” drew 6.1 million views. Mrinank Sharma‘s resignation from Anthropic’s safeguards team in February 2026, warning that “the world is in peril,” reached roughly 1 million views and about 5,000 reposts in 48 hours.
Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI” and a Nobel laureate, left Google in May 2023 specifically so he could speak freely about risk, telling The New York Times that he had previously believed general AI was decades away and was now revising that estimate down, and putting odds of AI-driven catastrophe at 10% to 20%. And of course, Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist, resigned in May 2024 amid disputes over safety prioritization following Sam Altman’s brief ouster and reinstatement the previous November. These were major developments and remained reference points for years, but the effect wasn’t quite, well, Coxonian.
