A warning from a departing Anthropic researcher has drawn a wave of responses this week. Senior scientists at rival labs backed the claim that AI could threaten humanity, while a top Pentagon official rejected it. The reaction followed Jacob Coxon’s resignation from Anthropic. In a post on X, he said AI firms were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”.
The post has since passed 150 million views, according to Bloomberg.
Coxon said he had spent about three years in AI research across both OpenAI and Anthropic. He wrote that the people building AI earnestly believe it could kill everyone by the end of the decade. His posts reached more than 100 million people within days, according to Wired.
He told Axios he had left Anthropic two months before his equity would have vested, after roughly four months at the company. He no longer had anything to gain by juicing up Anthropic’s valuation, he said in that interview.
Colleagues and rivals back the claim
