“They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Jacob Coxon wrote this week as he resigned from Anthropic.
He meant it as a serious warning. Within a day, the line had become a joke template on X. Dozens of users copied the structure of his post and swapped the threat of human extinction for something absurd.
The resignation itself was not a joke. Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher who previously worked at OpenAI, said neither Anthropic nor OpenAI was acting responsibly.
He said the people building AI privately feared it could cause human extinction by the end of the decade. He wrote that AI would “soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources”. His post passed 150 million views.
Coxon told Axios he had left Anthropic after about four months, two months before his equity would have vested. Then the imitations began, Business Insider reported.
