When Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher, publicly quit the artificial intelligence start-up this past week, citing his concerns over the powerful technology, the internal messages began flying.“It’s what we’ve all been saying,” one Anthropic employee wrote about Coxon’s comments in a group chat among workers. “It’s just public-facing now.”“Jacob took the group chat public,” another employee wrote. “That’s a good thing.”The reactions inside Anthropic were echoed by AI researchers at OpenAI, Meta and Google, who parsed Coxon’s social media posts that described how OpenAI and Anthropic were “gambling with our lives” with the technology. Many convened in office messaging channels, encrypted chats and private dinners, with the goal of organising to raise awareness about the risks of AI, according to a dozen employees across the companies.For those who have made AI their life’s work, Coxon’s message was not new. But his comments snowballed into such a global conversation that many saw it as a moment to call for increased caution. Some AI workers are now speaking up to top executives to urge a pause in developing the fast-evolving technology until it has the proper safeguards, six of the people said.A demonstration of Anthropic’s Claude Cowork AI agent in San Francisco earlier this year. Photograph: Jason Henry/New York Times