A 27-year-old AI researcher, Jacob Coxon, walked away from Anthropic after a three-year stint. Not quietly. Not with a bland "pursuing other opportunities" LinkedIn post. He went straight to X and lit a match.
"I resigned from Anthropic today," he wrote. "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."
That was just the opening line. Coxon didn't stop there. In a thread that quickly went viral, he made a claim that should stop anyone scrolling mid-swipe:
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"The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. 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. No other human activity poses this level of danger."
He wasn't done. Coxon described what's coming next in blunt terms: "Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionise any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing."
So, Why Keep Building It?
Coxon's answer cuts at the heart of the AI race. At OpenAI, he says, the danger hasn't fully sunk in. At Anthropic, it has; but fear of losing the race outweighs fear of the outcome.
"At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalised the civilisational stakes. 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."
He called this what it is: a gamble. And not a small one.
"Accepting this race and entering the 'endgame' is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company's Slack. Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available."
A Call To The People Still Inside
Coxon didn't just quit and walk off. He left a challenge for everyone still sitting at their desks in AI labs across the Silicon Valley.
"If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because 'it's happening anyway' -- or take this moment to call for different conditions?"
He also pointed to a recent security scare -- an attack on Hugging Face infrastructure -- as proof that the industry can, in theory, coordinate before disaster strikes. But he isn't optimistic that it will happen fast enough.
"I don't feel like we're on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities."
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Anthropic's Response
Responding to Jacob's posts, Evan Hubinger, Alignment Science Lead, Anthropic, said, "Jacob is correct here-we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10 per cent within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to."
He added, "I think the risk from present models is low. What I am worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement, as we have said is happening faster than we thought."
What Elon Musk Says
Just two months before Coxon's resignation, Elon Musk -- Anthropic's longtime critic and, awkwardly, one of its compute suppliers through SpaceXAI -- did a complete 180 on the company.
Musk had once called Claude "misanthropic," "evil," and a "threat to Western civilisation". But in July, he posted this instead: "I was clearly wrong about Anthropic. They are obviously currently the leader in AI. No company has released a model as good as Mythos/Fable and they will undoubtedly have Mythos 2 ready soon. And I would never cut them off in a way that hurt them badly, even as a competitor. That's not my style."
In any case, Coxon's resignation won't slow down the AI race by itself. But it adds another voice (an insider's voice) to a growing chorus warning that the companies building this technology understand its risks better than anyone, and are building it anyway.
