A researcher for artificial intelligence developer Anthropic resigned publicly on Tuesday, citing concerns that it and other leading AI companies are “gambling with our lives” as they compete to develop self-improving models, adding to mounting fears about the safety of the emerging technology.
Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher who has trained AI models at both Anthropic and OpenAI, issued an existential warning before announcing his resignation from the industry at-large: “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,” Coxon said in a viral thread posted to his X account. “No other human activity poses this level of danger.”
Coxon’s warning comes amid an industry-wide reckoning over concerns that AI could grow out of control without stringent safeguards and pose a threat to humanity. Bill Gates, the billionaire co-founder of Microsoft, recently warned that AI poses a grave risk to the fundamentals of human life, arguing that mitigating those risks should be the world’s “top priority.”
At the core of Coxon’s concern is the fierce competition between Anthropic and OpenAI to develop self-improving AI systems, which have not yet been achieved but would theoretically operate with little human intervention.
“A common response is ‘if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?,” Coxon wrote. “At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational 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.”
The dueling labs are also hurtling toward the launch of their initial public offerings, with each company aiming to beat the other to public ownership. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, is a former founding member of OpenAI who left the company in late 2020 over fundamental disagreements with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about safety and regulation. The pair have since been locked in a public rivalry.
Anthropic’s Claude AI model has also been at the core of an ethical dispute with the Trump administration over how the Pentagon can use the technology.
Hours after Coxon’s resignation Tuesday, Anthropic’s chief safety researcher, Evan Hubinger, wrote on X that “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!”
Hubinger added that he believes there is a greater than 10% chance that AI could “kill all humans” and that while he believes Anthropic is “trying its best,” the company does “not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”
Anthropic and OpenAI did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment.
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