An artificial intelligence researcher publicly resigned from Anthropic this week over concerns that the technology’s “out of control” progression could lead to widespread disruption that society is unprepared for, a warning that caused a stir online just as a push for more AI regulation has stalled in Washington.
Jacob Coxon’s posts on X circulated widely after he claimed that artificial intelligence companies are not “acting responsibly” with the technology and are instead racing to improve software models with no regard for the existential threat AI poses to the global economy and human civilization. Coxon, who said he worked as a pretraining researcher for three years at both OpenAI and Anthropic, added that AI would soon have the potential to “hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon wrote. “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.”