Anthropic researcher quits with a warning on AI that echoes 'The Terminator' script
Former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon has resigned, alleging that AI labs are recklessly racing toward super-intelligence. He cites concerns about existential risks and recent security breaches as evidence that current safety measures are insufficient.
Why it matters
Internal whistleblowing from top AI researchers raises significant questions about the safety culture and development speed of the world's leading AI companies.
Jacob Coxon, who spent three years working on pretraining at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned Tuesday and explained his decision on X .
"I resigned from Anthropic today. 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 super-intelligence and gambling with our lives,” he said.
"The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he added.
That statement makes Cameron's 42-year-old fiction look almost prophetic. The movie opens with machines waging war on humans in 2029, the same rough window Coxon says insiders are quietly worried about. Coxon isn't alone at Anthropic making the extinction case. The company's own alignment lead, Evan Hubinger, has said separately he'd put the odds above 10%.
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