Anthropic researcher says humanity's future decided on 'MacBooks of engineers'
A former Anthropic researcher has publicly criticized the AI industry, warning that the future of humanity is being shaped by engineers in private Slack channels. He and other experts express concern that labs are racing toward superintelligence without adequate safety plans.
Why it matters
This highlights the growing internal dissent within top AI labs regarding the existential risks posed by rapid, unregulated development of superintelligent systems.
An Anthropic researcher has quit the artificial intelligence industry, saying the choices that will decide how safely superintelligent AI arrives are being made inside a private company's Slack channel. Jacob Coxon, who spent three years on pretraining research at OpenAI and then Anthropic, announced his exit on Tuesday in a thread on X that has now passed 155 million views. Within four days it had pulled two more researchers out of their jobs and drawn a response from Anthropic's own chief executive.Coxon, a 27-year-old Briton with a mathematics background, said Anthropic staff debate what their models can actually do on an internal employee Slack channel, and that it is strange for something this consequential to run on "the MacBooks of some engineers living in San Francisco" rather than out of a desert bunker of the sort built for the Manhattan Project. His public post was blunter.
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