Everyone Is Right (and Wrong) About AI

Qilai Shen / Bloomberg / Getty September 19, 2026, 2:10 PM ET Share Save O ne 27-year-old quit his job, and everybody (including but not limited to the singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow) appears to have lost it.

The past two weeks have been dizzying. The 27- year-old, Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic, went public with an alarming allegation: That the people inside Silicon Valley’s leading AI companies truly believe their products might pose an extinction level threat to humanity. This claim isn’t exactly new. AI safety advocates, often dubbed doomers, have been saying this for over a decade. Coxon isn’t even the first AI researcher this year to quit and cite concerns.