How a 27-year-old math geek at Anthropic made the world afraid of AI

Jacob Coxon had fewer than a hundred followers on X when he announced he was quitting Anthropic last week. Within days, his posts had been viewed more than 170 million times, and the bosses of the world's biggest AI companies were publicly agreeing it was time to slow down.The 27-year-old British researcher warned that people inside frontier AI labs earnestly believe the technology "could kill us all by the end of the decade." He accused companies racing towards superintelligence of "gambling with our lives." As The Wall Street Journal reports, the resignation has turned a researcher almost nobody had heard of into one of the most recognisable faces of the AI safety debate.Jacob Coxon went from math Olympiad medals to building AI modelsCoxon studied math at Cambridge after winning a silver medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad in 2016 and a bronze the following year.