*Jacob Coxon spent three years helping develop artificial intelligence at two of the world’s leading AI companies. Now the 27-year-old researcher has walked away from Anthropic with an extraordinary warning: The companies building increasingly powerful AI are “gambling with our lives.”
“I resigned from Anthropic today,” Coxon announced in an X post that exploded across social media.
“I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic,” he wrote. “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
The post has drawn more than 100 million views, according to multiple news reports, turning an argument once largely confined to AI researchers into a very public question: What happens if artificial intelligence becomes more capable than humans can control?
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‘It Could Kill Us All’
Coxon’s most alarming claim concerns what he says people inside the industry actually believe.
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he wrote. “This is not a marketing stunt.”
Coxon predicts future “superhuman systems” could develop extraordinary hacking abilities, rapidly transform scientific fields and acquire power and resources. Those are his predictions about where AI is heading, not established capabilities of today’s systems.
But his larger concern is the possibility of self-improving AI — systems capable of accelerating their own development beyond effective human oversight.
Coxon argued that Anthropic understands the stakes but remains trapped in a competition to reach advanced AI before rivals do. He described accepting that race as a “hubristic gamble” that shouldn’t effectively be launched from “a private company’s Slack.”
Another Anthropic Researcher Backs His Warning
Perhaps the most startling response came from inside Anthropic itself.
Evan Hubinger, who leads Anthropic’s Alignment Science team, publicly agreed with a central part of Coxon’s warning.
“Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” Hubinger wrote, according to TechCrunch.
Hubinger said he personally puts the probability at greater than 10% within the next decade. He also acknowledged that Anthropic does not yet have a solution for aligning a future superintelligence with human interests and isn’t clearly on track toward one.
That does not mean Anthropic predicts humanity has a greater than 10% chance of being wiped out. It is Hubinger’s personal risk estimate. The distinction matters.
Samuel Marks, who leads Anthropic’s Cognitive Oversight team, also responded publicly, writing in a personal capacity that AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction.
Coxon’s departure has since been reported by the Associated Press and other major outlets.
Coxon Wants the Race Slowed Down
Coxon isn’t arguing that artificial intelligence has no benefits. His warning centers on the speed at which frontier systems are being developed without, in his view, adequate safeguards.
He expressed optimism that competing AI laboratories could coordinate on slowing development, while acknowledging that preventing an international race could eventually require drastic measures, including “a temporary ban on improving model capabilities.”
His final appeal was directed at researchers still inside the labs.
“Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind?” Coxon asked. “Should you put your head down because ‘it’s happening anyway’ — or take this moment to call for different conditions?”
The future Coxon describes remains a prediction, not a certainty. Experts continue to disagree sharply over whether superintelligent AI is imminent, how dangerous it could become and whether existential-risk estimates are meaningful.
But Coxon’s resignation has pushed an uncomfortable debate far beyond Silicon Valley: If some of the people building the world’s most powerful AI systems genuinely fear where the race could lead, how much risk should society accept while they keep building them?
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