Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quits, urges AI slowdown

Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old British researcher who spent three years on pretraining at OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned from Anthropic on September 8 and posted from a park bench in San Francisco's Alamo Square that the leading labs are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." Time reports the message drew 153 million views in 36 hours.

Coxon walked two months before his equity would have vested. He asked publicly for "some sort of slowdown between the people building the different AIs," warned that things could be "out of control" by the end of next year, and said colleagues inside frontier labs now speak of "crunchtime" and "endgame." Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI, he wrote, is acting responsibly.

The endorsement from inside Anthropic is what made the resignation land. Evan Hubinger, an alignment science lead at Anthropic, wrote that he shared Coxon's view and put the chance of AI killing all humans within the next decade at greater than 10 percent.

Two researchers we follow shared the post the day it dropped.