Coxon, Kokotajlo, Turner Tell NYMag Why They Quit AI Labs
TL;DR
- NYMag ran a Q&A with ex-Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, ex-OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo, and ex-DeepMind researcher Alex Turner on quitting AI labs.
- Coxon, who did pretraining at OpenAI and Anthropic, said both are 'racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.'
- Turner told a NYC Council hearing the same day that misaligned AI could become 'our own adversary here at home.'
New York Magazine ran a joint Q&A with three former frontier-lab staffers now going public about why they quit: Jacob Coxon, who did pretraining research at OpenAI and then Anthropic; Daniel Kokotajlo, formerly of OpenAI and now executive director of the AI Futures Project; and Alex Turner, until recently an AI safety researcher at Google DeepMind.
Coxon resigned from Anthropic on September 8. In the post announcing it he wrote that his former employers are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." Speaking to Time, he described an "atmosphere of almost resignation, where people have accepted that the whole race is happening."
Turner, who left Google DeepMind earlier in 2026 over a Pentagon contract, used blunter language at a New York City Council hearing on the same day the Q&A ran: "With reasonably high chance, we are racing to build and grow our own adversary here at home, which is misaligned AI."
The piece is framed as exit interviews and covers "leaving AI labs, AGI's dangers, planned IPOs, AI safety, oversight, and more."
Originally reported by nymag.com
Read the original article →Original headline: NYMag Q&A: Jacob Coxon, Daniel Kokotajlo and Alex Turner Say AI Labs Racing to Build Their Adversary