GoKawiilI resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below. — Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) September 9, 2026
This is how Jacob Coxon said goodbye to the AI industry, on X, last week.
And in a follow-up post:
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.”
Jacob Coxon is not a star. He is not a CEO, not a famous scientist, and does not hold a PhD (yes, in USA you can be an “AI researcher” without a PhD). He joined Anthropic at 27 years old, mainly because of its safety reputation, and he likes to solve problems and “make a world a better place”.
He is, in other words, an engineer. Like most of us.
But he did something most of us never do: he left two months before his equity vested, and gave it up to speak.
“I no longer have anything to gain by juicing up Anthropic’s valuation. … I left before any of my equity vested.”
Note that he does not call Anthropic “evil”. He even told the Wall Street Journal that their safety work is sincere. His accusation is colder than that: “if you’re under pressure to race, you have to cut corners”.
You could argue the reaction was oversized. One resignation letter, more than 115 million views, a rage on social networks between engineers, entrepreneurs, or simply humans, and lawmakers suddenly calling for regulation.
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