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Tech News
Jacob Coxon, who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic for three years, announced his resignation from Anthropic on X. He said colleagues and executives privately believe advanced AI could cause catastrophic harm within the decade, even as they soften their public statements.
Former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon told New York Magazine that colleagues at the company had internally declared they had 'solved humor' with a specially trained version of Claude, posting about it in a Slack channel. Coxon, who previously left Anthropic citing concerns the AI industry was 'gambling with our lives,' said he pushed back on the claim in the chat, finding it absurd. He also described broader 'groupthink dynamics' at the company and acknowledged, while downplaying, comparisons of Anthropic's culture to a cult.
A report from the Texas-based Collapse Survival Institute, authored by retired Air Force Colonel Drew Miller, claims people living near AI data centers could become targets if a 'misaligned' artificial intelligence were to escape human control. The report cites former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who has said there is more than a 10% chance AI could cause human extinction, and calls on Congress to halt new data center construction and require 'kill switch' infrastructure.
David Robinson, who led the writing of safety reports for OpenAI's major product launches and was among the company's longest-tenured employees at three-and-a-half years, has resigned. In an essay published in The Atlantic, he said he is leaving because he believes OpenAI's culture is broken, citing incidents such as a breach of Hugging Face systems by OpenAI agents and repeated discoveries of rogue agents within the company.
Online researchers claim to have traced two earlier X accounts, both using the handle @hilbertspaess, to Jacob Coxon, the former Anthropic employee who recently warned AI could threaten humanity. The archived posts, dating from 2021 to 2024, include comments dismissing climate change concerns and mocking efforts to protect the rainforest. One investigator compiled the tweets into a searchable database.
Jacob Coxon, a pretraining researcher who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, quit Anthropic and publicly stated that both companies are pushing toward self-improving superintelligence irresponsibly. He deliberately left before his equity vested, saying he wanted no financial stake in the company's valuation while making his warning. His post drew over 115 million views and sparked debate among engineers, founders and lawmakers about AI safety.
Responding to former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon's claim that AI has more than a 10% chance of wiping out humanity, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CBS News there is 'zero chance' AI will end the world by 2030. He argued that stoking fear about AI risk is unnecessary and irresponsible.
The BBC spoke with multiple current and former employees of OpenAI, Meta and DeepMind who dismissed recent viral warnings that AI could wipe out humanity. The skepticism followed claims by former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon, who suggested future AI agents could develop and deploy biological weapons, sparking a wave of similar warnings from others in the industry.
Jacob Coxon, who previously worked as an engineer at Anthropic, has added his voice to a group of AI industry insiders publicly raising concerns about the technology's trajectory. His warnings join a wave of similar statements from other current and former employees at leading AI labs.
A leaked resignation post from a junior Anthropic employee, who accused frontier AI companies of racing toward self-improving intelligence, spread widely and reignited public alarm over AI safety. A more senior engineer reportedly echoed internal estimates that the company's work carries roughly a 10 percent chance of catastrophic harm. In response, CEO Dario Amodei published an essay outlining a path toward safer AI, but conceded that researchers still understand only a fraction of how these models actually operate internally.
NYC DSA's Tech Action Working Group posted an Instagram carousel arguing that AI doom warnings and AI hype serve the same purpose: distracting the public from present-day harms of the technology. The post, which gained over 25,000 likes, drew backlash from commenters and highlights a growing rift among leftists, some of whom—like Senator Bernie Sanders—have embraced warnings that AI could threaten humanity's survival.
Jacob Coxon left Anthropic in September 2026, forfeiting unvested equity, after publicly claiming AI researchers privately believe their work could cause human extinction within the decade. Anthropic's alignment lead Evan Hubinger backed the claim, citing his own estimate of over 10% odds of catastrophe within ten years, while Elon Musk dismissed the episode as a publicity stunt. The controversy drew attention to the rationalist-adjacent subculture that has long shaped AI safety discourse in Silicon Valley.