Anthropic’s Jacob Coxon quits and calls Code Red on AI’s potential for human extinction by 2030. Post receives 100 million views. – Chat GPT Is Eating the World
Anthropic’s Jacob Coxon quits and calls Code Red on AI’s potential for human extinction by 2030. Post receives 100 million views.
September 9, 2026
I 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.
Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic. And he caused a firestorm in doing so. Coxon warns in a series of X posts, some of which are shown below:
The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear…
Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.
The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.
Jacob Coxon
I interpret the “end of the decade” to mean 2030, but hopefully I’m wrong.
Adding to the alarm, Anthropic’s Evan Hubinger, the Lead for Alignment Science, wrote:
Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to. https://t.co/QAIHiFP3QZ
A noisy quitting does call public attention to this important issue (Coxon did get 100 million views!), but not sure what else it achieves. We do need concerned researchers to be raising these issues internally at AI companies. Unless Anthropic was ignoring Coxon completely, wouldn’t it be better for us all if he worked from within to help Anthropic navigate these safety concerns?