Jacob Coxon had raised a few eyebrows when he’d claimed that many in the AI industry believe that the technology has a 10 percent chance of killing all of humanity by 2030, but he’s found support with his former CEO.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has weighed in publicly for the first time on Jacob Coxon’s viral resignation, telling CNN in an interview that he sides with the former researcher on most of what he said. “I agree with Jacob much more than I disagree with him,” Amodei said.
Coxon, who had worked on pretraining at both Anthropic and OpenAI, resigned earlier this month in a post that went viral, arguing that people actually building frontier AI systems privately believe the technology could kill everyone by the end of the decade, and that both of his former employers were racing toward increasingly self-improving systems without adequate safeguards. The post racked up over a hundred million views within a day, and later drew scrutiny of its own after researchers raised questions about Coxon’s neutrality and his ties to AI safety-adjacent PR groups, given how quickly and widely the post spread from an account with little prior activity.
Amodei used the CNN interview to push back on one particular reading of Coxon’s resignation: that it was an attack on Anthropic specifically. He pointed out that Coxon had actually singled Anthropic out as the industry’s most responsible and most safety-aware lab when he left. In Amodei’s framing, Coxon wasn’t calling out Anthropic at all — he was calling out the pace at which the entire industry was moving, a dynamic Amodei says he recognizes and has been increasingly vocal about himself.
This lines up with Amodei’s own recent public position. He recently published an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” arguing that AI capabilities are advancing faster than labs, including Anthropic, can keep pace with on safety, and proposing that outside evaluators get employee-like access inside frontier companies to check their work. That essay in turn drew quick endorsements from OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Tesla’s Elon Musk, both of whom publicly said they agreed with Amodei’s call to slow down.
Amodei’s comments effectively fold Coxon’s resignation into that same narrative: less a whistleblower exposing one company’s misconduct, and more an early public marker of a concern Amodei says he already shared, and has now spent the past several weeks trying to formalize into industry-wide commitments. Whether Coxon himself would characterize it the same way remains an open question, particularly given the unresolved questions around how his post achieved the reach it did.