Ex-Anthropic Researcher Burns It All Down as He Quits, Warns AI ‘Will Kill Us All’ Within a Decade

(Patrick Sison/AP photo)

A now-former AI researcher issued a dire warning as he quit his job this week, claiming those involved with artificial intelligence are developing it irresponsibly and declaring it “will kill us all” inside of a decade.

Jacob Coxon, who worked as an artificial intelligence researcher at Anthropic for three years, announced his resignation Tuesday in an X post.

“I resigned from Anthropic today,” Coxon wrote. “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.”

In a subsequent post, Coxon added, “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.”

Other posts followed, including one where Coxon warned, “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.”

He added, “No other human activity poses this level of danger.”

Evan Hubinger, a former Anthropic colleague of Coxon, later took to X to say he agreed with the assessment.

“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.”

Hubinger later clarified that he believes the possibility of human extinction is low, pointing to Anthropic’s own risk report.

“To be clear, as we say in our latest Risk Report, I think the risk from present models is low. What I am worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement, as we have said is happening faster than we thought.”

Anthropic did not immediately respond to request for comment by Mediaite.

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