Anthropic researcher quits over 'irresponsible' AI race

Jacob Coxon announced his departure from Anthropic on Tuesday, accusing the artificial intelligence lab and its rival OpenAI of pursuing dangerous capabilities without adequate safeguards. "Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives," Coxon wrote on the social media platform X, according to his public statements.

Coxon, 27, spent the past three years building foundational models at both firms, specializing in pretraining — the core, computationally intensive phase that establishes the base knowledge underpinning consumer products like ChatGPT and Claude. His exit marks the latest in a string of resignations by safety-focused researchers leaving top AI developers over mounting ethical concerns regarding the unchecked pace of capability advancement.

Private fears of catastrophe

The researcher warned that upcoming systems could soon gain the ability to hack software, disrupt entire industries and autonomously acquire real-world resources. "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," he said.

Addressing fellow researchers across commercial labs, Coxon urged workers to "call for different conditions" and noted that slowing the competitive race may require drastic measures, including formal pacing agreements between rival labs or a temporary industry-wide ban on certain capability advancements. His resignation follows previous high-profile exits from OpenAI by prominent figures who raised similar alarms about existential risks posed by rapid artificial intelligence development.