There’s a moment in many science-fiction movies when a scientist tries to warn everyone that some monster or pathogen is about to break containment. And then they are ignored.
We have now arrived at that moment in real life. We’d better not ignore it.
On Tuesday, AI researcher Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from Anthropic in a mega-viral post on X: “I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic,” he began. (Pretraining is an important part of the training process for AI models like Claude and GPT-6.)
He continued: “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. . . . These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. . . . The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
He’s right. I know this because I worked at OpenAI for two years, forecasting AI progress internally and working on model evaluations and alignment research, and because I still talk with friends at OpenAI and Anthropic.
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