'They are gambling with our lives': Anthropic researcher quits over AI race fears

An Anthropic AI researcher has resigned and issued a stark warning about the future of artificial intelligence, accusing leading AI companies of racing towards self-improving superintelligence without enough safeguards.

Jacob Coxon, who said he spent the past three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, announced his resignation on X on September 9.

“I resigned from Anthropic today,” Coxon wrote. “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

His warning quickly became the focus of a wider debate over how fast frontier AI development should move.

‘AI could kill us all by the end of the decade’

Coxon made his most serious claim when discussing what people inside AI companies allegedly believe about the technology. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he wrote.

He said this was not a marketing tactic and claimed executives and senior researchers privately express fears that are more severe than their public comments suggest.

Coxon also warned against underestimating increasingly capable AI systems.

“These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources,” he wrote.

Why would companies keep building it?

Coxon addressed the obvious question: if researchers believe the technology could be catastrophic, why continue developing it?

He argued that the motivations differ between companies.

“At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes,” he wrote. “At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first.”

He described entering this phase as a “hubristic gamble” and argued that decisions about potentially superintelligent systems should not be made inside private-company Slack channels.

Coxon calls for a different AI path

Coxon said he remains optimistic that AI companies could coordinate rather than race.

He called for stronger agreements between leading US AI labs and suggested that extreme measures, including a temporary ban on improving model capabilities, may eventually be necessary.

His final message was aimed directly at AI researchers.

“Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind?” he asked, urging researchers to question whether “it’s happening anyway” is a good enough reason to continue.

Coxon’s resignation comes as other researchers publicly debate the risks of recursive self-improvement. Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger has also said the company does not yet have a clear solution for aligning a future superintelligent system. For the AI industry, Coxon’s departure is therefore more than one researcher leaving a job. It is another public warning from inside a frontier AI lab about whether the race towards increasingly powerful systems is moving faster than humanity’s ability to control them.