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AI employee quits over safety concerns (Credit: Jacob Coxon's X account)
Another AI employee has quit over safety concerns, adding to a growing list of researchers and employees who have publicly warned that the race to develop increasingly powerful AI systems is moving too fast.Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher who spent the past three years conducting pretraining research at OpenAI and Anthropic, announced his resignation from Anthropic in a post on X. “Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote, accusing both companies of “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon said.
He warned that future AI systems could become capable of hacking systems, transforming entire fields and acquiring real-world power and resources.
Coxon is the latest AI worker to publicly raise concerns about the technology’s development. Several employees at major AI companies have quit or spoken out over fears that advances in AI could outpace efforts to keep the systems under human control.In July, nearly 1,400 AI company employees signed an open letter calling for stronger regulation and a slower pace of development to improve AI safety, according to a CNN report.
Coxon said that while the risks are understood at Anthropic, the company remains caught in a race with other AI developers. “Accepting this race and entering the ‘endgame’ is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack,” he said.He called for greater coordination between AI companies and governments and said a temporary ban on improving model capabilities could be among the measures needed to prevent a global race.His comments were backed by Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger, who wrote: “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” Hubinger later said he personally puts the chance of this happening over the next decade at under 10%.Anthropic said it has “always been transparent that AI will bring both enormous benefits and unprecedented risks” and that it continues to build models with strong safeguards.The latest resignation comes as AI leaders themselves acknowledge growing safety concerns. OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki recently warned that AI capabilities are advancing faster than researchers’ ability to reliably monitor and control them.
