Thursday, September 10, 2026 - A former Anthropic researcher has resigned from the
artificial intelligence industry, warning that competition among leading AI
companies is accelerating the development of systems he believes could become
uncontrollable and pose an existential threat to humanity.
Jacob Coxon, who worked on training advanced AI models at
Anthropic, told the Wall Street Journal that he left the company because of
concerns about the speed at which increasingly capable systems are being
developed. Coxon said some researchers working on the technology “earnestly
believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
He also said colleagues had begun using terms such as
“crunchtime” and “endgame” to describe the current phase of AI development,
reflecting what he viewed as an increasingly urgent race to build
self-improving systems. “We're on track for a lot of the most aggressive of
these scenarios where by the end of next year things could be out of control
already,” Coxon told the Wall Street Journal.
Coxon said he had also worked at OpenAI earlier in the year
before joining Anthropic and argued that competition between major AI companies
was making the industry less safe. He criticised both companies, saying they
were “not acting responsibly.”
Following publication of the Wall Street Journal report,
Coxon expanded on his concerns on social media, discussing his experiences at
OpenAI and Anthropic and reiterating his fears about the direction of AI
development. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and
gambling with our lives,” he wrote.
Anthropic executives and other figures in the AI industry
have previously warned about the potential dangers associated with increasingly
powerful AI systems and called for stronger safeguards around their
development. Coxon, however, argued that those warnings had not resulted in a
meaningful slowdown in the race to develop more advanced models.
His concerns centre on the possibility that future AI
systems could become capable of improving themselves faster than humans could
control or understand them, potentially producing consequences their developers
could no longer reliably manage.
The claim that AI could destroy humanity remains a disputed
and highly speculative scenario, and Coxon’s comments reflect his assessment of
the risks rather than an established prediction of what will happen
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