A former safety researcher at Anthropic and OpenAI has resigned from his position to publicly urge a deceleration in the artificial intelligence industry’s rapid advancement. Jacob Coxon told ABC News that he supports Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s recent proposal for a pause in frontier AI development, describing the move as a critical step toward responsible oversight.
“I think it’s great. It’s very exciting,” Coxon said during an interview with “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos. “I think this is a substantial step towards what I was talking about, needing some sort of slowdown between the people building the different AIs.”
Coxon departed Anthropic last week, citing urgent safety concerns. In a post on the social media platform X, he argued that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI is acting responsibly, stating that both companies are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” He further noted that industry insiders privately fear the technology could pose an existential threat, writing, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
I’ve been saying this for years. It feels like humanity is betting everything on a gamble we don’t understand at all.
Wait, so he left to warn people but the race continues regardless? What actual power does a single researcher have here?
Slow down or speed up? We already have the tech. A voluntary pause might just help big companies consolidate power further.
This is terrifying. The idea that insiders genuinely fear existential risk by decade’s end is chilling and hard to ignore.