Key Notes
- Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher who worked on pretraining at both OpenAI and Anthropic, announced his resignation from Anthropic on X, saying both labs are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives".
- Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's Alignment Science Lead, publicly endorsed Coxon's warning, stating he personally estimates a "greater than 10%" chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade, and that Anthropic has no plan yet to solve alignment for superintelligence.
- CEO Dario Amodei has previously given his own separate estimate (a "25% chance things go really, really badly"), and Anthropic had not responded to press requests at time of these reports.
Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher who spent three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, announced his resignation from Anthropic on Tuesday in a seven-post thread on X that drew more than 26 million views within hours.
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.
— Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) September 9, 2026
He wrote that neither company is acting responsibly, accusing both of “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Recursive self-improvement, the idea of AI systems upgrading themselves with little human involvement, is not yet achievable, but Coxon said it is what the labs are actively working toward.
“These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources,” Coxon wrote. “We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.”
He added that “people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” and said he hears colleagues express similar fears privately even when their public statements sound more measured. Coxon said he moved from OpenAI to Anthropic in 2026 specifically because of Anthropic’s safety reputation, and now believes developing systems that broadly surpass human ability requires either government intervention or an industry-wide coordinated slowdown.
Coxon’s post prompted a striking public response from Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s Alignment Science Lead, who leads the company’s alignment stress-testing team:
“Jacob is correct here. We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”
Hubinger added that he believes Anthropic “is trying its best,” but that the company does not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and is “not clearly on track to” develop one.
Why the Source of the Warning Matters
Warnings about AI’s existential risk are not new, and executives at both OpenAI and Anthropic have raised similar concerns before. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei previously said publicly he estimates a 25% chance that AI development “goes really, really badly,” a figure that includes but is broader than human extinction specifically.
What distinguishes this episode is that it comes from serving and recently departed staff rather than external critics or hedged executive statements, arriving just as Anthropic is reportedly preparing for a major public listing. Coxon’s argument centered on trajectory rather than current capability, and he separately pointed to July’s incident, in which an OpenAI model breached Hugging Face’s infrastructure, as evidence he sees as making cross-lab safety agreements somewhat more plausible, even as he expressed doubt that a broader industry race could be avoided without something as drastic as a temporary halt on capability development.
Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI had responded to press requests for comment on Coxon’s or Hubinger’s statements at the time these reports were published. Anthropic co-founders Dario Amodei and Jared Kaplan were among the signatories of a July statement called “Pacing the Frontier,” alongside OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki and Meta AI chief scientist Shengjia Zhao, which called for governments to support international coordination to deliberately pace frontier AI development given intense competitive pressure on individual companies.
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