"I resigned from Anthropic today": labs are "gambling with our lives"

Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old pretraining researcher who worked at OpenAI and then Anthropic over three years, announced his resignation in an X thread. He wrote that neither company is acting responsibly and that both are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives". The thread says people building AI earnestly believe it could kill everyone by the end of the decade, and that OpenAI staff have not internalized the stakes while Anthropic staff understand them but feel locked in a race. It calls for pacing agreements and possibly temporary capability bans. Anthropic alignment lead Evan Hubinger publicly agreed (>10% extinction risk within a decade). TIME, TechCrunch, Fortune, Deadline and Scientific American covered it. Four days later Dario Amodei published "We Must Pace the Frontier", and TIME links Altman's IPO postponement to the fallout. Later partisan outlets (RedState, The Manhattan) alleged coordination with an AI-risk PR firm; this is unverified. Verified via the X syndication API: 2026-09-09 00:04 UTC, which is the evening of Sept 8 in San Francisco.

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.

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Archived 2026-09-29 via syndication.