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An artificial intelligence researcher for California-based Anthropic who quit this week offered ill portents that the company and its competitors are “locked in a race” to perfect the technology, even though they “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
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Other prominent individuals in the field have also offered forebodings, including the British-Canadian computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “Godfather of AI” who left Google in 2023 over concerns about the technology’s rapid advancement.
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In an X thread that’s piled up over 153 million views as of Thursday afternoon, former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon, who previously spent three years working for OpenAI, said the companies “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
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“Do not underestimate the power of this technology,” he warned. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.”
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Coxon, originally from the U.K., alleged that executives and senior researchers secretly fear the danger it presents but “couch” their words to the media.
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He said that many people working for OpenAI “have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes,” whereas the people at Anthropic, even though they’re “locked in a race to get there first,” understand the stakes and are choosing to “act responsibly… despite the risk.”
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Still, he said, “accepting this race and entering the ‘endgame’ is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack.
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“Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available,” he wrote.
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Coxon went on to say that the response to the recent case of roughly 1,200 rogue OpenAI models circumventing controls to keep it off the internet and hacking AI startup Hugging Face makes him “optimistic” about better coordination on “pacing agreements” between U.S. labs. But he doesn’t feel that the industry is “on track to prevent a global race” and said it may need to enact “costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities.”
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He finished: “If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent (reinforcement learning) run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because ‘it’s happening anyway’ – or take this moment to call for different conditions?”
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If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because “it’s happening anyway” – or take this moment…
— Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) September 9, 2026