AI Firms Gambling With Our Lives: Anthropic Researcher Quits Citing Irresponsible AI Use

Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher at Anthropic, announced his resignation on Wednesday, alleging that leading technology firms, including OpenAI, are acting irresponsibly in an unchecked race toward developing superintelligence and "gambling with our lives".

Coxon, who spent the past three years conducting pre-training research across both OpenAI and Anthropic, said that the competitive rush between labs is being pursued without adequate safeguards.

In a post on social media platform X, he warned that the technology is advancing rapidly toward superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionise any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. He added that no other human activity poses a comparable level of danger.

"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.

“At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalised the civilisational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first – they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk. Accepting this race and entering the ‘endgame’ is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack," he said, adding that many working in the sector earnestly believe AI could cause catastrophic harm by the end of the decade.

Coxon claimed that while executives and researchers often adopt measured language in public, many privately harbour deep concerns about the existential dangers posed by uncontrolled artificial intelligence. He also noted that security incidents, such as the recent Hugging Face breach, demonstrate the urgent need for pacing agreements between major US labs.

Urging his peers to reconsider their complicity, Coxon wrote: "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 (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?”