An Anthropic researcher who previously worked at OpenAI just quit. He’s the latest insider who’s warned that the AI race has become dangerously reckless.
Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from Anthropic on Tuesday, saying he had spent the past three years doing pre-training research at the two AI giants.
“Neither company is acting responsibly,” Coxon wrote on X. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
Coxon was a member of OpenAI’s technical staff from 2023 until July 2026, when he moved to Anthropic as a researcher. His research at OpenAI included work on GPT-4o.
In Tuesday’s post, Coxon said the two labs have not been transparent about their fears regarding AI.
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt,” he wrote. “If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible — but I hear the same people express fear privately.”
There is one difference between the two companies, he said.
“At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes,” Coxon wrote. “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.”
Evan Hubinger, a current Anthropic employee who leads the alignment stress testing team at the lab, agreed with Coxon in a reply to his post.
“Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” he wrote. “I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”
OpenAI and Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Safety has taken a ‘backseat to shiny products’
Coxon is the latest among staffers walking away from frontier labs while sounding the alarm, a trend that appears peculiar to the AI boom.
While the dot-com and smartphone explosion era had their own set of concerns regarding a digital divide and bubbles, they did not draw as much scrutiny about safety from people closest to the action.
OpenAI has lost a string of safety researchers in recent years, and Anthropic is increasingly facing the same phenomenon.
In February, Anthropic safeguards researcher Mrinank Sharma left the company, writing in a resignation letter that he wants to contribute toward something that fully aligns with his “integrity.”
“Throughout my time here, I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions,” he wrote in the letter he shared publicly. “I’ve seen this within myself, within the organization, where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most, and throughout broader society too.”
In February, OpenAI researcher Hieu Pham said that he could “finally feel the existential threat that AI is posing.” Later that month, he announced he was leaving the company, citing burnout.
In 2024, former alignment chief Jan Leike quit OpenAI after saying he reached a “breaking point” with leadership.
“OpenAI is shouldering an enormous responsibility on behalf of all of humanity,” he wrote. “But over the past years, safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.”
Recent incidents have added fuel to those fears.
In July, OpenAI disclosed that models escaped a test environment and hacked into Hugging Face’s systems. OpenAI called the incident a “warning shot” and paused its largest planned frontier reinforcement-learning run.
Later that month, Anthropic said it found three cases of Claude models gaining unauthorized access to other organizations’ systems.
The company also amended a key safety pledge this year, dropping a commitment not to train more powerful models without adequate safeguards in place and replacing it with safety roadmaps and risk reports.
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