On Tuesday, September 8, 2026, an Anthropic researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned over safety concerns and wrote about why. He said the leading labs are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence” and gambling with everybody’s lives.
Then a colleague answered him in public. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s Alignment Science Lead, agreed. He wrote that “we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans,” and put his personal odds at greater than 10% within the next decade.
Not a disgruntled ex-employee. Not a competitor. The person whose job is making sure the thing doesn’t go wrong, still employed, posting under his own name.
I’ve been investing in Anthropic through various funds since 2022 as a hedge for my children. So this got my attention.
But the part I can’t stop turning over isn’t the 10% chance of human extinction. It’s the 3,499 people working on Anthropic who read it and went to work the next morning.
So I started wondering how much money it takes before we’ll do work that doesn’t sit right with us, and when we should stop. This is the conflict that created the FIRE movement in the first place. You save enough to leave something you don’t love so you can do something meaningful for less money. Every one of us makes that trade at some price. Almost nobody ever writes the price down.
The Headlines Left Out The Important Part
Every outlet ran with the 10% number. Fewer ran with the follow-up.
Hubinger clarified that he considers the risk from Anthropic’s current models to be low, citing the company’s own risk report. What he’s worried about is a future superintelligence emerging from recursive self-improvement, meaning AI that designs its own successor without a human in the loop.
That doesn’t exist yet. It might never exist. But the labs say progress toward it is running faster than they expected.
So the honest version is not “Claude is going to kill you.” The honest version is “we are building toward something we do not yet know how to control, on an uncertain deadline.”
Interesting Timing Before Anthropic’s IPO
Anthropic confidentially filed its draft S-1 on June 1, 2026. Reuters reported on September 5 that the public filing has slipped to late September, with the roadshow no earlier than mid-October, at a valuation that could reach $1.5-$2 trillion.
Which means these tweets landed during the exact window when a company is supposed to be at its most disciplined. I wrote about the IPO quiet period, and here’s the thing people misunderstand: the quiet period gags the company, not the employees posting on X at 11pm.
Having worked on dozens of IPOs during my working career, I can promise you an internal Anthropic memo went out to watch what you say publicly. I can also promise you the lead bankers spent Wednesday morning rewriting the risk factors section. “Our employees have publicly stated our technology may cause human extinction” is not standard prospectus language, but it is going to be in there now, because leaving it out after this would be worse.
The counterintuitive part is that this probably doesn’t hurt the deal. It probably improves it.
All Publicity Is Good Publicity
Look at what happened in February 2026. Anthropic refused the Pentagon’s demand to drop its restrictions on autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. President Trump ordered every federal agency to stop using Claude, and Defense Secretary Hegseth designated Anthropic a supply chain risk, a label normally reserved for adversary nations. It cost them a contract worth up to $200 million.
Claude then hit #1 on the US App Store within 24 hours, displacing ChatGPT. In August, a federal judge ruled the blacklist was illegal.
The Desire For Money Is More Powerful Than Everything
If there were no financial incentive to work 50-80 hours a week, almost nobody would. There are infinitely more interesting things to do than sitting in meetings all day and telling people what to do.
And the vast majority of us will do work that conflicts with our values if the number is high enough.
Somebody is at PepsiCo right now optimizing the sugar content of a drink that is making the country sicker. Somebody is at Meta right now A/B testing the notification that keeps a 14-year-old scrolling until 1am. They are not villains. Instead, they are people who got offered a number too good to refuse.
I wanted the money for 13 years in finance because I started with none. Then I got to the point where my passive income covered my basic living expenses of about $80,000 gross a year. Once that happened, I was Audi 5000.
Helping institutional money managers beat their benchmarks was fine. It just stopped being meaningful, so I negotiated a severance and left at 34.
I make a fraction of what I used to. But I feel great helping folks reach financial independence sooner, which is why I’ve written consistently since 2009 for free.
The difference is, I left a job that was boring, not a job that was dangerous. Nobody at Credit Suisse thought our equities desk had a 10% chance of ending humanity. If I had known my employer might wipe out millions of livelihoods and then the lives of everyone else, would I have stayed 13 years?
Hell no! Then again, if you paid me enough, maybe.
The Going Rate For Selling Your Soul
Every one of us has a price. We just don’t like to price it, because pricing it means admitting it exists.
So let me do it for you. Below is the going rate, by category of person, along with the passive income each level throws off at a 4% withdrawal rate and where it puts you among American households.
Before you get upset, I’m not the arbiter of anybody’s soul. The chart comes out of FIRE reality, where the whole point is breaking free from work you don’t fully believe in.
If you love your job and think your product makes the world better, great. Ignore everything below. And if you work at a foundational AI lab and put the odds of your product ending humanity at close to zero, you’ve got every right to sleep well too. My soul-selling guide isn’t for you.
But if you’re troubled inside, the percentiles come from Federal Reserve survey data, the passive income is straight 4% math, and the inflation adjustment is the CPI. The labels I hung on those numbers are mine, and you’re welcome to think I got them wrong.
This is a pricing guide, not a verdict.
$1 million. $40,000 a year. Top 18% of households. You’re a millionaire and you still can’t leave, thanks to raging inflation and the high cost of living.
$3 million. $120,000 a year. Top 6% of households. The first red bar, and the most important one on the chart. The passive income figures assume the invested portion, since your house doesn’t send you a check.
In 2012, my passive income covered about $80,000 gross a year based on ~$2 million in non-house assets, and that’s what let me walk at 34. Run that through the CPI and $80,000 in 2012 is roughly $116,000 today. Cumulative inflation over those 14 years was 45%. Which is why I’ve argued that the real millionaire threshold is now $3 million, not $2 million or $1 million.
$5 million. $200,000 a year. Top 3% of households. The second red bar. $5 million should be enough for the vast majority of people to walk away from a soul-sucking job and do something with better alignment. But if you live in an expensive coastal city, it’s tougher, especially with children. If you have real convictions and no dependents, this is where you find out whether they were convictions or hobbies.
$10 million. $400,000 a year. Top 1.5% of households. Two college educations, a paid-off house, orthodontia, and the sneaking suspicion that your kids will need more help than you did. $400,000 without working is enough to stop rationalizing and start living true to your values. Based on my survey of hundreds of FS readers, $10 million is the ideal net worth to retire early. And yet most people who get here keep grinding, which is why this bar is navy and not red.
$25 million. $1 million a year. Top 0.3% of households. The greed is strong with this one, and I say that with affection because I’ve felt it myself. When your money prints a million a year and you’re still at the desk on a Sunday, you are not staying for the money. You’re staying for the scoreboard. There’s no bar past this one because there doesn’t need to be. Whatever number you name next, you’ll name another after it.
Again, if you love your job and believe in its mission, none of this applies to you. Keep making more money forever.
Related: How You’ll Feel Reaching Different Millionaire Milestones: $1 to $20 million
The Gap Is The Price
Don’t like $3 million as the number that buys your freedom? Fine. Use your own. Take what you spend in a year and multiply it by 25. Spend $60,000, your freedom number is $1.5 million. Spend $200,000, it’s $5 million.
Now do the division.
Take the number where you privately think you’ll finally stop working. Divide it by your freedom number. That multiple is the price of your soul, and it’s the only figure on this page that’s actually about you.
Say your freedom number is $1 million but you won’t leave the job you hate until $5 million. You’re at 5X. You are selling your soul. Most people land between 2X and 8X, and not because they’re weak. Because nobody ever made them reconcile the two figures.
And no, being above 1X isn’t a moral failing. Selling your soul isn’t a character defect. It’s a market, and you’re a participant whether you priced yourself or not.
If you want a framework for reaching your freedom number faster so you can stop negotiating with yourself, that’s the entire point of Millionaire Milestones: Simple Steps To Seven Figures. Financial independence isn’t about owning stuff. It’s about being able to quit on a Tuesday because something felt wrong.
The Retention Rate Is The Real Number
Everybody fixated on 10%. The more important number may be the number one.
Anthropic employs roughly 3,500 people. On Tuesday, one of them quit. Jacob Coxon is 27 years old and spent three years doing pretraining research, first at OpenAI and then at Anthropic for just two months. He walked, publicly, and named both companies. Some believe it’s a carefully orchestrated publicity stunt.
The other 3,499 employees read the same thread. Their alignment lead put his own odds at better than one in ten. Then they all went to work the next morning.
Now go back up to my chart.
That chart prices what it costs to keep someone working on something that conflicts with their values. At a potential $2 trillion listing valuation, a meaningful share of that workforce is sitting on paper stakes well past $5 million, which is the threshold for enough in an expensive city like San Francisco.
So Anthropic is retaining essentially its entire workforce, including the researchers most publicly worried, at a company where employees openly assign double-digit odds to human extinction. How? With equity people believe will be worth a generational sum.
10% Human Extinction Is Compensation Disclosure, Not Risk Disclosure
If you sincerely believe there’s a one-in-ten chance your employer ends the world, and you stay anyway, you are telling the market exactly what you think your stock is worth.
The implied number is staggering. A $30 trillion total addressable market is the only thing that makes that trade rational. Nobody carries that psychological weight for a company they think is fairly priced at $965 billion. They think the company is worth much more.
The bearish version of this story is not “Anthropic employees say AI might kill us all.” The bearish version is “Anthropic employees say AI might kill us all, and then hundreds of them followed their principles and resigned two weeks before the S-1.”
That story didn’t happen. The opposite happened. Everybody has stayed despite knowing the potential consequences.
Which is why I read Jacob Coxon’s humanity extinction as bullish. Despite the risks, employees think the gains are worth it. Stopping these people is impossible.
As an investor who wants to build wealth, perhaps it’s best to follow their lead.
Blaise Pascal was a 17th century French mathematician, and he essentially invented decision theory while arguing about God. His reasoning went like this.
You cannot prove whether God exists. So stop trying, and instead look at the four possible outcomes of your choice:
- You believe, and God exists. Infinite gain.
- You believe, and God does not exist. You lost a little. Some Sundays, some restraint.
- You don’t believe, and God does not exist. You gained a little. Some Sundays, some fun.
- You don’t believe, and God exists. Infinite loss as you get damned to hell.
Pascal’s insight was that the probability barely matters when the payoffs are this lopsided. Even if the odds of God existing are tiny, a small chance of infinite gain beats a large chance of a modest gain. So you should believe.
The key mechanic, and the part people always miss, is asymmetry. Pascal’s Wager isn’t a bet on what’s likely. It’s a bet on what happens to you if you’re wrong.
That is the single most useful idea in investing, and it has nothing to do with religion.
The AI Version Of The Wager
Apply the same four boxes to your portfolio.
- You own AI, and AI transforms the economy. You captured one of the largest wealth transfers in history. Your kids are fine because of your huge AI investment gains, even if the labor market isn’t.
- You own AI, and AI disappoints. You underperformed the S&P 500 with a slice of your portfolio. Annoying. Survivable.
- You don’t own AI, and AI disappoints. You feel smart at dinner parties for about three years.
- You don’t own AI, and AI transforms the economy. Your career gets automated, your children’s careers never start, and you own none of the machine that did it. This is the box you cannot recover from.
The cost of being wrong in box 2 is a few percentage points of return. The cost of being wrong in box 4 is your family’s economic future. In other words, multiple generations of being part of the permanent underclass.
That’s the wager. Not “AI will definitely win.” Just “I cannot afford to be on the wrong side of it.”
The AI Version Of The Wager
One objection first. The instinct is that a 10% chance of extinction means sell.
But run it through. In that scenario your portfolio is worth nothing, and so is everyone else’s, and so is cash, gold, farmland, and the dollar. There’s no counterparty. Nobody to sell to and nothing to buy. It’s the one risk in finance that can’t be hedged, which means it shouldn’t drive your allocation at all. You can’t position for a world with no positions in it.
So you’re left with the other 90%. Apply the same four boxes there.
- You own AI, and AI transforms the economy. You captured one of the largest wealth transfers in history. Your kids are fine even if the labor market isn’t.
- You own AI, and AI disappoints. You underperformed the S&P 500 with a slice of your portfolio. Annoying. Survivable.
- You don’t own AI, and AI disappoints. You feel smart at dinner parties for about three years.
- You don’t own AI, and AI transforms the economy. Your career gets automated, your children’s careers never start, and you own none of the machine that did it. This is the box you cannot recover from.
The cost of being wrong in box 2 is a few percentage points of return. The cost of being wrong in box 4 is your family’s economic future.
That’s the wager. Not “AI will definitely win.” Just “I cannot afford to be on the wrong side of it.”
One Risk X Factor
The bigger risk is regulatory. Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Greg Casar introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act this month, and a separate AI Kill Switch Act is advancing in the House.
Extinction talk from named employees at the leading safety-branded lab is exactly the kind of testimony that gets read aloud in a hearing. Free publicity is bullish. Legislation that caps what these models are allowed to become is not. Price both.
So my conclusion, uncomfortable as it is: hold or buy more.
So my conclusion, uncomfortable as it is: hold or buy more.
It’s Only Rational To Protect Yourself
Talent stays, so shipping velocity holds. Velocity holds, so revenue compounds. Anthropic’s annualized run-rate went from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025 to past $47 billion by May 2026, and I think $100 billion by year end is achievable. That’s the number the IPO gets priced off, and Reuters reported the listing could come at up to $2 trillion.
Anthropic is over 20% of VCX, its single largest holding, which is where a chunk of my money lives. I’ve laid out my NAV math separately.
So the greed is not a side effect I’m tolerating. The greed is the asset. The willingness of 3,499 people to keep building something they’re afraid of is what produces the revenue that produces the valuation that produces my return. Strip out the greed and you don’t get a safer investment. You get a slower company and a worse mark.
The Hedge Was Never A Prediction
In 2023 I watched AI replace my father, who had been my semi-regular editor for over 10 years, and I extrapolated.
If AI destroys millions of jobs and makes it hard for my kids to support themselves, at least the investments will be there. If AI turns out to be overhyped or a net job creator, my children will be OK anyway and I just underperformed the index. Both branches end fine. That’s what a good hedge looks like.
Ideally I hold until they’re 25 and I can see whether they can earn a livable wage in whatever economy exists then. So much can change between now and then, which is exactly why I’m writing Your Children Will Be OK. You cannot promise your kids a specific future. You can build them a floor and teach them to be adaptable.
But there’s a third branch I don’t like thinking about, where the portfolio does its job and I’m not around to manage it.
The Greater Risk That Actually Shows Up
Here’s what bothers me more than the extinction talk.
We spend enormous emotional energy on a 10% tail risk we cannot insure against, and almost none on the mundane one we can. The realistic threat to my children’s financial future isn’t the machines. It’s me dying at 52 with two kids in school, a mortgage, and a portfolio that was supposed to have another 20 years to compound.
That’s the scenario that actually shows up in families.
Which brings me back to the chart. Every number on it assumes you’re alive to reach it. A freedom number is a promise you make to the people who depend on you, and a promise that expires when you do isn’t worth much.
So run your multiple this weekend. Then make sure the plan survives you.
Reader Questions
At what net worth would you actually walk away from a job that conflicted with your values, and what’s the multiple between that number and the amount that would genuinely cover your living expenses?
Does an Anthropic employee publicly stating there’s a greater than 10% chance their product ends humanity make you more likely to invest in that company, or less? Does it change your answer that the same employee says the risk from today’s models is low?
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