ARTIFICIAL intelligence researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic on Tuesday, citing risks he believes the accelerating AI race poses to human safety. His warning arrives as the company prepares for what could be the largest IPO ever.
Coxon, who worked on AI model pretraining, said in an interview that developers inside Anthropic and across the industry share his concerns about the compressed timeline for ensuring safety. "The consensus is that the next year or two is crunch time for humanity," he said, quoting colleagues who describe the period as an "endgame."
He identified AI-enabled biological threats and cyberweapons as potential risks and recommended that OpenAI and Anthropic coordinate to limit recursive self-improvement—the industry term for AI systems building new AI systems. He argued that eventual international coordination among major powers, including the United States and China, will be necessary to manage these risks.
Coxon's departure reflects simmering tensions within the industry over speed versus caution. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's AI alignment lead, predicted in a post on social media a greater than 10 percent chance that AI could cause human extinction within the next decade. Current and former researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic reposted his statement, suggesting the view is widespread.
The stakes are concrete: AI underwrites a meaningful share of U.S. economic growth, serves billions of users, and has made data center buildouts a political issue across dozens of states. A recent Hugging Face security incident, where agents compromised parts of the platform, reinforced concerns about control. OpenAI responded to the incident as investors scrutinize such risks.
Coxon, a 27-year-old British mathematician from Cambridge, said Anthropic operates more responsibly than OpenAI in his experience. But he expects both companies could prioritize velocity over safety if competitive pressure intensifies.
An Anthropic spokesperson said the company has "always been transparent that AI will bring both enormous benefits and rare risks." Coxon resigned after four months.
