Jacob Coxon, the poster child for AI doom and gloom, said there’s a reason that pacing the frontier may not work.
Coxon, who quit Anthropic last month after accusing it and OpenAI of “gambling with lives,” said on businessman Patrick Bet-David’s podcast that slowing US AI development may be ineffective because Chinese spies might have infiltrated US labs.
He said he was “90%” certain about the presence of Chinese spies at OpenAI and Anthropic, who could steal the labs’ progress at any time, and “catch up the lead.”
“So if we continue, they’re going to have access to it. If we don’t continue, China’s going to create it themselves. So either way, China’s eventually going to have access to it,” he said to Bet-David in the interview released on Tuesday.
However, when Bet-David asked him for details about who they might be, Coxon said he was “not trying to, like, start a witch hunt” and didn’t name anyone.
A source familiar with Anthropic told Business Insider that there is no evidence to support this claim. Anthropic treats foreign intelligence threats as a serious risk and maintains rigorous personnel vetting, strict access controls, and insider risk monitoring.
Coxon and representatives from OpenAI did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
Coxon added in the interview that another reason China’s AI capabilities are progressing is the use of distillation attacks, a problem that labs like Anthropic have mentioned several times.
Distillation attacks involve using advanced AI models to train and improve the capabilities of less advanced models, and Anthropic accused Chinese labs such as Alibaba, Moonshot, DeepSeek, and Zhipu of launching millions of these attacks over the summer.
In another part of the interview, he also compared Anthropic staff to worker ants who are “willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the mission,” which is achieving superintelligence.
Coxon’s interview come after executives at major AI labs, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and xAI CEO Elon Musk, have talked about slowing AI development and adding checks and guardrails into the process. Altman said in a September X post that progress at OpenAI “has been rapid and will continue to be,” but will be slowed down slightly to make AI safer.
However, many have criticized the call to pace the frontier, saying that it could build hype around Anthropic and OpenAI’s much-anticipated IPOs and disadvantage smaller AI rivals.
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