Several current and former Anthropic employees warned Tuesday of the dangers posed by the tech company’s rapidly evolving AI models, with one former researcher writing on social media that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
Jacob Coxon, the former AI researcher in question, announced his departure from Anthropic on his personal X account Tuesday. In a series of tweets, Coxon divulged his belief that the leaders at both Anthropic and OpenAI, where he also previously worked as an AI researcher, are not doing nearly enough to address the serious dangers presented by their companies’ AI ventures.
“Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. 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.”
“No other human activity poses this level of danger,” Coxon continued. “At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational 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.”
“If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like,” Coxon’s tweets concluded. “Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL 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?”
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. More thoughts below.
— Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) September 9, 2026
The former Anthropic and OpenAI employee’s comments were shockingly confirmed by current Anthropic science lead Evan Hubinger, who wrote in response to Coxon’s tweets, “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!”
“I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. 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,” Hubinger wrote, adding, “I think the risk from present models is low. What I am worried about is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement, as we have said is happening faster than we thought.”
Samuel Marks, Anthropic’s scalable oversight lead, also confirmed the veracity of Coxon’s tweets. Writing in a personal capacity Tuesday, Marks acknowledged, “AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes). This could happen in the next few years. In general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are.”
“Why do AI developers continue despite the risk? Due to a mixture of commercial incentives and a belief that they are in a race with other, less responsible AI developers,” Marks wrote.
“Many AI developer staff desperately want to slow down to figure out how to build AI more safely,” Marks further noted, concluding, “I work on safety research at Anthropic because I hope my work will reduce the chance of these extinction-level bad outcomes.”
Marks, Coxon and Hubinger’s comments all come at a time when those both within and outside of the AI development space are becoming more and more vocal about their concerns over the technology’s dangers to humanity. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Amazon and over 100 other tech companies all signed an open letter in late August calling for collective action to be taken to better prepare the world for an age of AI superintelligence.
While concerns continue to mount, Anthropic is not the only force in the AI space that is pushing forward allegedly out of fear over what its competitors could do with the technology. On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also told Breitbart that the Trump administration will continue to invest in AI in order to keep up with China’s tech ventures.
“There is no day after tomorrow if China wins at this,” Bessent said. “If they were to pull ahead of us on AI, then nothing else matters.”
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