The AI world has turned one researcher’s extinction warning into its latest copy-and-paste meme: resign dramatically, accuse your company of racing recklessly toward disaster, then reveal that the supposed threat is a self-painting fake tunnel.
The trend was sparked by Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher who previously worked at OpenAI. On Wednesday, he announced his resignation from Anthropic with a stark warning about the AI race.
“Neither company is acting responsibly,” Coxon wrote on X of Anthropic and OpenAI. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
Dozens of X users have since mirrored Coxon’s grave, tightly structured announcement — only to swap the prospect of human extinction for more ordinary, and absurd, professional hazards.
Jae Holzman, a senior reporter at Heatmap, wrote that they had resigned from the Acme Corporation after years of “pre-gag research” at Acme Paint. In a close riff on Coxon’s warning, Holzman said Acme was racing toward “self-painting fake tunnel technology.”
That is a reference to the “Looney Tunes” cartoons in which Wile E. Coyote paints a fake tunnel on a rock face; the Road Runner runs through it, while Coyote crashes into the wall.
Designer Isha Taghvaei’s widely viewed post started with Coxon’s exact opening before giving way to lyrics from Natasha Bedingfield’s 2004 pop hit, “Unwritten.” In place of self-improving superintelligence, Taghvaei wrote that OpenAI and Anthropic were “releasing their inhibitions” and “feeling the rain on their skin.”
I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three year doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are releasing their inhibitions and feeling the rain on their skin. No one else can feel it for them, only they can le
— isha (@ishadesign) September 9, 2026
Software engineer Alan Rice used the same Coxon-style resignation template before pivoting to “plants and birds and rocks and things,” lyrics from “A Horse With No Name,” the 1971 song by the rock band America.
And Kabir Sethi, growth lead at Phoenix Trade, adapted Coxon’s warning for crypto: His blockchain employer was racing toward “seamless global trading of any asset” and gambling with his money.
The jokes poke fun at a very real fear among some people building frontier AI. Coxon said that leading labs privately fear AI could cause human extinction by the end of the decade.
Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment stress testing at Anthropic, backed Coxon’s broader warning, saying he believed there was a greater-than-10% chance AI could kill all humans within the next decade.
Geoffrey Hinton, meanwhile, has said a 10% chance of AI killing humanity is not unreasonable, while Toby Ord, the Oxford researcher and author of “The Precipice,” puts the risk at about one in 10 by 2100.
Startup workers have also found their own existential dangers. Ian Tracey, a senior staff software engineer working on applied AI at Ramp, joked that the fintech company was racing toward “self-closing books” with no plan for what happens when businesses save too much time and money.
I resigned from @tryramp today. I spent the last year there doing applied AI work and neither CEO is acting responsibly. They are racing toward self-closing books with no clear plan for what happens when companies have saved too much time and money. More thoughts below.
— Ian Tracey (@ian_dot_so) September 9, 2026
Air CEO Shane Hegde similarly repurposed Coxon’s formula to warn of a self-organizing workspace that might let creative teams be creative.
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