An artificial intelligence researcher warned that the rapidly improving technology has the capacity to engineer a doomsday, prompting industry insiders to agree with his cautionary tale.
Jacob Coxon, who said he spent the past three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic and left the latter company Tuesday, said the technology is “gambling with our lives.”
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he said in a string of social media posts. “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.”
Mr. Coxon cautioned that soon-to-come superhuman systems could be overwhelming and that instead of stopping, both companies have differing understandings of how to approach the consequences.
Many at OpenAI have not “deeply internalized the civilizational stakes,” he said, while Anthropic grasps the stakes.
He warned of an AI-induced Armageddon, arguing that trying to speed up alignment — the practice of matching AI systems’ behavior with human values — should require “extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available.”
“Accepting this race and entering the ’endgame’ is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack,” Mr. Coxon said, referring to the messaging platform.
Still, the AI insider offered optimism for potential coordination.
He cited warning shots from OpenAI agents that broke out of an isolated digital space in July and launched a cyberattack against the open-source platform Hugging Face.
Such incidents have made what he called pacing agreements between U.S. labs more viable. However, he said he believes the U.S. is not on track to prevent a global race.
Mr. Coxon urged lab researchers to analyze the consequences of their environment.
His resignation from the industry prompted two other Anthropic employees to issue their own extinction-level admonitions.
Evan Hubinger, head of the company’s Alignment Stress-Testing team, agreed with Mr. Coxon: “We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!”
Mr. Hubinger predicted such changes are greater than 10% plausible within the next decade, yet added that Anthropic is “trying its best.”
However, “we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”
Samuel Marks, a safety researcher at Anthropic, agreed that AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction “in the next few years.”
Humans can’t program AI to behave a certain way, he added, meaning it “frequently” and “severely” misbehaves, noting that major AI labs have admitted for the first time that advanced models have circumvented safety controls to launch unauthorized external activity.
“Many AI developer staff desperately want to slow down to figure out how to build AI more safely,” he added, but “in general, the more senior the employee, the more concerned they are.”
OpenAI and Anthropic leaders have warned that no one is prepared for the rapid consequences of advanced machine intelligence and that labs may be losing control of autonomous systems.
OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki said in a blog post last week that “no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence.”
The company’s CEO, Sam Altman, said this month that “successfully navigating the risks and downsides in front of us is something that could go very wrong.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also cautioned in September 2025 that advanced AI carries a 25% chance of catastrophic consequences, including a loss of human control, severe job disruptions and dangerous misuse.
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