Anthropic Researcher Quits the Industry, Warns AI 'Could Kill Us All by the End of the Decade'
Jacob Coxon, who left OpenAI for Anthropic, has now left AI entirely — accusing both companies of 'gambling with our lives' in the race toward self-improving models.
A researcher who spent roughly three years inside the two most prominent American AI labs has walked away from the field with an accusation that lands harder coming from the inside: the companies building frontier models are, in his words, "gambling with our lives." Jacob Coxon left OpenAI to join Anthropic, and has now left the industry altogether, according to @TheInsiderPaper.
The substance of Coxon's departure is not a vague expression of unease. He wrote that AI "could kill us all by the end of the decade," as reported by @ABCWorldNews. The specific worry is the race to build models capable of recursive self-improvement — systems that can enhance their own capabilities faster than human oversight can keep pace. That is the scenario safety researchers have long flagged as the point at which containment becomes structurally difficult, and it is now the reason a working researcher says he can no longer participate.
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