Ex-pretraining researcher quits Anthropic, accusing OpenAI and Anthropic of racing recklessly to superintelligence
peterwildeford · x · 2026-09-09
Jacob Hilbert Spaess, who spent three years on pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned from Anthropic and publicly accused both labs of acting irresponsibly.
- Core claim: the labs are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence, gambling with human lives
- He asks peers: would you kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? "It's happening anyway" should be a reason to call for different conditions, not to keep heads down
- Sneha Revanur (Encode founder) amplified the post, calling it brave and urging more lab employees to be honest with themselves about these conditions
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