Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quits AI industry over out-of-control AGI fears
AGI Hunt · wechat · 2026-09-09
Anthropic pretraining researcher Jacob Coxon resigned and left the AI industry entirely after three years at OpenAI and Anthropic, saying neither company is acting responsibly and both are racing toward recursive self-improvement that could be out of control by end of next year.
- He contrasts the two: at OpenAI many haven't internalized the civilizational risk; at Anthropic the risk is understood, but the company is locked into a race — "an arrogant gamble that shouldn't be launched from a private company's Slack channel."
- He notes this AGI effort runs on San Francisco engineers' MacBooks, without Manhattan Project-style oversight, and questions whether safety commitments can hold amid Anthropic's reported $2T-valuation IPO plans.
- He follows earlier exits like Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever, but is the first to conclude from inside the most safety-focused lab that even that isn't enough.
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