Anthropic Researcher Quits Over Extinction Risk; Newsletter Writer Pushes Back
alex_verem · x · 2026-09-19
Jacob Coxon, a pretraining researcher who left OpenAI and then Anthropic, publicly resigned claiming both labs are racing to self-improving superintelligence, saying builders themselves believe AI could be lethal by decade's end — the post drew 170M+ views, and a still-employed colleague put the odds above 10%. Newsletter author Alex Prompter recaps the week and argues the doomer logic is really compound interest: the same stacking curve can be used productively at work. Includes a copy-paste 'Compounding Error Check' prompt for auditing error accumulation in AI workflows, plus four links on both sides of the debate.
Related event: Anthropic engineer resigns, warning superintelligence race gambles humanity(3 posts)→
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