Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Community, Diversity, Sustainability and other Overused Words
Jacob Coxon only worked at Anthropic for a few weeks. Prior to that he worked for leftist political organizations. And guess what--Bernie Sanders has a bill to ban AI. Wouldn't you know it?
Anthropic researcher resigns, saying OpenAI and Anthropic are racing toward superintelligence and "gambling with our lives" Jacob Coxon, who worked on pretraining at both labs, says insiders privately fear AI could kill everyone by decade's end while estimates of that risk range from near zero to 99 percent.
A 27-year-old researcher with almost no time on the job just dropped the loudest AI alarm of the year — and Washington’s favorite “ban it” bill was already sitting on the table.
Jacob Coxon announced Tuesday he was resigning from Anthropic and the industry. His X thread exploded past 140 million views. The charge: the biggest labs are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he wrote. “This is not a marketing stunt.”
Here’s the part critics can’t stop pointing at. Coxon didn’t spend years in the Anthropic trenches. He was there a few weeks. Before that, according to the viral recap now ripping across X, he had worked with left-wing political advocacy shops — including Britain’s Newspeak, a civic-tech outfit critics tie to progressive causes, Hillary-world networks, prison-abolition politics and Extinction Rebellion-style activism.
Then the timing. Wouldn’t you know it? Sen. Bernie Sanders unveiled legislation on Sept. 3 to ban “artificial superintelligence,” pause advanced AI until a new Cabinet-level regulator exists, and hit violators with a “corporate death penalty” plus up to 20 years in prison. A week later, Coxon’s confession is the exhibit Democrats are waving around.
The Wall Street Journal got the exclusive as the posts went live. Coxon told the paper colleagues now talk about “crunch time” and “endgame,” and that things “could be out of control already” by the end of next year.
Anthropic alignment lead Evan Hubinger publicly backed the core fear, saying researchers “earnestly believe AI could kill all humans” and putting his own odds above 10% this decade.
Elon Musk’s verdict was shorter: “Seems like a setup.”
Coxon fired back with a selfie. “I’m real and these are my real beliefs. You could ask your xAI researchers about me if you hadn’t fired them.”
Skeptics say the packaging is the story. A quiet account. A few weeks at Anthropic. A prior tour through left political advocacy. Safety nonprofits — several in grant networks linked to Skype co-founder and early Anthropic investor Jaan Tallinn — among the first to boost the thread. And a Sanders ban-and-pause bill already written.
Coxon says he walked because he didn’t want to keep rolling the dice. Musk says the dice look loaded. Bernie already had the ban drafted. The only question left is whether America pauses its own labs while China keeps training.
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