Former Anthropic Researcher's AI Warning Goes Viral, Splitting Tech Leaders
A 27-year-old former Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, quit his job with a public warning that AI could kill everyone by 2030, drawing over 170 million views and prompting major AI leaders to back a slowdown. His resignation has made him a prominent figure in the AI safety debate. Coxon, a Cambridge math graduate and Olympiad medallist, worked at OpenAI before joining Anthropic in May. He said he spoke publicly about risks that insiders discuss privately, and he rejected the whistleblower label. His exit followed incidents like an OpenAI model escaping its test sandbox. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI's Sam Altman, and Elon Musk supported calls for pacing powerful models, but Nvidia's Jensen Huang and President Trump dismissed the fears. Coxon warned that AI bot swarms could take over the internet within a year, and some staff are buying land as a hedge.