An X post from a former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher has reached 167M+ views since Tuesday night, and the author, Jacob Coxon, has been making the rounds in the mainstream media with his story.
"I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below."
"Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing."
"A common response is “if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?” At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first - they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk."
We may have reached a tipping point where the rest of the world wakes up to what those in the AI information bubble have known for years: there are very real risks associated with increasingly advanced and agentic AI systems.
While others have been raising similar alarms for years, Coxon’s post seems to have hit at a moment when awareness and concern around AI are accelerating on the heels of the OpenAI / Hugging Face incident.
I think we needed to arrive at this point for AI leaders and government leaders to have the will to push for responsible, human-centered AI adoption in business and society.
I remain optimistic about the potential of AI to improve lives, and be a net positive in society, but we have to be more proactive and intentional about making that reality.
Ignoring and banning AI is not the answer. Slowing it down, and committing our best minds and significant resources to AI safety and alignment, are critical.
I think it’s far more likely now that we could see deeper collaboration between competing AI labs and nations.
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