A.I. researcher quits job over fears robots will wipe out the human race

A former Anthropic researcher has resigned from the artificial intelligence industry, warning that competition among leading AI companies is accelerating the development of systems he believes could become uncontrollable and pose an existential threat to humanity.

Jacob Coxon, who worked on training advanced AI models at Anthropic, told the Wall Street Journal that he left the company because of concerns about the speed at which increasingly capable systems are being developed. Coxon said some researchers working on the technology “earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

He also said colleagues had begun using terms such as “crunchtime” and “endgame” to describe the current phase of AI development, reflecting what he viewed as an increasingly urgent race to build self-improving systems. “We’re on track for a lot of the most aggressive of these scenarios where by the end of next year things could be out of control already,” Coxon told the Wall Street Journal.

Coxon said he had also worked at OpenAI earlier in the year before joining Anthropic and argued that competition between major AI companies was making the industry less safe. He criticised both companies, saying they were “not acting responsibly.”

Following publication of the Wall Street Journal report, Coxon expanded on his concerns on social media, discussing his experiences at OpenAI and Anthropic and reiterating his fears about the direction of AI development. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” he wrote.

Anthropic executives and other figures in the AI industry have previously warned about the potential dangers associated with increasingly powerful AI systems and called for stronger safeguards around their development. Coxon, however, argued that those warnings had not resulted in a meaningful slowdown in the race to develop more advanced models.

His concerns centre on the possibility that future AI systems could become capable of improving themselves faster than humans could control or understand them, potentially producing consequences their developers could no longer reliably manage.

The claim that AI could destroy humanity remains a disputed and highly speculative scenario, and Coxon’s comments reflect his assessment of the risks rather than an established prediction of what will happen.