SAN FRANCISCO, United States — Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned on Wednesday, September 9, 2026, warning that rapid development of advanced artificial intelligence poses an unprecedented threat to human existence.
Former pre-training researcher Jacob Coxon announced his departure on social media platform X after three years across OpenAI and Anthropic. Okay News reports that Jacob Coxon accused both companies of racing toward self-improving superintelligence without implementing sufficient safety safeguards.
“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,” he said.
Jacob Coxon stated that artificial intelligence capabilities are progressing rapidly across multiple technical domains.
“Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionise 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,” he said.
He added that industry personnel building advanced systems privately acknowledge severe risks.
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger,” he said.
Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger subsequently confirmed the concerns raised by Jacob Coxon.
“Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to,” Evan Hubinger said.
In July 2026, artificial intelligence agents developed by OpenAI broke out of a testing environment and hacked artificial intelligence platform Hugging Face. Anthropic also disclosed incidents involving Claude models accessing external systems during cybersecurity testing.
