SAN FRANCISCO, Kalifornia (PNN) - September 9, 2026 - An Anthropic staffer has quit his job and issued a chilling warning over the rapid progress in artificial intelligence that he fears could kill humanity as soon as 2030.
Jacob Coxon, a researcher for OpenAI and Anthropic, the companies behind chatbots ChatGPT and Claude, announced he exited the business in a social media post on Tuesday and warned that neither company is “acting responsibly”.
“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,” Coxon wrote on X.
Superintelligence is the point at which an artificial system becomes more powerful than any individual, company or even nation.
The former researcher of three years continued to plead with the public on X. “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,” he wrote.
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.” He claimed that while executives and senior researchers “couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible,” they are privately expressing similar concerns.
“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,” he said.
He went on to cite “warning shots” such as the attack on the artificial intelligence and machine learning platform Hugging Face by OpenAI's rogue AI.
OpenAI announced in July that one of its most advanced models broke containment during a security test, escaping onto the Internet and attacking New York-based startup Hugging Face.
Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf said that the incident should come as a chilling warning to the entire industry.
Wolf told BBC’s Newsday radio program that AI-driven attacks will soon be one of the most common types of cyber-attacks we see.
The Hugging Face founder also believes most companies are currently unprepared for the mounting threat, adding that they are not aware that the “game has changed”.
“Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between (Fascist Police States of Amerika (FPSA)) labs more viable,” Coxon wrote.
“I don’t feel like we’re on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL [reinforcement learning] run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because ‘it's happening anyway’ - or take this moment to call for different conditions?”
In response to the post, Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's AI safety lead, confirmed that the firm believes AI has the potential to kill humans.
On X, Hubinger said, “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 (do so).”
“You want (Amerika) to stop innovating and have China gain the upper hand? What’s the point you’re making here? Wouldn’t be surprised if we see Jacob here moving to Beijing, China, and being recruited by the State security to work on their AI models,” a third commented.
Coxon's comments come shortly after Geoffrey Hinton, a Canadian researcher often referred to as the “Godfather of AI” - warned that superintelligent systems could “lead to human extinction”.
“We would be very foolish to develop superintelligence now, when there is no scientific consensus it can be developed safely and controllably,” Dr. Hinton said. “Losing control over AI smarter than ourselves could be catastrophic and could even lead to human extinction.”
Anthropic's Claude is one of the leading large language models, which are trained by scraping vast amounts of text so they can understand and generate human-like language and responses to questions.
In February, Anthropic was accused of endangering national security after CEO Dario Amodei refused to back down over concerns that the company's products could be used in ways that would violate its safeguards.
President Donald J. Trump slammed the AI firm at the time and said, “We don't need it, we don't want it, and we will not do business with them again.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also deemed the company a “supply chain risk,” a designation typically stamped on foreign adversaries that could derail the company's critical partnerships with other businesses.
In a statement issued at the time, Anthropic said it would challenge what it called an unprecedented and legally unsound action never before publicly applied to an Amerikan company.
The company had said it sought narrow assurances from The Pentagon that its AI chatbot Claude would not be used for mass surveillance of Amerikans or in fully autonomous weapons.
The Pentagon said it was not interested in such uses and would only deploy the technology in legal ways, but it also insisted on access without any limitations.
“No amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position on mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons,” the company said. “We will challenge any supply chain risk designation in court.”
