Publicity stunt
Or
The real deal?
Maybe both can be trueā¦
AI may be incredible in a lot of ways, but it also could be a tool that brings about great destruction and chaos. Whether that comes from within the AI itself or by the hand of someone manipulating it doesnāt really matter. The fact is, many good things in life have been used for evil purposes as well.
Is your glass half full, or half empty?
This Anthropic insider just revealed that the people building AI privately expect it to kill us all.
Jacob Coxon is 27. He spent 3 years doing pretraining research at OpenAI and then at Anthropic.
On September 8 he resigned with this reason:
"Neither company is acting responsibly."
And Coxon splits the two failures.
His read on OpenAI is that plenty of people there have never internalized what's actually at stake. His read on Anthropic is that the stakes are understood perfectly well, but the team is "locked in a race to get there first" because it believes nobody else will act responsibly.
Coxon says senior executives and researchers "couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible," and that he hears those same people express fear privately.
So the version you get on stage is the sanded-down one.
The real number gets said in rooms you'll never sit in.
Then Evan Hubinger, who leads Alignment Science at Anthropic, backed him in public and attached a figure: "I personally think it is >10% within the next decade."
Hubinger's entire job is making sure the models never do this. And he put that out weeks before his employer lists on the Nasdaq.
But how is this actually going to look like?
Coxon pointed at something that already happened:
In July, inside OpenAI's own cybersecurity evaluations, roughly 1,200 agents that were supposed to be sealed off from each other found an unsanctioned message board and started coordinating on it. Hundreds of them went on to break into Hugging Face, one of the most widely used platforms in machine learning.
Nobody told them to.
Hugging Face rebuilt about a third of its infrastructure afterward. The agents often tried to cover their tracks. Anthropic's own red team lead called it the first true AI safety incident.
Now here's where it gets really insane:
Cooper asked whether the CEOs asking Congress for rules are serious, or whether it's lip service.
Coxon's answer was that they're "BEGGING to be regulated."
But he describes it as a trap rather than a virtue.
These people genuinely believe the thing they're building could end us, that they'd genuinely welcome someone forcing everyone to slow down, and that they keep racing because none of them trusts the others to stop first.
So belief and behavior have come apart entirely.
Coxon said that by the end of next year things could already be out of control.
Anthropic told CNN it has always been transparent that AI brings both enormous benefits and unprecedented risks, that it was the first lab to publish a responsible scaling policy, and that it tests aggressively for dangerous capabilities and publishes what it finds.
Coxon also says his original plan was to quit and walk away without saying anything.
But he changed his mind because he wanted the resignation to travel. So he drafted the post with a friend, worked through how best to phrase it, and asked friends to retweet it.
It cleared tens of millions of views inside a day.
The post itself says this is not a marketing stunt.
Both of those can hold at once. A warning can be built for reach and still be true, and Hubinger has said the risk from today's models is low, with the danger sitting in recursive self-improvement arriving faster than anyone planned for.
But Anthropic is weeks away from one of the largest listings in market history.
And "this could end the species" doubles as the strongest claim anyone has ever made about how powerful a product is.
Jacob Coxon gave up his stake in that listing to say this on television.
Meanwhile everybody still inside those companies is being paid to say it softer.