Few people had heard of Jacob Coxon, the 28-year-old British AI researcher, on the morning of September 8, 2026. His X account had fewer than 100 followers.
By September 10, he was world famous, after he published a social-media thread on X about resigning from Anthropic because the company is not “acting responsibly.” The post has now been viewed 174 million times. It triggered a tsunami of news panic about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Suddenly, Jacob was everywhere: doing prime-time interviews; a celebrity whistleblower, the casus tumultus of a global conversation about the dangers of AI, which in turn led to a public fight among various tech overlords urging for more government regulation, and angry pushback from the Trump administration.
It all felt like a highly-orchestrated PR stunt. Because it was. The apparently new intelligence about artificial intelligence turns out to be artificial.
✍️ @Freddygray31
Article | spectator.com/article/when-t…
Sep 25, 2026 · 7:17 PM UTC
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