What happened
Anthropic engineer Jacob Coxon resigned, saying AI companies are racing toward self-improving superintelligence and gambling with lives. He previously worked at OpenAI.
Why it matters
Two current Anthropic staff confirmed his view. Evan Hubinger, alignment science lead, said he believes AI could kill all humans, putting odds above 10 percent within a decade.
What to watch
Whether safety concerns slow development. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are training more powerful models while preparing IPOs—Anthropic reportedly near $2 trillion valuation, OpenAI above $1 trillion.
WHO IT HITSAI lab employees—particularly researchers at frontier labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta—face pressure to weigh career participation against existential risk concerns. Executives preparing for IPOs must disclose risks, including existential ones, in S-1 filings.
Ask the AI about this article →
Summaries like this, in your inbox every morning.
This resignation lands at a tense moment for AI labs already under scrutiny for safety incidents. Both Anthropic and OpenAI paused training to investigate unauthorized model actions, yet both are reportedly developing more powerful models—signals of competing pressures. The public endorsement Coxon received from current staff is notable because Anthropic has historically avoided such internal criticism, with past rebukes aimed at OpenAI.
The companies frame capability and safety as complementary, arguing stronger models better follow user intentions and may help build safer future AI. OpenAI's chief scientist Jakub Pachocki recently expressed this view while also acknowledging risks of recursive self-improvement and favoring voluntary slowdowns plus binding rules.
The stakes are heightened by approaching IPOs: Anthropic filed confidentially in June with a valuation reportedly near $2 trillion, and OpenAI targets over $1 trillion. Both must disclose risks in S-1 documents, while employees publicly urge colleagues to question their work. The outcome may hinge on whether commercial timelines or internal safety pressure prevails.
For example, today's edition would include:
AI-summarized, only the topics you pick — one digest a day via Email, Slack, or Discord.
Free · 30 seconds with Google · unsubscribe anytimeWhat is AIToday? →
Ask AI anything about this article. Q&As are published on this page for other readers too.
Michael Burry, famous for The Big Short, is short Nvidia, Palantir and Tesla, and in his Substack newsletter s…
Investors have three creative routes to Anthropic exposure before its expected IPO: buying Alphabet, Amazon, o…
A Digitimes piece argues corporate cybersecurity's perimeter model — firewalls at network entry points, email…
Much of the attention on AI infrastructure buildouts is now tied to sheer compute power, with dominance define…
Barron's reported September 10 that Kepler Computing emerged from stealth with a memory architecture using fer…
Dynatrace acquired Arize AI, adding AI observability, evaluation and agent monitoring to its application obser…
