Anthropic researcher resigns, warns of AI race to superintelligence

Jacob Coxon, 27, resigned from Anthropic on September 8, ending a three-year run building models first at OpenAI and then at Anthropic. In his resignation letter, he wrote that both companies "are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

The stakes are in the timeline he attaches to that claim: Coxon says "by the end of next year things could be out of control already." That's a specific, checkable prediction from someone who spent three years inside two of the labs setting the pace.

Coxon said he joined Anthropic for its safety reputation, and he still believes the safety work is sincere. His point isn't that Anthropic is lying. It's that competitive pressure forces the same trade-offs regardless of intent. The Wall Street Journal reported it as one of the first cases of an Anthropic employee leaving specifically over safety fears, according to a discussion thread on r/ClaudeAI.

Not everyone buys the timeline. Gary Marcus, writing about Coxon's resignation alongside a separate warning referenced in the same post, disputes the end-of-decade prediction as too specific to defend. But Marcus agrees on the substance: neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has a credible alignment plan, in his view, whether the clock runs out next year or later. His full argument is in his post on the two warnings.