An artificial intelligence researcher quit his job at Anthropic on Tuesday and accused the company, and its chief rival, OpenAI, of acting irresponsibly, igniting a frenzy of concern on social media about the rapid pace of the technology's development.
Jacob Coxon, who has worked as a researcher at both companies, said in a post on X that he resigned out of concern that Anthropic and OpenAI are "gambling with our lives." He said the people building AI "earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."
"Do not underestimate the power of this technology," Coxon wrote. "These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources."
Coxon's post, which has been viewed more than 70 million times, reflects a long-standing debate in Silicon Valley about whether AI can be safely developed and controlled. As Anthropic and OpenAI barrel toward potentially historic initial public offerings while releasing increasingly advanced models, many researchers are calling for a coordinated slowdown.
OpenAI's chief scientist, Jakub Pachocki, published a blog post on Sunday and warned that no AI company has "solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer." In the AI industry, alignment refers to the work by AI developers to ensure that the system behaves in accordance with human values and intentions.