An Anthropic researcher just quit, saying OpenAI and Anthropic are 'gambling with our lives'

An Anthropic researcher who previously worked at OpenAI just quit. He's the latest insider who's warned that the AI race has become dangerously reckless.

Jacob Coxon announced his resignation from Anthropic on Tuesday, saying he had spent the past three years doing pre-training research at the two AI giants.

"Neither company is acting responsibly," Coxon wrote on X. "They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

Coxon was a member of OpenAI's technical staff from 2023 until July 2026, when he moved to Anthropic as a researcher. His research at OpenAI included work on GPT-4o.

In Tuesday's post, Coxon said the two labs have not been transparent about their fears regarding AI.

"The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt," he wrote. "If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible — but I hear the same people express fear privately."

"At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes," Coxon wrote. "At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first — they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk."

Evan Hubinger, a current Anthropic employee who leads the alignment stress testing team at the lab, agreed with Coxon in a reply to his post.

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"Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade," he wrote. "I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to."

OpenAI and Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Coxon is the latest among staffers walking away from frontier labs while sounding the alarm, a trend that appears peculiar to the AI boom.