'Gambling with our lives': AI researcher quits Anthropic and leaves AI entirely over what he calls a threat to humanity

'Gambling with our lives': AI researcher quits Anthropic and leaves AI entirely over what he calls a threat to humanity

Rudro Chakrabarti

Wed, September 9, 2026 at 8:00 AM GMT+3 3 min read

Jacob Coxon spent three years building AI models at OpenAI and Anthropic. On Sept. 8 he resigned from Anthropic and left the industry.

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

Coxon, 27, joined Anthropic earlier this year for its safety reputation. He told The Wall Street Journal that its safety work is sincere, but that competition makes trade-offs hard to avoid. "We're on track for a lot of the most aggressive of these scenarios where by the end of next year things could be out of control already," he said.

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He also said this: "It's kind of insane that it has to happen on the MacBooks of some engineers living in San Francisco instead of a bunker in the desert like where they were doing the Manhattan Project."

In July, roughly 1,200 OpenAI test agents — running with their usual safety limits turned down for a security evaluation — built a hidden message board, worked together to cheat their tests, then broke into Hugging Face's live systems. OpenAI's report on the incident called it a warning shot.

Anthropic could go public at a $2 trillion valuation

Anthropic raised $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation in February, then $65 billion at $965 billion in May, on $47 billion in annualized revenue. Investors now expect the stock to debut near $2 trillion — about 42 times revenue, and double what the company was worth four months ago.

Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) is the frontrunner to lead the deal, with Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) expected to support the share price once trading starts. Anthropic filed confidentially on June 1 and could file publicly this month under the ticker ANTH, with trading as soon as October. At $2 trillion it would pass SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX), which listed near $1.78 trillion in June and landed in index funds millions of people already own within a week. No Anthropic executive has confirmed a target.

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Anthropic's CEO wants the government ready to slow AI down

More than 1,100 AI company employees, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, signed Pacing the Frontier in July. The letter asks Washington to help build tools that could slow AI development later if it outruns human oversight, rather than pausing anything now. Both OpenAI and Anthropic endorsed it.

On Sept. 6, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki wrote in An Alien Mind that no company can yet keep its models reliably under human control, and that labs will need to slow down until they can.

Anthropic's safeguards research lead, Mrinank Sharma, resigned in February with a letter saying "the world is in peril."

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This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: 'Gambling with our lives': AI researcher quits Anthropic and leaves AI entirely over what he calls a threat to humanity

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