Ex-Anthropic researcher's resignation post pushes AI risk warnings into mainstream

TIME reported that Coxon, 27, wrote on September 8 that he had resigned from Anthropic, that neither it nor OpenAI was acting responsibly, and that both were racing toward self-improving superintelligence. He told the BBC that without a slowdown there was a strong chance of catastrophe in the near future, and that colleagues were frightened by the pace of progress. On NBC's Meet the Press he argued Congress should let the leading labs regulate themselves until a dedicated regulator exists, NBC News reported.

Anthropic told the BBC it has always said AI brings both large benefits and unprecedented risks, and called for a lawful, verifiable way for companies to coordinate on how fast they release powerful models. TIME reported that Amodei published an essay four days after the post urging a slowdown. The warnings drew skepticism: the BBC reported that Hugging Face's Clement Delangue questioned Coxon's standing to assess extinction risk, Grindr's George Arison suggested such statements court investors, and Nvidia's Jensen Huang dismissed them.