As Jacob Coxon prepared to exit AI company Anthropic on Tuesday, the researcher issued a warning to his co-workers.
“Hi! I’m leaving Anthropic today,” Coxon began, in messages sent through the workplace platform Slack and obtained by NBC News. “I haven’t been here for long, but I knew many ants while I was at OpenAI, so it still feels like a goodbye.” Ants is a term of camaraderie used for Anthropic employees.
Despite the warm opening note, the rest of Coxon’s resignation wasn’t so cheery.
“Like many of you I think that without international coordination we will incur a risk of causing human extinction,” Coxon, 27, continued, writing of his concerns about AI. “I’ve recently become more concerned about the degree and imminence of this risk. I also find myself viscerally fearing the intelligence explosion where previously those concerns were unemotional.”
