By South China Morning Post | Created at 2026-09-09 17:11:45 | Updated at 2026-09-09 18:27:49
1 hour ago
An artificial intelligence researcher who left OpenAI to join Anthropic has decided to leave the industry, accusing both US companies of “gambling with our lives” in the race to develop AI models capable of self-improvement.
Jacob Coxon, 27, spent the past three years pretraining AI models, first at OpenAI and then, this year, at its rival Anthropic, which he considered more cautious in its approach.
Pretraining is the stage where AI models absorb vast quantities of data.
“Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon said on Tuesday.
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” he said in a social media post. “This is not a marketing stunt,” he added.
Post Techcast: the great AI schism
Superintelligence is the theoretical point when AI’s capabilities exceed human intelligence.
