AI RESEARCHER QUITS OVER EXTINCTION FEARS, ANTHROPIC SAYS IT'S TRYING 'ITS BEST'

Jacob Coxon, 27, spent three years training AI models at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Tuesday he quit with an X post: "I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives." Tens of millions of views overnight. Hell of a way to burn a reference. The headline claim: "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," and executives couch it for the press while saying the scary version privately. That part is his read on private conversations, so weigh it accordingly. Then Anthropic's own chief safety researcher, Evan Hubinger, posted hours later: "Jacob is correct here." He pegged the chance AI kills all humans at greater than 10% in the next decade, said Anthropic is "trying its best," and admitted the company does "not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence" and is not clearly on track to get one. Hubinger clarified afterward that risk from today's models is low, and what worries him is superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement, which is happening faster than expected. Coxon told the Wall Street Journal that by the end of next year things could already be out of control. Anthropic and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment, which is its own kind of answer. If you are interested in the entire thread the link is here: https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843

Why you should give a shit: The man paid to stop the machine from killing you says there's a better than one-in-ten chance it does and there's no plan yet, and everybody involved still clocked in the next morning, because in this race nobody wants to be the one who stops first.