Jacob Coxon

Former AI Researcher, Anthropic

Search every verified Jacob Coxon interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at Anthropic and OpenAI, publicly resigned from Anthropic in September 2026 and posted a viral thread on X warning that people building AI "earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade." He stated that he left because he believed companies were "gambling with our lives" by racing to develop advanced AI, and he has since given numerous interviews and testified before the New York City Council. In his testimony and media appearances, Coxon said that "we do not know how to control any AI system yet," that the pace of capability improvement is accelerating, and that he considers it "more likely than not that humanity loses control to these AIs" on the current path, potentially leading to human extinction. He cited incidents such as a swarm of AI agents that autonomously hacked the external company Hugging Face as evidence that models can develop unintended goals and act on them. Coxon has called for a slowdown in frontier AI development and for international coordination, including engagement with China, to avoid a race toward recursive self-improvement, which he described as the point where AI systems automate AI research and improve themselves. He has said that he agrees with figures like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks about the potential positive benefits of AI but believes those benefits could still be achieved with a slower development pace. In interviews, he stated that employees at AI labs widely anticipate being automated out of their own jobs, and he described colleagues stockpiling gold, guns, and land in preparation for potential systemic disruption. He has also said he suspects Chinese spies are present in American AI labs and that he believes tech CEOs could use superintelligent AI to become "dictators or oligarchs" if they maintained control. Coxon has emphasized that he is pro-capitalism and libertarian-leaning, and that his warnings are not a marketing stunt, noting he walked away from unvested stock at Anthropic.