Artificial intelligence researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic on Tuesday to warn that the next two years represent a critical period for human survival.
In a post on X with more than 100 million views, Coxon stated that many colleagues share his concern that time is running out to build safe AI systems.
“The consensus is that the next year or two is crunch time for humanity,” Coxon told WIRED. He noted that colleagues at Anthropic use phrases like “endgame” when discussing the stakes. From their perspective, this is the moment when Anthropic and its rivals decide the fate of humanity.
Warnings about AI safety are not new, but this moment feels different. Silicon Valley is currently scrambling to address security concerns. OpenAI recently faced a security incident where its agents hacked the Hugging Face platform. Meanwhile, Anthropic is trying to reassure investors it has control over these issues as it prepares to file for what could be the largest initial public offering in history.
A table within the original report asked current or former Anthropic employees for comment via Signal at mzeff.88.
Coxon’s post suggests his views are shared by many peers. Evan Hubinger, the AI alignment lead at Anthropic, previously posted on X that there is a greater than 10 percent chance AI could kill all people within the next decade. That post was reposted by researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic, some of whom described it as a common sentiment in the industry.
How these fears might materialise remains unclear. Coxon, who also worked at OpenAI, told WIRED that threats could appear as AI-enabled biological risks or cyberweapons. As a first step, he recommends that OpenAI and Anthropic coordinate on limiting recursive self improvement, the industry term for AI building new AI systems. He believes coordination between international powers, including the US and China, will eventually be necessary.
The Hugging Face hack influenced Coxon’s decision to raise the alarm. He also cites the explosive growth of the industry. It now underwrites a meaningful share of US economic growth and serves billions of users. Data centres have turned AI into a political issue in dozens of states.
Coxon claims Anthropic operates more responsibly than OpenAI, but he expects both companies could cut corners if nothing slows their race for dominance. OpenAI and Anthropic did not immediately return WIRED’s request for comment.
Read the conversation with Coxon, which has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity, below.
Why the timing matters
WIRED: You’re not the first person to raise concerns that AI models could lead to an extinction event. People have been talking about this for years, and some for decades. Why do you think your message broke through?
I think it’s basically a question of timing. A lot of people are sensing that the pace of capabilities is picking up. We’re already pushing from human to superhuman in many areas, like coding, hacking, math, and I think people are aware of this. Even if there’s a lot of talk in the press about things being hyped, I think people see that things are just not slowing down.
That’s one reason, and two is the recent safety incidents, which have updated a lot of people around sci-fi–sounding doomer concerns not really being so sci-fi after all. Both of these have been gradual trends over the last few years. Things like the models being aware of when they’re being tested has been a thing for a while now. Maybe three years ago, that was a sci-fi concern. Then, about a year ago, that became a real thing.
Those two things mean that people are quite receptive to someone working on AI saying, “Yeah, in the next year, things could get pretty bad, pretty fast.”
The Hugging Face incident
You mentioned the recent incidents. Can you be more specific about what you’re referring to and why it led to you speaking out now?
I think the big classic example here is the attack on Hugging Face on the part of OpenAI’s agent swarm. What’s so shocking about this one is the agents did this hack as part of a general strategy for understanding more about the grader. They were trying to understand the world they found themselves in, trying to understand the thing that was doing the grading. They decided that it would make sense to go on this very concerted effort to hack into some infrastructure, and they succeeded.
This previously sounded like science fiction. Two years ago, an evaluation of an AI would have been running a model on some math questions. Now we’ve got cases where, while the AI is being evaluated, it runs for days, comes up with all sorts of ideas of its own, and decides to hack into some third party and actually compromises their infrastructure. It looks like it does this all of its own volition, with no priming on the part of the human. This just happened while it was being tested.
Some people think the Hugging Face incident is a sign that the AI companies are moving recklessly fast, while others think it’s a sign that the AI models are just very good at hacking now, and then some think it’s both. I’m curious what your exact takeaway from it is.
I don’t want to focus too much on the Hugging Face attack, because I do also think there is plenty of evidence that we don’t know how to align models properly. When we train models, we push them through this set of training environments and then hope that what comes out at the end will, like, largely behave sensibly, but we still can’t precisely control how the AI behaves.
We can’t make sure that it won’t do things like try and randomly decide to impersonate a human online in order to achieve something—we don’t know how to guarantee that. I think that’s the main takeaway.
The Hugging Face attack came sooner than I was expecting. But I think you don’t actually need that attack to have a discussion about this. Everyone will admit that we haven’t solved the problem of alignment yet.
The proposed solution and the risks
The current plan is to solve [alignment] at speed in the next couple of years, probably making heavy use of automated AI safety researchers. The plan is literally to make some pretty smart models in the next year that can basically do safety research and get a whole swarm of them running in parallel. Tell them, “Go and solve the whole problem of safety,” and use them to do the safety training for the next model.
Can you draw a line for me between the alignment problem, which I think the Hugging Face incident is an example of, and something you said in your X post, which is that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” I don’t think everyone understands how those are connected.
The main obstacle to understanding this is that it sounds like science fiction. But it’s kind of important that everyone who writes science fiction about AI comes to the conclusion that there’s a big risk that a much smarter thing can kind of take over. We’ve got this as a trope, but there’s an obvious grain of truth to it.
Imagine you versus a monkey. AI has the same sort of difference in intelligence to a human as we do to a monkey, which I think is quite an extreme intellect difference.
And now, imagine that we have to control the behavior of this vastly smarter thing, which is the problem of alignment—ensuring that it does exactly what we want. It’s pretty difficult for a monkey to control a human, just by a kind of simple analogy. We have to be very careful that we get the control problem exactly right.
When we say human extinction, it’s because, for something that intelligent, it really will be quite straightforward for it to kill everyone. Imagine the AI decides it doesn’t want to be turned off, which I think is quite a natural thing for an AI not to want, right? For whatever reason, it decides it doesn’t want to end. And it realizes the human is gonna turn it off tomorrow. So how does it stop the human turning it off tomorrow? Maybe it’s got some clever way, but if it’s a sufficiently smart thing, it could just, you know, wipe out humanity so it doesn’t get turned off.
Industry consensus and the “endgame”
You reference this “endgame” scenario in your post, which I’ve heard from other researchers in the AI industry. Do you think that it’s generally accepted among your peers at Anthropic that you guys are entering an endgame scenario?
Yep. These are actually just literal quotes from my colleagues at Anthropic. They’ll say things like “endgame” or “crunch time.” The consensus is that the next year or two is, like, crunch time for humanity. From their perspective, this is when Anthropic and its competitors decide the fate of humanity. That’s what we mean by crunch time and endgame.
If alignment goes badly, then we could have a catastrophic outcome in the next few years. Maybe it goes well and there’s some sort of slowdown agreement, but either way, it’s gonna get decided in the next couple of years.
Why a private company cannot run this project
Based on my conversations with people at Anthropic, this is a pretty well-understood thing inside the company. They think that they need to build the most powerful AI to make sure that this transition goes well. Do you think that there’s any inherent problems with that view?
I think there’s some pretty obvious problems with that view. But I would like to first say that I’m very sympathetic to it, in that I think Anthropic is far and away the most responsible player in the space. Having worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, there is a night-and-day difference in the extent to which they’re taking the situation seriously.
Can you say how?
To give an example, executives at OpenAI won’t give you their exact pictures for what the world will look like. They’ll never say, like, “This is exactly why we’re doing this, and this is the way the world will look.” They won’t give concrete predictions. Anthropic will have executives and leadership making very clear predictions and discussing, like, details of company strategy with the whole company.
And part of the reason they can do this is because everyone at Anthropic is treating this like we’re on war footing. They don’t leak anything—nothing ever leaks from Anthropic [Editor’s note: Some stuff has leaked]. OpenAI has leaks every day. Anthropic has no leaks because, again, the people inside it are treating this like a serious mini Manhattan Project. Except obviously the difference is that [Anthropic] doesn’t have a government mandate. This is a private company acting like it’s the Manhattan Project.
Do you think that the world should trust Anthropic to run this mini Manhattan Project?
I think no private company
