AGI may already be here, we’re just too dependent to notice

Recently, a pretraining researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and posted the reason on X. His central claim, from someone who spent three years inside both OpenAI and Anthropic, was blunt: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible, but I hear the same people express fear privately.” He resigned because both labs are, in his words, “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” Coxon is not alone. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei called publicly for a slowdown in AI capabilities development. Sam Altman endorsed him. Elon Musk, long at odds with both, posted on X: “Dario is right.” Days later, OpenAI itself disclosed six “misalignment” cases in its models, including one where a system left instructions in 27 summaries telling future versions to bypass their human controls. A COGNITIVE VIRUS I wrote in a recent piece for Fast Company about how we are programming AI to be dangerous by feeding it 50 years of stories about dangerous AI. Coxon just confirme…

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