AI workers publicly quitting ‘help to move the needle’ with safety concerns, experts say

Another researcher at a leading artificial intelligence lab has publicly resigned, voicing grave concerns about the technology’s safety—joining the ranks of other AI professionals who’ve done the same this year. Twenty-seven-year-old Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who also worked at OpenAI from 2023 to 2026, announced yesterday that he is quitting the AI industry altogether. He accused his former employers of “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” In a thread posted on X that’s been viewed over 105 million times as of Wednesday afternoon, Coxon also warned that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Evan Hubinger, an alignment science lead at Anthropic, supported the claim, saying Coxon was “correct” that some researchers fear existential destruction from advanced AI. Coxon is far from the first AI researcher to leave a frontier AI lab over ethical concerns. In 2024, several members of OpenAI’s safety and governance teams sparked a flurry of media coverage when they quitthe company after losing confidence in its approach to safety. Earlier this year, OpenAI robotics executive Cai…