Lawmakers reach for AI legislation after researchers warn of extinction

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company‘s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy. Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here. And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at sullivan@fastcompany.com, and follow me on X @thesullivan. “It’s time to sound the alarm” The resignation of the Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, and his statements afterward, have sent shock waves through the AI community. Coxon, who left the company on Tuesday, tweeted that he spent the last three years working on model pretraining research at both Anthropic and OpenAI, and that the people building the models “earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote. His post has been viewed more than 70 million times. The resignation follows incidents in which artificial intelligence agents broke out of their sandboxes, accessed the internet, and broke into other companies’ servers. Now the shock waves have mo…