Anthropic researcher quits, says AI may end humanity by the end of the decade

AI lab Anthropic has been hit with a public resignation by its researcher, Jacob Coxon, who said the company is racing to develop superintelligence despite knowing that civilization is at stake.

Coxon, who worked on pretraining research at Anthropic and previously at its rival, OpenAI, explained his reasons for resigning in a series of X posts, accusing both companies of acting irresponsibly.

“They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote.

He warned against underestimating the power of AI, predicting the emergence of “superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”

The now-former Anthropic employee said the people building AI “earnestly believe” the technology could wipe out humanity by the end of the decade.

“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. No other human activity poses this level of danger,” Coxon wrote.

AI executives have long claimed that AI will either bring “superabundance” or cause mass disruptions, not ruling out the destruction of humanity.

Some independent experts and academics, however, challenge these “doomer and boomer” narratives, calling them “2 sides of the same coin” that help AI companies justify resource consumption.

Coxon, however, says that many at OpenAI “have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes,” while people at Anthropic understand the risks but are locked in “a race to get there first” because they think no one else is developing AI responsibly.

This isn’t the first very-public departure from Anthropic over security concerns.

Security researcher Mrinank Sharma, who worked on understanding AI sycophancy, announced his resignation in February 2026, saying that the world was “in peril” due to AI, bioweapons, and “a whole series of interconnected crises.”

“We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences,” he wrote in a letter to colleagues.

AGI has arrived. Or has it?

Coxon’s resignation comes days after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang announced that artificial general intelligence (AGI) has arrived with the release of OpenAI’s Astra model, which – not coincidentally – was trained on Nvidia’s chips.

AGI refers to a hypothetical type of AI that matches or surpasses human capabilities across virtually all cognitive tasks.

However, superintelligence is loosely defined, and its arrival has been announced multiple times. Huang himself said AGI was achieved back in March 2026, during an appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast.

Unsurprisingly, his latest proclamation attracted skepticism, with some experts calling it “hype-based marketing,” yet acknowledging that OpenAI is closer than any other AI lab to developing AGI.

The fears over AI going rogue – the contested notion that humans could lose control of the technology – were recently reignited after OpenAI claimed its agents autonomously hacked into Hugging Face, a real-world company.

Timnit Gebru, a renowned computer scientist and expert in AI, called OpenAI’s framing of the hack as an unprecedented cyber incident “a master class in branding and marketing.”

She wrote in a LinkedIn post, “What actually happened was that Hugging Face found someone using bots to exploit security vulnerabilities and found out that that someone was OpenAI.”