Jacob Coxon
Researcher (Pre-training) · Anthropic · 2026
Evidence reviewed
Jacob Coxon’s resignation from Anthropic
Researcher focused on pre-training who resigned from Anthropic after working on frontier-model development at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Coxon said neither company was acting responsibly and argued that the race toward self-improving superintelligence was proceeding without adequate guarantees that increasingly capable systems could be controlled. He called the race a gamble with human lives and urged laboratory researchers to demand stronger coordination, potentially including a temporary pause in further capability improvements.
Coxon announced his resignation on September 8, 2026. Some embeds display September 9 because the post was published after midnight UTC.
“Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
Before joining Anthropic, Coxon worked at OpenAI, where he contributed to GPT-4o and co-authored research on making neural-network computations easier to interpret. In interviews, he distinguished between the laboratories: he said Anthropic took AI risk more seriously than OpenAI and had not yet cut safety corners, but argued that competitive pressure would eventually force unacceptable trade-offs. Coxon told Axios he resigned about two months before his Anthropic equity would have vested. Anthropic told WIRED that it had consistently acknowledged AI's benefits and risks and supported lawful, verifiable coordination on the pace of powerful model releases; OpenAI did not respond to WIRED.
Sources
- Resignation statement on Anthropic and the race toward self-improving superintelligenceX
- Anthropic Researcher Quits Over ‘Out-of-Control’ AI FearsThe Wall Street Journal
- ‘Gambling with our lives’: Anthropic researcher quits, warns against self-improving AITechCrunch
- Anthropic researcher resigns with warning about the dangers of AI developmentAssociated Press
- Scoop: Anthropic whistleblower gave up his equity to leave the companyAxios
- The AI Researcher Who Just Quit Anthropic Says It’s “Crunch Time for Humanity”WIRED
- Anthropic researcher resigns, warning of “reckless race” toward superintelligence
Key Publications
- Understanding neural networks through sparse circuitsOpenAIpaper
Coxon and his co-authors train sparse neural networks whose internal computations are easier to trace. On controlled tasks, they identify small circuits that explain model behavior. The experiments use models much smaller than frontier systems and do not establish that the approach will scale.
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