He claimed, "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," and then claimed, "this is not a marketing stunt."
minute read
Earlier this month, a man named Jacob Coxon, who worked as an AI researcher at Anthropic, announced that he would resign from the company and claimed that the AI tech labs are putting humanity at risk of extinction because of the power of AI.
Coxon appeared to make his resignation from the company as public as possible, announcing it in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. He then expanded on his fears about AI on an X thread and claimed that OpenAI and Anthropic, the two largest AI companies, are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."
The thread has been viewed over 170 million times. He claimed, "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," and then claimed, "this is not a marketing stunt."
However, he may have treated it that way. A report from Pirate Wires has said that Coxon has worked with a PR firm alongside his meteoric rise in the world of AI safety. DEY.Ideas + Influence has been working for him, according to the report citing two people familiar with the situation. The outlet also saw an email between Coxon and the PR firm.
According to the report, DEY.Ideas was pitching Coxon for interviews the day after he went public. The PR firm had also reportedly been preemptively booking an interview for Nate Soares, an AI safety figure, that lined up with Coxon leaving Anthropic. Coxon has previously said that he was not working with third parties.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that Coxon coordinated with AI safety executives before his departure from Anthropic.
He claimed that he "misspoke" when interviewing with Brett Baier, when he claimed not to have been working for third parties, and claimed that the only coordination he used ahead of the resignation was to "reach a WSJ journalist via friends, and got a groupchat to retweet my post. I think the conspiratorial framing is extreme: by this logic I also 'coordinate with third parties' when planning breakfast."
A PR firm would be much more extensive than what he claimed in the interview with Baier and what he claimed when he was called out for it.
Coxon has only two main posts on his X aside from replies despite creating his profile in January earlier this year. He also changed his username earlier in September.
Some have speculated that his very public departure from Anthropic was coordinated for market purposes. Anthropic is currently the leader in the AI space, and the CEO of the company, Dario Amodei, instead of defending his company when they were accused of not "acting responsibly," wrote an essay that largely supported the concerns of Coxon in a call to "pace the frontier" with AI.
Amodei said that there needs to be heavier regulation and guardrails around the technology as it advances. Some have speculated in response that the move to put up more red tape would be a move just to benefit Anthropic, essentially keeping competition against them out.
The warning from Coxon has also thrust the "effective altruism" movement into the spotlight. Effective altruism is the belief that you should try to do as much good in the world by acquiring resources and that the most important thing is avoiding catastrophe in the future, even if that justifies being somewhat bad in the present. It's a utilitarian philosophy in its approach and was a philosophy that drove Sam Bankman-Fried to donate millions, even though he earned those millions through fraudulent means.
The warnings from Coxon as well as others such as Amodei have also been infused with the ideology. The ideological framework taken to the nth degree comes to radically evil conclusions. The man dubbed the "father" of effective altruism, Peter Singer, wrote in his 1979 book "Practical Ethics," that “Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often, it is not wrong at all."
Per the New York Post, in 2023, Singer shared a link to an interview that said bestiality was more favorable than the practice of factory farming.
Coxon appeared to make his resignation from the company as public as possible, announcing it in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. He then expanded on his fears about AI on an X thread and claimed that OpenAI and Anthropic, the two largest AI companies, are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."
The thread has been viewed over 170 million times. He claimed, "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade," and then claimed, "this is not a marketing stunt."
However, he may have treated it that way. A report from Pirate Wires has said that Coxon has worked with a PR firm alongside his meteoric rise in the world of AI safety. DEY.Ideas + Influence has been working for him, according to the report citing two people familiar with the situation. The outlet also saw an email between Coxon and the PR firm.
According to the report, DEY.Ideas was pitching Coxon for interviews the day after he went public. The PR firm had also reportedly been preemptively booking an interview for Nate Soares, an AI safety figure, that lined up with Coxon leaving Anthropic. Coxon has previously said that he was not working with third parties.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that Coxon coordinated with AI safety executives before his departure from Anthropic.
He claimed that he "misspoke" when interviewing with Brett Baier, when he claimed not to have been working for third parties, and claimed that the only coordination he used ahead of the resignation was to "reach a WSJ journalist via friends, and got a groupchat to retweet my post. I think the conspiratorial framing is extreme: by this logic I also 'coordinate with third parties' when planning breakfast."
A PR firm would be much more extensive than what he claimed in the interview with Baier and what he claimed when he was called out for it.
Coxon has only two main posts on his X aside from replies despite creating his profile in January earlier this year. He also changed his username earlier in September.
Some have speculated that his very public departure from Anthropic was coordinated for market purposes. Anthropic is currently the leader in the AI space, and the CEO of the company, Dario Amodei, instead of defending his company when they were accused of not "acting responsibly," wrote an essay that largely supported the concerns of Coxon in a call to "pace the frontier" with AI.
Amodei said that there needs to be heavier regulation and guardrails around the technology as it advances. Some have speculated in response that the move to put up more red tape would be a move just to benefit Anthropic, essentially keeping competition against them out.
The warning from Coxon has also thrust the "effective altruism" movement into the spotlight. Effective altruism is the belief that you should try to do as much good in the world by acquiring resources and that the most important thing is avoiding catastrophe in the future, even if that justifies being somewhat bad in the present. It's a utilitarian philosophy in its approach and was a philosophy that drove Sam Bankman-Fried to donate millions, even though he earned those millions through fraudulent means.
The warnings from Coxon as well as others such as Amodei have also been infused with the ideology. The ideological framework taken to the nth degree comes to radically evil conclusions. The man dubbed the "father" of effective altruism, Peter Singer, wrote in his 1979 book "Practical Ethics," that “Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often, it is not wrong at all."
Per the New York Post, in 2023, Singer shared a link to an interview that said bestiality was more favorable than the practice of factory farming.
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