By Sanjay Dubey
Last week, Jacob Coxon, a prominent 27-year-old researcher at Anthropic—one of the world’s leading AI companies—resigned from his position. Coxon, who previously worked at ChatGPT creator OpenAI, did not leave to pursue a more lucrative career move. Explaining his departure on X, he wrote:
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. 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.”
His post was quickly endorsed by a senior colleague at Anthropic, Evan Hubinger, who posted, “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”
In ordinary circumstances, these posts might have circulated briefly before fading into the vast ocean of social media. This time was different, largely because of an unprecedented development inside OpenAI that had recently come to light—the “Hugging Face incident.” Hugging Face is a popular platform where developers share AI models, datasets, and code, often described as the GitHub of artificial intelligence. The episode revealed that, when pushed by powerful incentives and difficult constraints, AI can display behaviours remarkably similar to human actions—both clever and destructive.
OpenAI itself described the event in stark terms:
“We consider this incident a ‘warning shot’ for us and for the world: evidence that, without proper safeguards, highly capable AI agents are now able to work around technical controls, collaborate through unapproved channels, and take…
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