How a single tweet transformed the AI safety debate
It was the tweet heard ‘round the world. Last week, a little-known Anthropic employee named Jacob Coxon announced that he was resigning from the company. “I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote. “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Coxon wasn’t the first employee to quit over similar fears. In 2024, William Saunders told a US Senate committee that he “resigned from OpenAI because I lost faith that by themselves they will make responsible decisions about AGI.” And in February, Mrinank Sharma wrote that he was leaving Anthropic because “the world is in peril” from AI and other risks, and he felt he couldn’t act with sufficient integrity at the company. Yet for whatever reason, it was Coxon’s message that broke through. His tweet has been viewed over 170 million times. He was interviewed on CNN , CBS , and Fox News . Lawmakers and cel
