‘They want to slow down’: Anthropic whistleblower Jacob Coxon says AI companies need room for self-regulation

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon on Sunday suggested that the US Congress should allow top frontier AI labs to self-regulate while lawmakers develop a long-term framework to slow the pace of artificial intelligence development.

“My personal opinion would be to insist and allow that the current labs regulate themselves. I do think that the people running the labs, especially their recent communications, are completely genuine. They would like to slow themselves down,” Coxon told NBC News’ ‘Meet the Press’.

His appearance followed his viral X posts last week, which sparked widespread concern about the pace of AI advancement at leading labs such as Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind.

Hours after resigning from Anthropic on Tuesday, Coxon posted: “I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”.

In a subsequent post, Coxon added: “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”.

On Sunday, he likened developing AI to “inviting an alien mind onto the planet,” adding: “You’re building a human-level or superhuman-level mind without understanding what it wants or thinks or the way it thinks, and I think that intrinsically should be quite scary.”

‘No adults in the room’

Coxon's sentiment was echoed by other industry insiders.

By Thursday, two more safety researchers, Joe Benton of Anthropic and Josh Engels of Google, announced their resignations and sounded the alarm about the speed of AI advancement.