The AI Tipping Point
Inside the industry's growing alarm—and the struggle to turn warnings into action.
On September 8th, Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old British researcher, announced via X that he had resigned from Anthropic. Coxon had spent the last three years working on pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, expressing deep concern that these companies were racing to create self-improving superintelligent AI. He believed there was a significant risk of human extinction within the next few years if no regulation or slowdown was implemented.
Coxon's resignation post went viral, receiving 153 million views within 36 hours. The revelation sparked a cascade of concern, with dozens of politicians and industry leaders joining the debate. In response, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei penned a lengthy essay advocating for a temporary slowdown in AI development, warning that misaligned AIs could potentially take over the entire internet within as little as six to twelve months.
Although rivals Elon Musk of SpaceXAI and Sam Altman of OpenAI expressed agreement on the need for deceleration, neither company announced immediate changes to their training processes. Experts continue to grapple with the potential risks and challenges posed by the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, as humanity stands at a critical juncture where the stakes are higher than ever before.
Written by urgent.news from Time's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
