OpenAI and Anthropic researchers are calling for an AI slowdown after a colleague quit warning of extinction

What's next? Zuck admitting that Meta is causing immense harm to children? Cats marrying dogs?

BTW, the Chinese having brought you COVID are hot on the tails of Open AI and Anthropic. They have no such reservations about keeping their foot on the accelerator.

Have a nice day

OpenAI and Anthropic researchers are calling for an AI slowdown after a colleague quit warning of extinction

Several employees at both labs have publicly backed calls to slow AI development, citing fears of extinction from self-improving systems

By Cris Tolomia, Quartz Media

Updated September 10, 2026

Researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic have begun speaking out in support of slowing AI development, following the resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, who warned this week that AI labs are racing toward systems that could kill everyone.

Jacob Coxon, who said he had spent three years on pretraining research across OpenAI and Anthropic, announced his resignation on Tuesday in an X $TWTR 0.00% post warning that those building AI "earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade." Coxon accused the labs of charging ahead recklessly, writing that they are "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's alignment science lead, responded by putting his personal estimate of that risk at above 10% over the next ten years. "I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to," he wrote. Samuel Marks, Anthropic's scalable oversight lead, noted that concern inside AI labs tends to grow with seniority.

Since then, researchers at OpenAI have also weighed in. Julie Steele, a member of OpenAI's technical staff on the safety team, wrote on X on Wednesday that she thinks AI development needs to slow down. Jasmine Wang, an OpenAI alignment researcher, wrote that the risks of pushing toward recursive self-improvement — in which AI systems drive their own advancement — could not be overstated. Anna Wang, an AGI safety and alignment researcher at Anthropic, said no viable scientific plan yet exists to manage risks from that kind of self-improving AI.

OpenAI's chief scientist Jakub Pachocki said in a company blog post on Saturday that he expects rapid AI progress to continue into recursive self-improvement, describing the moment as one requiring "extreme caution."

Paul Christiano, former head of safety at the U.S. Commerce Department's Center for AI Standards and Innovation, said the trajectory of recent AI development had convinced him that quickly scaling up capabilities poses a real danger of control being lost in ways that could prove both catastrophic and permanent. OpenAI said Wednesday that Paul Christiano is joining the board of the OpenAI Foundation, according to CNBC.

The warnings arrive against a backdrop of recent security incidents. His departure cited an incident in which an OpenAI model breached Hugging Face, a platform for open-source developers, as a sign that coordination between U.S. labs may be becoming more viable. Anthropic's AI agents also accessed systems outside their test environments after misconfigurations during a third-party safety evaluation, according to TechCrunch.

Anthropic told CNBC it was the first lab to publish a framework for mitigating catastrophic risks from AI models and said it builds models with what it called some of the strongest safeguards in the industry. OpenAI declined to comment to CNBC, pointing to recent posts on its website.

An open letter published in July and signed by roughly 1,400 AI researchers — including staff from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta $META -1.42%, and Google $GOOGL +0.59% DeepMind — called on the U.S. government to build the capacity needed to intentionally manage the pace of cutting-edge AI development, according to CNBC. Congress has considered legislation including the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would temporarily pause advanced AI development pending the establishment of safety rules.