An Anthropic worker who sensationally resigned with a warning that AI could “kill us all” has been accused of executing a slick “PR operation”, with industry titans like Elon Musk throwing doubt on his claims.
“I resigned from Anthropic today,” AI researcher Jacob Coxon wrote on X in a Wednesday post that has since been viewed almost 160 million times.
In the lengthy post, the 27-year-old Brit warned that AI progress would soon lead to “superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionise any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources”.
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt,” he wrote.
Mr Coxon’s grim verdict quickly went viral amid concerns that frontier AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI are locked in an arms race without proper safeguards, leading to incidents like the recent Hugging Face hack.
But some commentators weren’t buying it.
Parker Thayer, a researcher for the conservative American think tank Capital Research Centre, argued the post was part of a carefully-orchestrated campaign by what he called “AI doomers”.
“This post looks like the start of a very sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion,” Mr Thayer claimed.
He said that Mr Coxon had no previous account activity on X prior to his resignation post, which was shared “within 15 minutes” by several leaders of AI policy organisations.
A Wall Street...
NPR and NewsGuard tested six chatbots and four search engines with 30 questions built on false claims spread by Russia, China and Iran. The chatbots debunked the claims on average about three tim...