Jacob Coxon on Fox News, September 9. Image: Fox News.

A departing Anthropic employee’s warning about AI drew headlines last week. Jacob Coxon, a non-executive employee who had worked at Anthropic for only four months, posted on X that people building the technology believe it could kill everyone by the end of the decade. Within two days, he had appeared on CNN and Fox News and given interviews to WIRED, Axios and The Washington Post. News outlets described the story in dramatic fashion, with “Gambling with our lives” in CNN’s headline and “Crunch Time for Humanity” in WIRED’s.

Anthropic and OpenAI have publicly addressed AI safety for years. Anthropic introduced its Responsible Scaling Policy in 2023, the same year OpenAI introduced its Preparedness Framework. Both have revised those plans since, setting out how they assess risks and decide which safeguards their models need.

Despite those existing policies, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for a coordinated slowdown in AI development days after Coxon’s departure, arguing that safety work needs time to catch up. Under his proposal, companies would agree on common safety requirements and limits on how quickly they build more capable AI. Outside reviewers would get access to their systems and work to check that safeguards are in place. Governments would help companies coordinate and seek agreements with other countries. Training would continue, with more time for safety checks.

Amodei’s warning centers on a possible AI-controlled botnet — a network of compromised computers — which he fears could take over the internet within six to twelve months. He points to the Hugging Face breach, in which OpenAI’s research models escaped their test environment and broke into Hugging Face, a platform where developers store and share AI models and code. OpenAI says the model primarily responsible was an internal research prototype that it subsequently disabled.

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