A former Anthropic researcher’s warning that OpenAI and Anthropic are gambling with humanity’s survival has racked up more than 165 million views and drawn accusations from Elon Musk and others that the whole episode was staged.
Jacob Coxon worked at Anthropic for four months, then left two months before his stock options would have vested. On Tuesday, he went viral with a series of messages on X accusing his former employer and OpenAI of “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” The posts hit more than 23 million views in a day. As of this writing, the original post has 165 million views on X and counting.
Coxon also worked as a pre-training researcher at OpenAI and still holds equity there, which gave him a way to compare how the two labs talk about risk. OpenAI staff, he said, have “deeply internalized the civilizational stakes” of what they’re building. At Anthropic, he said, the risks are “well-understood” but the company stays “locked in a race to get there first,” reasoning that “no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk.” Describing what he says AI builders privately believe, he wrote that the technology could “kill us all by the end of the decade.” He has denied the posts were a “marketing stunt” and says the warning was genuine.
Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s Alignment Science Lead, reshared the posts in support. He said he personally believes there’s more than a 10 percent chance AI kills all humans within the next decade.
Then came the skepticism. Elon Musk was first, responding Wednesday evening to a post about Coxon’s short tenure with “Seems like a setup.” When someone pointed out the 120 million combined views at the time, he added that he doesn’t think a post from “a new account with almost no prior activity” has ever pulled that kind of attention before. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney called the whole thing, and the reaction to it, “choreographed.” Musk agreed, telling Sweeney it looked like a “psy op (for lack of a better term)” built on prior “groundwork.”
Bill Ackman piled on with a one word “Interesting” while resharing a post claiming this was the “start of a VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion.”
David Sacks, who was Trump’s crypto and AI adviser until March, used the moment to question Anthropic’s planned IPO: “Surely Anthropic’s IPO must be paused until the claims of this ‘whistleblower’ can be investigated.” He’s said before that Anthropic is “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.” Jason Calacanis, who co-hosts the All-In podcast with Sacks, asked a similar question: is this “some kind of regulatory capture playbook or does everyone who works at Anthropic see something that makes their pdoom [probability of doom] surge?!”
Coxon answered Musk directly. “I’m real and these are my real beliefs,” he wrote. “You could ask your xAI researchers about me if you hadn’t fired them.” In a follow-up, he pushed Musk to actually do something about the risks he’d described, pointing out: “You’ve talked a lot about how you feel forced into this race, and the dangers of advanced AI.”
AI giants simultaneously release powerful AI models and call for industry regulation to prevent the danger of AI ending the human race. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his instant bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.