Two big stories are driving interest in artificial intelligence this week. The first is the resignation of Jacob Coxon, a researcher at Anthropic (maker of Claude) who used to work for OpenAI. He said in a statement on X:

Coxon went on to say that “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade”, and that employees at Anthropic are aggressively driving forward because they believe they are in the only company capable of managing the technology safely and ethically. At OpenAI, “many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes.” 

Scary stuff. Two important points of context about Coxon’s former employer, Anthropic: it was founded by former OpenAI employees with links to the “effective altruist” movement, which holds a very “doomer” view of artificial intelligence. The altruists have been concerned about existential AI risk for decades, irrespective of the capabilities of contemporary frontier models. The investigative journalist Parker Thayer has documented how individuals in the wider “AI safety” (or AI doomer) network immediately reposted Coxon’s work, followed by several prominent Democrat politicians who want to extend government oversight over tech. They included Bernie Sanders, who used Coxon’s resignation as a chance to repeat his call for a “ban on superintelligence” and for the pausing of AI development.  

There could also be commercial motivations. Anthropic is planning to sell shares to the public for the first time in the next few months and the Wall Street Journal believes the company could be valued at $2 trillion. A cynic might suggest that AI companies have a commercial interest in generating hype around their products. If AI is so powerful that soon we will have “superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources,” why invest money anywhere else? The potential of AI is already moving money on........

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