This week a 27-year-old researcher who spent three years doing pretraining at OpenAI and then Anthropic quit his job, posted a thread that passed 100 million views, and put the odds of AI killing every human on earth at more than 10 percent. Then an Anthropic alignment lead replied, on the record, that he agreed.
I read the whole thing twice and sat with it. I want to walk you through what it actually says, why it landed so hard, and where I honestly come down: not on panic, and not on hype, but on faith.
In this issue you’ll find:
The resignation that put 10 percent odds on human extinction
Why this warning is credible even to those of us on the outside
We survived the last weapon that could have erased us
If progress can’t be stopped, root for the AI that cures cancer
What choosing faith actually changes for you
1. The resignation that put 10 percent odds on human extinction
Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic on Tuesday, and he did not go quietly. He is 27, and he spent the last three years doing pretraining research at the two most important labs in the world: a member of OpenAI’s technical staff from 2023 until July 2026, where he worked on GPT-4o, then a researcher at Anthropic. This is not a fringe voice. This is someone who was in the room.
The line that traveled everywhere: “Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” You can read his full thread here: x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843.
What made it more than a resignation letter was the second claim: “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 pre-empted the obvious dismissal that scary talk is just good marketing, noting that many executives and senior researchers soften their phrasing in the press to sound sensible, but that he hears the same people express fear privately.
By September 9, the thread had passed 100 million views and been picked up by Fortune, Business Insider, Ars Technica, TechCrunch, the Washington Post, and CNBC, which framed the headline number bluntly: more than a 10 percent chance of “killing all humans”.
Strip away the virality, and here is the uncomfortable core. A person whose entire job was building the thing looked at the trajectory and decided the honest move was to walk out and say it out loud. That is worth taking seriously before we decide what to do with it.
2. Why this warning is credible even to those of us on the outside
The strongest reason not to dismiss Coxon is that someone still inside the building agreed with him publicly. Anthropic’s own Alignment Science lead, Evan Hubinger, replied on X: “Jacob is correct here, we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade”. That reframes everything. This is not a bitter ex-employee versus the company. It is a view held inside the company, by the person whose title is literally about keeping the models aligned.
Coxon’s sharpest observation is the difference he draws between the two labs. “At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes,” he wrote. “At Anthropic, the stakes are well understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first, they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk.” That is the trap in one sentence: the people who understand the danger best feel they have to run toward it anyway, because they trust themselves more than the alternative.
He is also not the first to walk. Ars Technica noted that a prominent researcher quitting a frontier AI lab has become a recognizable event, one in a pattern of departure warnings rather than a one-off. When multiple credible insiders keep leaving with the same message, the base rate matters. This is real signal.
But signal is not proof. Coxon is describing a future (”these will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything”) that has not happened yet. Even Anthropic’s own August alignment report, the one Hubinger pointed to, rates the catastrophic risk from current models as “low,” while warning that future, more capable models “may cause unbounded harm.” So the honest read is this: the people closest to the technology are genuinely scared, they may well be right, and none of us on the outside can verify it either way. All three are true at once.
3. We survived the last weapon that could have erased us
Here is where I have to be honest about my own limits. I am not in the lab, and neither are you. From out here, we cannot run the experiment that tells us whether Coxon’s 10 percent is closer to the truth than someone else’s 1 percent or 30 percent. The same uncertainty that makes his warning credible is what makes it unverifiable. We are not being handed a calculation. We are being handed a choice between fear and faith.
And I keep coming back to one fact that steadies me. Humanity has held the power to erase itself since the 1940s. Nuclear weapons could have ended the whole story many times over. Through the Cold War, through Cuba, through decades of terrifyingly close calls, we did not use them. Not because the danger was fake, it was as real as danger gets, but because enough people, on enough sides, chose not to. World-ending power sat in human hands for eighty years, and we are still here.
That is not naive optimism. It is precedent. It is the single best piece of evidence we have about how our species behaves when it can destroy itself, and the evidence says we can hold that power without pulling the trigger. Coxon points at something similar when he talks about coordination: “warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between the US labs more viable.” The people worried about this are also actively trying to build the guardrails, the same way the nuclear age eventually produced treaties.
So I refuse to resolve the uncertainty into doom just because doom is the loudest emotion in the room. Holding “he might be right and we can’t know” is uncomfortable, but it is the mature place to stand. Panic is a decision, not a fact. And I would rather spend my energy on the version of the future I actually want to see.
4. If progress can’t be stopped, root for the AI that cures cancer
I do not think we can stop this. That is the plain truth. Coxon himself, who is more worried than almost anyone, wrote that he doesn’t feel we’re “on track to prevent a global race.” When even the person walking out in protest can’t see how the brakes get pulled, betting your peace of mind on a full stop is a losing bet. So if progress is coming either way, the sane move is to lean hard into the good it can do.
And the good is already showing up. Last month Anthropic’s Claude completed the first formalized proof of a major mathematical result, converting the reasoning into a form the Lean proof assistant could verify, work that used to take human mathematicians years (Anthropic on X, 2026-09-04). The same category of self-improving system that Coxon fears is the one now accelerating real science.
Formalizing math is not a party trick. It is the same muscle that reads through millions of molecular interactions to find a drug candidate, that models how a protein folds, that spots the pattern a human researcher would need a decade to notice. If a system can hold an entire mathematical proof in its head and check every step, pointing it at cancer biology or the tangle of Alzheimer’s is a difference of domain, not of kind.
So here is the near-term version I am rooting for, and it is not science fiction. In the next couple of years, I fully expect AI to compress drug-discovery timelines, to hand oncologists better-targeted treatments, and to help crack diseases that have humbled us for generations. That is the exact same technology in the exact same headlines. Coxon is scared of what it could destroy. I choose to also see what it could heal. Both live inside the same machine, and which one we build more of is not fully out of our hands.
5. What choosing faith actually changes for you
If you build with AI, invest in it, or bet your career on it, this week’s warning is not a reason to freeze. It is a reason to be deliberate about which future you pour yourself into. AI is going to end up being an image of humanity, and humanity is not one thing. It is capable of the bomb and capable of the vaccine. What it becomes depends heavily on what the people building it are actually trying to make.
That means the choice in front of you is more consequential than it feels. Every founder who points these systems at disease instead of manipulation, every investor who backs the lab treating safety as a first-order problem rather than a press line, every operator who insists on understanding what they’re shipping, is casting a vote for which image AI reflects back. Coxon’s whole closing appeal to lab researchers was exactly this: don’t put your head down because it’s happening anyway, use the moment to “call for different conditions.” That applies to all of us, not just the people inside.
I am choosing to trust the good in people. Not because I’ve proven the pessimists wrong, I can’t, and neither can they prove themselves right. I’m choosing it because the last time we held world-ending power we chose not to end the world, and because the same technology that scares a credible insider is the one plausibly about to cure the things that have been killing the people I love.
So hold the warning honestly. Take it seriously. Then decide which side of it you’re going to spend your one working life building. The future is not something that happens to us. It is the thing we root for, and then go make. I’m rooting for the one that cures cancer. Let’s build that one.
Best,
Guillermo