Key points
- Coxon took his AI warning from a viral resignation to a room of New York business leaders.
- The session ran mostly as executive Q&A.
- One attendee compared the turnout to a pandemic-era briefing.
Jacob Coxon, a former Anthropic researcher, spoke virtually to dozens of top New York business leaders at a recent gathering of the Partnership for New York City, according to the New York Times' DealBook newsletter. Coxon resigned from Anthropic on September 8, warning that Anthropic and OpenAI were "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."
DealBook reported that most of the session was an executive question-and-answer discussion. Attendees asked Coxon about AI-related cybersecurity risks, regulation, effective altruism and whether controlling the technology would eventually require a global framework.
Who Jacob Coxon is
Coxon spent roughly three years on pretraining research, first at OpenAI and then at Anthropic. Pretraining is the stage in which a model learns patterns from large amounts of data before later refinement. As a teenager, he represented the United Kingdom at the International Mathematical Olympiad, winning silver in 2016 and bronze in 2017.
His resignation post on X received more than 100 million views, according to Wired. Coxon wrote that neither company was acting responsibly and that AI development was moving faster than its builders could safely control.
He left about two months before his equity would have vested, Axios reported, and said none of his Anthropic equity had vested when he departed. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's head of alignment stress testing, backed Coxon's warning days later, writing that "we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans."
Why the Partnership wanted to hear from him
The Partnership for New York City is a business group founded by David Rockefeller in 1979. Its members are several hundred of the largest corporate, investment and entrepreneurial firms in the city. Pfizer chief executive Albert Bourla and Tishman Speyer's Rob Speyer co-chair its board, and its directors include Larry Fink of BlackRock (BLK), Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Arvind Krishna of IBM (IBM) and Lynn Martin, president of the New York Stock Exchange.
The Partnership's board includes leaders from major companies and financial firms. DealBook's account of Coxon's appearance shows that his warning drew unusual interest from that audience. DealBook reported that one attendee compared the level of interest to the updates Bourla gave the group during the pandemic.
What it does and does not tell us
Anthropic is privately held, so there is no stock to trade on the appearance. What the meeting shows is that the safety argument Coxon made on his way out has reached the executives who run some of the largest public companies in the country. He put the stakes plainly in the post that started it. Neither leading lab, he wrote, is "acting responsibly."
