Former Anthropic, OpenAI employee sounds alarm over AI development pace - ABC News - Breaking News, Latest News and Videos

Jacob Coxon, a former safety researcher for Anthropic and OpenAI, applauded Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s calls for a slowdown in artificial intelligence development.

“I think it's great. It's very exciting,” Coxon -- who resigned from Anthropic last week over AI safety concerns -- told “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos Sunday. “I think this is a substantial step towards what I was talking about, needing some sort of slowdown between the people building the different AIs.”

In a stunning letter on Saturday titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” Amodei called for a slowdown in the pace at which artificial intelligence companies develop the revolutionary technology, writing "I believe we owe it to humanity to try."

Coxon made waves last week when he resigned from Anthropic, posting on X that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI "is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

He also highlighted the fear within the industry about the potential for an AI takeover: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon wrote.

Coxon told Stephanopoulos the way in which his post took off shocked him.