Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has responded to former researcher Jacob Coxon’s resignation and warning that rapidly developing artificial intelligence systems could “kill us all by the end of the decade.”
In a CNN interview, Amodei said he “agrees with Jacob much more than I disagree with him.” However, he clarified that Coxon’s broader concern was about the AI industry moving too fast, while Amodei said Coxon viewed Anthropic as the most responsible player.
Coxon, who worked on pretraining research at both Anthropic and OpenAI, resigned from Anthropic earlier this week. In a post on X, he said AI companies were not acting responsibly and warned that the industry was moving towards self-improving superintelligence.
Coxon wrote that AI companies were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”. He also said people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
His post received widespread attention, with CNN reporting that more than 40 million people saw it.
Asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper whether he believes AI could kill all humans and what probability he would assign to that outcome, Amodei did not reject Coxon’s concerns.
“It’s funny, I agree with Jacob much more than I disagree with him,” Amodei said.
Amodei also explained that Coxon’s resignation was not a direct criticism of Anthropic. “He wasn’t calling us out. He was calling out the dynamic of the industry as a whole, moving too fast,” he said.
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Amodei said he no longer prefers expressing AI risks through a single probability. He said it was once an easy way to explain the issue but believes it can hide the different paths AI development could take.
He argued that it is more useful to examine “the paths in which things go well, and what are the paths in which things go poorly?”
Instead of framing AI catastrophe as a single probability, Amodei said it is more useful to examine the different paths AI development could take.
“If we take the right path, then the chance of something going wrong is very low. If we take the wrong path, then the chance of something going wrong could be even higher than that,” he said.
“So let’s focus on our agency, and our ability to take the right paths instead of the wrong paths,” Amodei added.