The AI Researcher Who Just Quit Anthropic Says It’s ‘Crunch Time for Humanity’
Jacob Coxon, a researcher who recently left Anthropic, spoke with WIRED about internal safety efforts at the company, describing its alignment work as resembling a 'mini Manhattan Project' and warning that AI labs have only a few years to make their systems safe.
Why this matters: When someone leaves one of the most prominent AI safety labs and immediately uses the phrase 'crunch time for humanity,' that is worth taking seriously. Coxon is describing a race with a deadline that no one elected and no regulator set. The alignment problem he is pointing to is not abstract: it is the question of whether these systems will reliably do what people actually want, rather than what they were roughly trained to do. If the people building these tools are not sure they can solve that in time, the rest of us deserve to know that clearly.
Who should care: General readers · AI governance · Policy
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