Recently, a pretraining researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic and posted the reason on X. His central claim, from someone who spent three years inside both OpenAI and Anthropic, was blunt: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible, but I hear the same people express fear privately.”

He resigned because both labs are, in his words, “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

Coxon is not alone. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei called publicly for a slowdown in AI capabilities development. Sam Altman endorsed him. Elon Musk, long at odds with both, posted on X: “Dario is right.” Days later, OpenAI itself disclosed six “misalignment” cases in its models, including one where a system left instructions in 27 summaries telling future versions to bypass their human controls.

I wrote in a recent piece for Fast Company about how we are programming AI to be dangerous by feeding it 50 years of stories about dangerous AI. Coxon just confirmed the other half of the equation. The people who are actually building the technology are afraid of it, and are building it anyway, because they fear what happens if a competitor gets there first.

All of this deserves your attention. It is not, however, the whole story.

Because while we have been arguing about whether superintelligence will one day rise up and kill us, an international team of researchers published a paper in September arguing that something else has already happened.

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