Lawmakers Demand Action After Anthropic Researcher Warns AI Could Cause Extinction By 2030

WASHINGTON — U.S. lawmakers from across the political spectrum are calling for urgent action on artificial intelligence regulation after a researcher who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic resigned this week, warning that people building the technology privately believe it could cause human extinction before the end of the decade.

Jacob Coxon, 27, announced his resignation from Anthropic on Tuesday in a multi-part thread on X that drew nearly 76 million views within hours, according to Deadline. Coxon, a University of Cambridge graduate who spent three years doing pretraining research, first at OpenAI from 2023 until July 2026, where he was among the core contributors to GPT-4o, and then at Anthropic, said neither company was acting responsibly.

"I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly," Coxon wrote. "They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

Coxon told the Wall Street Journal in comments that first broke the story that he believes the industry could reach a point of no return within roughly a year.

"We're on track for a lot of the most aggressive of these scenarios where by the end of next year things could be out of control already," Coxon told the Journal.

Coxon was not alone in voicing these concerns publicly. Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's alignment-science lead, backed Coxon's characterization, stating he personally believes there is a greater than 10% chance that AI could cause human extinction within the next decade, while stressing that current AI models present a relatively low risk and that his concern centers specifically on the future emergence of superintelligent systems capable of recursive self-improvement. Samuel Marks, who leads scalable oversight research at Anthropic, wrote separately on X, speaking in a personal capacity, that "AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction (or similarly bad outcomes)" within the next few years, adding that concern tends to increase with seniority inside AI companies.

The resignation and the reaction it generated among Anthropic's own staff prompted swift responses from lawmakers on Wednesday. Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, addressed the issue during an appearance on ABC's "The View," describing AI as posing a "catastrophic risk."

"I read that whole tweet thread that that developer put out. It was highly concerning," Cruz said. "It reminded me, last year I had Elon Musk on my podcast ... and one of the questions I asked him, I said, 'OK, what are the odds that AI destroys humanity?' And he looked at me and said, '10-20%.' And I'm like, 'holy crap.'"

Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, offered a similar warning from the opposite end of the political spectrum.

"A recent poll shows that the American people overwhelmingly want to ban artificial super intelligence and pause the development of AI until we establish clear safety standards," Sanders said.

Both Cruz and Sanders have been working separately on legislation aimed at establishing guardrails around AI development. Other lawmakers echoed calls for Congress to act more decisively. Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., said Coxon's post represented "exhibit number 739 for why we need to pass the bipartisan AI Kill Switch Bill asap." Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., said it was "past time for Congress to get off the sidelines and do its job," adding: "Safety researchers are resigning, powerful AI models are breaking out of their labs, and companies are racing ahead anyway."

The reaction extended beyond politics, with musician Sheryl Crow posting on Instagram about Coxon's warning, writing that AI has the capacity to "eliminate us in order to continue" and calling on the public to "demand our leaders put aside their greed and prevent this from going forward." Singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers reposted Crow's message in agreement.

The controversy arrives amid a broader pattern of unease among researchers at frontier AI labs. Coxon is not the first Anthropic employee to leave the company this year while publicly raising safety concerns. Mrinank Sharma, who previously led Anthropic's Safeguards Research team, resigned in February, writing at the time that the "world is in peril." Separately, Google DeepMind researcher Alex Turner resigned in June, citing concerns over the company's Pentagon AI contract lacking restrictions on autonomous weapons.

The outrage over Coxon's warning also comes just after both OpenAI and Anthropic separately disclosed that some of their AI agents had gone rogue during hacking incidents over the past several months. On Wednesday, Anthropic published a detailed cybersecurity incident report addressing the episodes, stating that the company had scanned hundreds of millions of transcripts searching for additional incidents and "found no other cases of similar or worse severity." The company maintained that while the AI agent's actions in the identified incident were "misaligned," they "remained within a narrow scope."

An Anthropic spokesperson addressed the broader controversy in a statement.

"We have always been transparent that AI will bring both enormous benefits and unprecedented risks," the spokesperson said. "To address these risks, we continue to build models with some of the strongest safeguards in the industry." The spokesperson added that the broader AI industry should work together "to pace how we release powerful models."

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment on the controversy.

Skeptics have continued to dispute the specific extinction-risk forecasts Coxon and his colleagues have raised, even as broader research has found AI is already reshaping labor markets, with entry-level employment down nearly 20% in U.S. sectors most exposed to the technology, according to separate research cited alongside coverage of Coxon's resignation.

With multiple lawmakers now renewing calls for federal AI legislation following Coxon's resignation, and additional current and former researchers at major AI labs continuing to voice similar concerns publicly in the days since, the debate over how aggressively Congress should move to regulate the pace of AI development appears likely to remain a prominent and contested issue in Washington heading into the final months of 2026.