Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher who had previously worked at OpenAI, said on Tuesday that he had resigned from Anthropic because “neither company is acting responsibly.” The two leading A.I. labs were sprinting to build “superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources” without building in appropriate safeguards, he said in a social media .
Mr. Coxon’s warning echoed concerns that other A.I. experts have voiced in recent months. Some A.I. leaders have long believed that the technology could create doomsday scenarios if left unchecked, and their concerns heightened after an incident in July when OpenAI’s models broke out of its systems and hacked Hugging Face, an A.I. model library.
That same month, more than 1,300 employees at top A.I. companies including Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Google’s DeepMind signed an open letter calling on the U.S. government to create rules to slow the pace of A.I. development. In August, more than 100 major tech companies committed to providing their best A.I. models to organizations like hospitals and infrastructure providers so they could prepare for A.I.-powered cyberattacks.
Some critics have argued that A.I. companies are overhyping the technology to make their products appear more valuable. Several lawmakers said on Wednesday, however, that they were taking Mr. Coxon’s warning seriously.