“Jacob Coxon Warns of Human Extinction and Triggers a Preference Cascade” by Zvi
LessWrong posts by zviShow Notes
CEOs of major AI labs, and employees of major AI labs, including OpenAI and Anthropic, often say they plan to build superintelligence soon, as in within a few years create AIs that are superior to humans at essentially all cognitive tasks.
They often warn that such AIs might kill everyone. Or that AIs might cause mass unemployment, cause cyberattacks across the internet, enable mass surveillance or risk causing any number of other highly bad things.
These warnings are consistently and directly against the interests of the labs. Yet the warnings have recently gotten a lot louder and more frequent. OpenAI has been practically screaming, for those with ears to listen, on many occasions.
A series of events, over two months and especially the last week or so, including internal observations of the pace of progress at OpenAI and also Anthropic, have freaked out everyone involved quite a lot more than they were already freaked out.
After all the events, plus statements by Dean Ball and Jakub Pachocki, we were already seeing the beginnings of a preference cascade.
Then along came Jacob Coxon as the tipping point, and things took off.
Table of Contents [...] --- Outline: (01:22) Jacob Coxon Resigns From Anthropic In Protest And Sounds The Alarm (05:46) Mainstream Media Finally Pays Attention (06:47) Preference Cascade at Anthropic (10:18) Preference Cascade at OpenAI (13:26) Preference Cascade at Google (14:43) #NotAllMembersOfTechnicalStaff (15:23) Why a Preference Cascade Now? (21:01) This Is What Many Anthropic and OpenAI Employees Actually Believe (24:08) To Quit Or Not To Quit (31:29) Quiet Quitting Is A Dominated Option (32:50) When You Quit, Very Serious People Understand What That Means (39:29) Jacob Coxon Believes Existential Risk Is High That Is Why He Quit (41:47) Evan Hubinger Believes Existential Risk Is High That Is Why He Stays (45:22) Anthropic and OpenAI Have Commercial Incentives To Downplay Existential Risks, Not Advertise Them (50:54) What Do We Do Now? (53:03) OK, But How Exactly Would AI Kill Everyone? (01:01:44) Best Start Believing In Science Fiction Stories Because You Are In One (01:06:20) Literal Extinction Is Not Much Harder Than Loss of Control (01:07:42) Conspiracytown Is Always Hiring (01:20:14) Now You See It ---
First published:
September 11th, 2026
Source:
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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More from LessWrong posts by zvi
Last week at a small conference, there was talk about a future event referred to as The Hackening. As in, within 6 to 12 months, many predicted that due to advanced AIs and AI agents the internet would become a severely hostile place. Some worried that this could rise to the level of ‘assume any phone connected to the internet is rooted’ and several people urged doing general crisis preparations on a personal level, in case of disruptions in supply lines, power, water or internet.
It was the probably worst day in cybersecurity history. So far. Not only is there a critical flaw in PHP that due to a leak was announced a day before the fix would be available, sending most of the internet scrambling for solutions and likely dooming a lot of long tail websites permanently, there were several other unrelated incidents. The floodgates seem to have been opened. I have a market on whether there will be an even worse day before the end of the year.
Anthony Cimino offered the closest thing to an official response we have seen on the leaked Anthropic draft bill I covered on Saturday.
Nick Cammarata of Goodfire makes a bold claim: Neural Networks are Already Clean. This was his follow up after various resulting online discussions.