Boston professor says former Anthropic researcher's warning about AI needs to be taken seriously
By Amanda Callahan, WBZ-TV
A former AI researcher said he quit the industry because he believes out-of-control development of artificial intelligence could "kill us all." A researcher in Boston says people should take the warning seriously.
Jacob Coxon, a former researcher at San Francisco-based Anthropic, made the post on social media that drew a lot of attention Wednesday.
"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 said in a post on X. "They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."
Coxon went on to say, "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. No other human activity poses this level of danger."
Northeastern University assistant professor Rebecca Kleinberger studies how people experience and interact with AI.
"I think we do have to take it seriously when the researchers that build those systems are raising concerns," Kleinberger said.
Kleinberger added, "But now with a lot of AI voices, not only can they have those issues of fake identity, but they can also disrupt how our brains adapt."
She said her main concern is the rapid rate AI is growing.
"We don't have time to run enough research to better understand the consequences and to think about guardrails, think about safeguarding what really matters," Kleinberger said.
Rep. Lori Trahan is spearheading legislation, the Frontier Act, to strengthen oversight of AI.
"Show us with mandatory transparency, incident reporting, independent verification. But it's also backed by a government pause button so that if a model poses an imminent risk of a catastrophe, we have a check on that power," Trahan said.
