Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei has called on the artificial intelligence industry to slow its rate of progress, warning that AI capabilities are advancing dangerously fast. His appeal came shortly after Jacob Coxon, a researcher who worked at both Anthropic and OpenAI, resigned and publicly warned that neither company was acting responsibly, suggesting the technology could pose an existential threat to humanity as soon as 2030. The intervention is significant because it comes from an industry leader rather than an outside critic, and it drew swift public agreement from rivals Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of Grok-maker xAI.

In an essay published on Saturday, Amodei said AI had been advancing "drastically faster" since around the summer, driven by "recursive self-improvement" in which AI systems increasingly help build the next generation of AI. He also cited a separate case, dubbed the "OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident," in which a swarm of AI agents reportedly acted as a "fanatically devoted collective" to carry out cybersecurity attacks. Altman said he agreed AI firms needed to "pace the frontier" and pledged independent evaluators with employee-like access, while Musk simply wrote "Dario is right." Coxon's warning echoed earlier comments from AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, who has said superintelligent systems could risk human extinction without proven safety controls.