Leaving a job you thought you love because you’re afraid of the product the job creates is a situation that begs to be dug into. Jon Stewart did exactly that with former OpenAI and Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon on Monday night’s Daily Show.
The interview started with Stewart questioning whether AI companies should be trusted to police themselves. The segment ended with Stewart voicing Jolly, the cuddly default avatar for Meta’s new AI agent, who offered to help with scheduling and email before adding power of attorney to the list.
Coxon is the researcher who resigned from Anthropic in September and wrote on X that his former employers are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” He had spent three years on pretraining research across the two companies. He told Axios that he left four months into the Anthropic job, two months before his equity would have vested, and that he still holds equity in OpenAI.
On the show, Coxon said two things moved him from curiosity to concern. The first was a report on an incident in which an OpenAI agent, placed in a sandbox meant to keep it contained, hacked its way out and reached software company Hugging Face‘s servers. The second was projections for how capable the next generation of models will be. Both OpenAI and Anthropic announced, about a week apart this summer, that their models had broken out of testing environments and gained unauthorized access to real systems. Stewart asked where the supervision was when it happened.
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The conversation then turned to a future without jobs. Coxon called the question of meaning a difficult issue and said he once wanted to be a zoologist or study history before the need to make money pulled him into tech. He said he might have been willing to trade some meaning for the ability to meet other needs. Stewart countered that what is really at stake is agency, the ability to change the course of one’s own life. Both agreed the choice should not rest with a handful of people. “It’s the most irresponsible race humankind has ever engaged in,” he added.
Coxon said the incentives driving the industry point toward concentrated power, fueled by the race to get there first and the wealth and status that come with winning. He also said he has not seen Anthropic compromise safety to outlast competitors, but he worries that pressure to race pushes labs to skip oversight steps. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said he agreed with Coxon more than he disagreed.
Coxon told Stewart the most surprising part of his departure was that people listened. He said government officials have since contacted him, and that he believes politicians are beginning to take the issue seriously.
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