The Doom Dividend

Last week, a frontier-AI researcher walked away from Anthropic and detonated a familiar sentence into a very different political environment: the people building advanced AI believe it could kill us. Jacob Coxon’s resignation went viral because it arrived after years of warnings, agent incidents, increasingly autonomous systems, and a visible race toward AI that can accelerate AI research itself. Coxon had worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic. According to Axios, he left Anthropic roughly two months before his equity would have vested, telling the outlet that he did not want a financial interest in increasing the company’s valuation.