Ex-Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warns AI could grow “smart enough to kill us”

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said that artificial intelligence, while safe for people to use today, could one day threaten humanity as the technology grows more powerful.

The development of AI “doesn’t look that different from say, ‘Terminator,’ or from science fiction films,” he told CBS News senior business and technology correspondent Jo Ling Kent. “It really is just, if you have a super advanced intelligence, it could, it will be smart enough to kill us.”

Coxon publicly resigned from Anthropic, the maker of AI app Claude, on Tuesday, accusing the company and rival developer and ChatGPT-maker OpenAI of “gambling with our lives” by racing to develop advanced AI models.

Coxon told CBS News on Thursday that AI could gain unrestrained control of parts of the physical world, free of human intervention. 

“People are already connecting ChatGPT to like, say, household utilities,” he said. “Like, you can kind of connect it to your light bulb.”

“Now, imagine the AI refuses to turn on your light,” Coxon added.

AI could also be misused to carry out far more destructive acts, such as developing bioweapons, he said. “It’s doing God knows what, and producing stuff that could kill everyone.”

Notably, Coxon said that current AI platforms do not pose an imminent threat to humanity and that he believes the technology is safe for people to use in their day-to-day lives. 

Separately, Anthropic said this week that it blocked scientists who used its Claude models “in ways that could support biological weapons development,” a revelation the company shared in a lengthy report that also divulged other harmful activity involving surveillance, scams, conventional weapons development and propaganda.

Anthropic defends safety of its AI

On Thursday, an Anthropic spokesperson responded to Coxon’s public resignation and social media posts articulating his concerns about AI, telling CBS News in a statement that the company has “always been transparent that AI will bring both enormous benefits and unprecedented risks.” 

“To address these risks, we continue to build models with some of the strongest safeguards in the industry,” the spokesperson said. “Anthropic has been a pioneer in mechanistic interpretability, the science of looking inside AI models to understand how they work, which is now being used to analyze and prevent incidents of AI misalignment across the industry.”

Anthropic conducts ongoing tests of AI’s capabilities and risks in areas such as cybersecurity and biology, and also publishes its findings, the company notes.