Should we slow AI?

"Gen Z quits job!" is not ordinarily worth a headline, unless they’re leaving millions of unvested equity on the table to warn that we’re all going to die.

So cue the classic domino meme, because this story escalates fast, starting with…

That first domino

Back last Tuesday, Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old AI researcher at Anthropic and previously OpenAI, announced he was out. And this was a shock because of...

• a) what he was losing (life-changing amounts of unvested, pre-IPO equity)

• b) what he said (the world's top AI labs are "gambling with our lives"), and

• c) the splash this all made (100 million views plus a global debate).

Then just when we were busy yelling about that first domino, we got...

The second domino

Several of Jacob's colleagues actually agreed, whether fellow researcher Evan Hubinger ("we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!") or Friday's shock risk report on, say, the Houthis using Claude to build missiles, Mali's spooks using it to spook, oh and is China's Kimi AI actually just Claude in a hat?!

Then just as we're busy yelling about that, we get...

The third domino

The Anthropic CEO himself, Dario Amodei, dropped his latest manifesto over the weekend, titled 'We Must Pace the Frontier'. It's worth a read but basically argues the AI risks are now so high, labs should start...

• a) voluntarily slowing their own advancements

• b) embedding independent inspectors to vet models, and

• c) coordinating AI safety across the free world to avoid trading safety for speed.

Why now? Amodei cites the summer’s developments in...
i) control, like autonomous swarms causing unintended harm (per the OpenAI rogue that hacked Hugging Face), and
ii) speed: recursive self-improvement means AI is now accelerating itself.

And sure enough, other AI luminaries then quickly chimed in with an amen, including Musk (Grok), Altman (OpenAI), and Hassabis (Google / DeepMind). Four egos of that magnitude all agreeing feels a bit like the planets all aligning and nudging the ancients to reach for a new calendar.

But you know what? There might be an ego that eclipses them all, in the form of...

The fourth domino

On a weekend visit to Ireland, President Trump dismissed them all as "negative forces" warning of "things that won't happen." And he went a step further, tugging on Amodei's free world thread above: "we're leading China on AI... and, frankly, I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins."

So to round out the domino meme, that’s how you get a zillennial loud-quitting on a Tuesday, and the president of the United States himself — on an Irish fairway — somehow weighing in by Sunday.