Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher who left Anthropic after previously working at OpenAI, told the BBC that people building advanced AI are "genuinely frightened" and warned that if progress does not slow "there is a strong chance that we could all die in the immediate future." Coxon backed Anthropic chief Dario Amodei's public call to slow development and said any slowdown would need to be coordinated with China to avoid an international race. Amodei has argued the risks of frontier models are "serious" and proposed industry-wide deceleration, independent monitoring, and time for governments to respond. Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of xAI have publicly agreed with Amodei's call for slowing development and oversight. Coxon highlighted a scenario Amodei raised in which a swarm of bots acts like a supercomputer taking over the internet, saying it could be realistic within six months to a year. Anthropic told BBC News it builds models with strong safeguards, published mitigation frameworks, and favors a lawful, verifiable way to pace releases; critics counter that warnings may aim to generate hype or shape regulation ahead of Anthropic's reported IPO plans. The episode increases pressure on regulators and industry leaders to negotiate coordinated pauses, monitoring regimes, and transparency as companies prepare major financing events.
![Something clearly happened with a frontier AI model that hasn't been made public and it spooked them so much that it made Elon Musk, Dario Amodei, and Sam Altman all simultaneously agree to slow down.
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
Dario is right
Dario Amodei @DarioAmodei · 6h
We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.
Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our [text cuts off]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:i4uqcqeictd4irpzpdfnvj33/bafkreiczv5vvu6rclbpeed2znzd2voinvrhnbofbt446l2cxxtxwms6jme)
