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On September 8, Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old Anthropic employee, posted a resignation statement on X that ricocheted around the internet. He quit in protest of what he saw as the company’s suicidally reckless pursuit of artificial general intelligence. To the AI community, an Anthropic employee believing that the technology their company is developing might end the world is not exactly news. (Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI employees who believed OpenAI, if left unchecked, would do just that.) But an Anthropic employee publicly quitting in protest is. Afterward, a debate broke out: If you’re a lab employee who believes in these risks, what should you do? Is it best to leave in protest? Or is it better to agitate from the inside, close to the seat of power? And how would the choice affect your friendships and community? “For me, there’s quite a distinction between my rational beliefs and the things I feel in my gut,” says Coxon. “If you’d asked me to narrate my opinions when entering Anthropic and when leaving Anthropic, they would probably sound pretty similar. But in terms of the actual feeling between the start and the end, it just felt very, very different.” Coxon joins a small set of employees of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind who, over the years, chose to walk away. For our Cover Story, in collaboration with Asterisk Magazine, we brought together eight of them. They don’t share the same concerns or the same p(dooms) — in fact, they wouldn’t necessarily agree that p(doom) is a coherent concept. But together, they provide a candid view of the AI race and the individual calculus many employees face. Read their interviews in full: nymag.visitlink.me/HbG6LU