Elon Musk Says the Anthropic Researcher Warning AI Could “Kill Us All” Is Faking It as a “Psy Op.”

11 Sep 2026, 00:30 by Jerome London · Thought Catalog

Updated 2 hours ago, September 10, 2026

Elon Musk pointed to Jacob Coxon’s new X account and the more than 120 million combined views on his posts, writing, “Seems like a setup.” Coxon replied, “I’m real and these are my real beliefs. You could ask your xAI researchers about me if you hadn’t fired them.”

Coxon left Anthropic after 4 months, 2 months before his stock options vested. He previously worked as a pre-training researcher at OpenAI and still holds equity in that company.

In posts published Tuesday, Coxon accused both companies of racing toward self-improving superintelligence while gambling with human lives. He said OpenAI employees hadn’t “deeply internalized the civilizational stakes,” while Anthropic understood the danger but remained “locked in a race to get there first.”

Elon Musk gestures on stage in front of a Tesla Powerpack unit during the company’s battery unveiling event at Tesla Design Studio in Hawthorne, California, on April 30, 2015. Photo by Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images.

Anthropic alignment science lead Evan Hubinger backed Coxon and said he believes there’s a greater than 10% chance AI kills all humans within the next decade. “I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to,” Hubinger wrote.

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