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Ex-Anthropic Jacob Coxon Interview: PBD Podcast (Transcript)

Former OpenAI and Anthropic pre-training researcher Jacob Coxon sits down with Patrick Bet-David to explain the viral resignation tweet that put AI safety on the White House agenda. He breaks down why 2027 could be a chaotic year for AI, the risk of Chinese spies inside top AI labs, the rivalry between Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, and what everyday families should do to prepare for recursive self-improving AI. This interview was premiered on October 6, 2026. Read the full transcript of this interview below:  

The Resignation Tweet Heard Around the World

PATRICK BET-DAVID: (00:01:16 – 00:02:03) So on September 8th, a Jacob Coxon who’s here with us— good to have you on the podcast.

JACOB COXON: (00:02:03 – 00:02:04) Nice to be here.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: (00:02:04 – 00:03:08) You decide to put on a tweet. Okay. You had started your account January of 2026. You hadn’t put nothing up at all. Your first tweet says, “I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last 3 years doing pre-training research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.”

We’ll get into that later on. And this tweet gets 803,000 likes, 175 million views. There was a meeting yesterday at the White House prompted by you indirectly. You got politicians that got involved, world leaders that got involved, a meeting that happened with Xi that was here last week. One of the topics of discussion was how powerful AI is going to be.

And the funny part that I think it’s important for the audience to realize this, and you can fact-check me on this, that you let all your stocks go, that you weren’t even able to vest your stocks because of the timing that you had, which means any money on the stocks that you also had was left behind for you, if that’s correct, right? There was no— the options didn’t move on with you.

JACOB COXON: (00:03:08 – 00:03:09) Not at Anthropic.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: (00:03:09 – 00:03:11) Not at Anthropic. At OpenAI, you were there.

JACOB COXON: (00:03:11 – 00:03:12) I have OpenAI.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: (00:03:12 – 00:03:12) Okay.

JACOB COXON: (00:03:12 – 00:03:12) Yeah.

Why 2027 Will Be a Chaotic Year for AI

PATRICK BET-DAVID: (00:03:13 – 00:03:23) So you did all of that and the world kind of stopped for a few days. Till today, they’re still talking about it. What did you see that got you to say, “I have to do this”?

JACOB COXON: (00:03:24 – 00:04:27) Yeah, it really was just thinking about next year and the year after. I think 2027 is going to be a crazy year. And I think about the news headlines. So last year, AI a bit in the news. 3 years ago, it was very rarely in the news, maybe for ChatGPT, but otherwise no.

This year it’s bam, bam, bam, AI. Every month there’s a big AI story. Next year, it’s going to be like every day there’s going to be a big AI story. In particular, just imagine, I don’t know, I wasn’t alive during World War II, but during World War II, I imagined that just the concept of war was coloring everything.

It was in the background for every day-to-day thing. Like every news story, war would be in the background. I think it will be like that for AI next year. In terms of what I specifically saw, it is the models, the AI models next year are going to be very capable in a way where they’re going to be able to automate a lot of work, a lot of everyone’s jobs, but kind of most importantly, a lot of the AI researchers’ jobs.

So things are just going to speed up so much that it’s going to become a very, very serious thing next year, probably.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: (00:04:27 – 00:04:33) So 2027 for you is what’s going to be— is a word to use chaotic?

JACOB COXON: (00:04:34 – 00:04:35) Chaotic? Definitely, yes.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: (00:04:35 – 00:04:39) So unpack it for me. Yeah, the average person listening to this, what does that look like?

JACOB COXON: (00:04:39 – 00:05:20) Yeah. So there’s many different things that could happen. Things that kind of the most important thing is right now labs are treating this like the companies are treating this like it’s a normal technology. This is business. They have, maybe you saw OpenAI kind of, they have these dev days. They share their products with users.

They’re still tweeting like, “Oh, excited to release this new product.” Thing is, this is a super weapon. So soon people are going to have to realize that this is not like a casual business thing. This is like a superweapon technology that really should be nationalized. And I think next year is kind of probably when that realization really sets in that, that this is like very, very serious stuff.

Should AI Be Nationalized Like Nukes?

PATRICK BET-DAVID: (00:05:20 – 00:05:31) You’re saying it should be nationalized. So if it’s seriously that concerning— yeah, when you say nationalize, you trust the government getting involved to control this than free market?

JACOB COXON: (00:05:31 – 00:06:00) Yeah, I’m not saying I need nationalization. I’m saying that it is so serious that I’m surprised the government isn’t nationalizing. The government is looking at these companies, they’re going to have power. This tech is, is powerful tech. And I’m just very surprised that Trump can sit there and say, “I’m going to let Dario Amodei, I’m going to let Sam Altman have the keys to this powerful tech.”

Because normally it’s the government that has the keys to this stuff. You wouldn’t let Mark Zuckerberg have nukes. That’s just not a thing that normally happens.

PATRICK BET-DAVID: (00:06:00 – 00:06:02) Make the comparable of the two. Yeah.

JACOB COXON: (00:06:02 – 00:06:49) So nukes cause world chaos, obviously, like plausibly.