Jacob Coxon, the 27-year-old researcher who split his time between OpenAI and Anthropic on pre-training research, announced his resignation from Anthropic last week on X with a lethal thread. “Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote. “They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”
He said the people building this technology “earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Hundreds of thousands of likes later, Coxon’s post has shaken the world.
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Coxon’s words were like a sudden, violent Mahjong collapse; breaching the fortress walls and upending the entire AI enterprise in a single clattering moment.
First came Congress’s whiplash reaction. Senator Bernie Sanders announced he’s introducing legislation to ban superintelligence outright. Then, Senator Richard Blumenthal fired off a letter to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman demanding answers about his AI agents reportedly going rogue.
Over the weekend came another shock when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a massive 3,800-word essay on his website titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” effectively trying to pump the brakes on the entire AI arms race. Altman chimed in on Monday, admitting “we could lose control.”
On Saturday at a private fundraiser, Barack Obama threw down a gauntlet for Democrats. The 44th president told his party to stop coasting on AI safety and make it a marquee campaign issue. He was answering House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’s question about Coxon’s stark warning.
And on Sunday, President Donald Trump misread the room from a golf course in Ireland. Trump said Coxon’s comments and Amodei’s letter were “very negative forces” and that they were hyping up “things that won’t happen.” To him, avoiding a civilization-wiping disaster isn’t the priority. It’s “whoever wins AI, wins.”
The data dump
That’s a lot of attention, particularly from the political sphere, for one tech guy’s message. However, before Coxon ever hit “post,” communities across the country were already revolting against the AI industry’s physical footprint. By early September, trackers had counted “more than 300 data center moratoriums, bans, and restrictions across 32 states,” with New Jersey, Ohio, Michigan, and Georgia leading the pack, and New York becoming the first state to enact one statewide.
A recent poll found only 14 percent of Americans would welcome a data center in their own backyard. They were angry long before Coxon came forward. They’re angrier now, and one party senses this anger, while the other ridicules it.
Mashable Light Speed
On the last day of August, Trump handed Democrats an opening, warning on Truth Social that towns that say no are choosing to be “backwards and poor,” and that if they “kill the Golden Goose,” they’ll “only have yourselves to blame.” This, coupled with his comments in Ireland, is raising the pulse, not checking it, of the average American voter.
I have to imagine that families whose utility bills are spiking didn’t react well to being called backwards and poor. In Georgia, data center backlash and rising electricity rates have already flipped two Public Service Commission seats, and the fight has spilled over to the governor’s race and state legislative contests, with GOP-leaning voters reportedly telling one Democratic challenger that data centers “changed how they see every other issue,” according to the Economist.
AI goes nuclear
I’ve watched something like this play out before while working as a congressional press secretary. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, when the federal government pushed states to build regional nuclear waste dumps under the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Policy Amendments Act, Pennsylvania’s coal country became a target.
Corporate scouts assumed struggling steel towns, like those that made up our congressional district in southwestern Pennsylvania, would quietly accept radioactive waste in exchange for economic bailouts. They assumed wrong. They weren’t “backwards,” but they were poor, and no amount of radiation was going to make them want to be rich.
Grassroots groups like P.O.W.E.R. packed town halls with furious residents, and the congressman I worked for, Austin Murphy, rode that wave to reelection, even while fending off ethics troubles of his own.
What’s going on now is identical because ordinary people don’t have the bandwidth to parse high-tech language or even begin to fathom the complexities of AI. It was the same with nuclear energy.
Ordinary people glaze over when tech bros argue about autonomous codebases waging invisible proxy wars. Huh? Come again? But when the headline flips to a visceral, “the end of civilization,” everyone hits the panic button.
Prior to trying to bury people in nuclear waste was the disaster at Three Mile Island, coincidentally in Pennsylvania. That accident spoke volumes to the state’s residents. The word “nuclear” meant armageddon to anyone who was only reading the headlines.
What makes this moment different is timing. Data center fights are colliding with a live election cycle, and a viral extinction warning just expanded the potential lethality of those centers.
All of these doomsday prophecies and the data center proliferation could be a genuine bellwether, and perhaps the first stage of how fear — and use — of AI shapes the midterms and the 2028 presidential election, and how those calling for a slowdown might be on the right side of history.
This article represents the opinions of the writer.
John Casey is a columnist at Raw Story, the Advocate, Daily Beast, and Outsports. He’s also the author of Love: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality.