Anthropic whistleblower Jacob Coxon to testify at NYC AI hearing on kill switches, regulations

Jacob Coxon, the former Anthropic researcher who sparked industry chaos by warning AI could kill all humans, is set to testify at a New York City Council hearing Monday on the new tech, according to a report.He was appearing at the request of Council Speaker Julie Menin, who has been urging AI whistleblowers to testify as the city seeks to get more involved in regulation of the industry, Bloomberg reported.Ex-Google DeepMind researcher Alex Turner and Daniel Kokotajlo — a former OpenAI researcher who now runs the AI Futures Project, focused on the societal impact of the emerging tech — were also scheduled to testify, a source told Bloomberg.Reps for Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta will be in the same room as some of the companies’ most outspoken critics, the report said.The tech giants are not sending their CEOs, but rather policy leads and other executives.Last month, Coxon quit his job at Anthropic and issued a chilling warning that AI is advancing so quickly that it “could kill us all by the end of the decade,” kicking discussions about safeguards and regulations into high gear.In an unusual move, the leaders of top AI companies responded by calling for more stringent regulations on their own product releases – warning that global cooperation is needed to prevent bots from running out of control.Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a lengthy essay calling on rival companies to jointly slow their development of AI models, fearful of the risks that come with “recursive self-improvement,” or RSI – when bots grow smart enough to keep evolving independently.OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceX founder Elon Musk and Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates have also sounded the alarm over the risks of unregulated AI advancement.President Trump, however, has argued that the bigger risk is allowing China to gain a lead in the AI race by slowing development in the US. The tech giants reportedly agreed to testify at Monday’s hearing after lawmakers threatened to ...