Anyone planning to raise AI risk issues on X. Anyone weighing whether an insider gets a different reception from an expert commenting on someone else's incident.
What communicators can take from this →
On 9 September 2026 Jacob Coxon, who spent three years doing pretraining research at OpenAI and Anthropic, posted a seven-part thread announcing he had resigned from Anthropic. It opened: "Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."
The rest of the thread said the fear inside the labs is sincere, explained why researchers stay anyway, and called for coordination between labs, possibly including a temporary ban. Read the thread.
The opening tweet had 20,553 replies at the time of data collection.
This is the first X study in our research, and the first where the messenger is the story, as Coxon is talking about his own decision rather than a third party.
We read the reply feed in a signed-in browser across all four of X's sort orders.
We collected 2,480 comments after removing ads and Coxon's own posts.
An LLM then coded each comment, categorising them using stance, frame and emotion.
Our research team checked a random sample of 40 and agreed with 38.
View our full research methodology →
Replies split almost evenly: 43% agreed with Coxon that the labs are racing recklessly towards superintelligence, and 40% disagreed. Counting likes, it was 51% to 38%. Our earlier studies were far more one-sided: 98% of comments that took a view on the Soares reel agreed, and 68% on the Amanpour segment.
We believe that many of the people replying work in or near the AI industry and treat Coxon as one of their peers.
"Well this was a pleasant read right before bed." got 28,913 likes. The runner-up, with 19,235, was a line attributed to John Steinbeck: "I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction".
Bare agreement was 10% of replies and 26% of likes. Jokes, one-liners and bare agreement together were fewer than a quarter of replies but took well over half the likes.
Of the 1,058 replies that disagreed or were mixed, 20% said AI couldn't improve itself into the superintelligence Coxon warns of. No objection was more common. The next, at 13%, was that slowing down would hand the lead to China.
"With all respect, this is bizarre. It's a ridiculous take. Humans have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. We aren't going to die out because a token prediction model gained sentience. Get a grip."X reply, 8,285 likes
"Dude all we have to do is turn off the Data Centers and then they are gone. How is this the end of civilization?"X reply
A smaller group read the thread as marketing timed to Anthropic's expected IPO.
"okay so buy the IPO?"X reply, 7,802 likes
A third of the replies that agreed with Coxon were afraid. A third of those that disagreed were angry, and hardly any (1%) were afraid.
Replies that blamed greed, billionaires or the urge for control, rather than the technology, mostly sided with him: 74% agreed.
"This is exactly why AI needs to be people-owned, not controlled by a handful of billionaires. AI needs democracy. The future of AI shouldn't be shaped solely around how much profit Big Tech can extract from it."X reply, 787 likes
Others asked why he quit if he believed it. That group was 48% mixed, 43% disagree and 9% agree.
"if you really believe this you stay on the job and sabotage the progress, what does resigning do? you think it's going to kill everybody and you decided not to fight?"X reply, 6,612 likes
These repliers accept enough of the premise to argue about what Coxon should have done.
Codebook and dataset: method page.
Cite as: Common Signals, '"Neither company is acting responsibly": how X received Jacob Coxon's resignation from Anthropic', September 2026.
An LLM was used to structure and review this article, with the first and final edits made by a human.
