What do we know about Jacob Coxon, the Anthropic “whistleblower”? He became concerned about AGI doom in high school (in the town of Oxford btw - see my previous posts) after reading Nick Bostrom’s book Superintelligence. Attended Cambridge, during which time he went to an alignment conference at age 19. He then became a fellow at Newspeak (yes, really) House, which received EA funding and hosted Jeremy Corbyn’s Digital Democracy Manifesto launch. In 2022 he received a scholarship from a Moskovitz-funded org. Moskovitz is one of the leading EA donors, and an early Anthropic investor. The 80,000 Hours project (also funded indirectly by Moskovitz) explicitly encourages EAs to infiltrate frontier labs to influence them from the inside. None of this, in itself, proves that he is wrong about AI safety. What it does indicate is that he was already sold on the idea as a teenager, before he worked in the labs, before GPT-1 came out. I think good epistemic practice means we should therefore take him no more seriously than any other doomer. His experience in the labs didn’t convince him AI is dangerous. He already believed that even before the current AI paradigm became dominant, and probably chose his career based on this belief. If you’re convinced by Bostrom’s arguments yourself, that’s fine. But Coxon adds precisely zero additional weight to them.