Since mid-July, I’ve posted several short pieces on the question of how to harness – how to lead and manage – Artificial Intelligence.* In the last 48 hours this question has received exponentially more attention than it ever did before.
Which raises the question of why. The obvious answer is that a soft-spoken Brit by the name of Jacob Coxon who had worked at Anthropic for just four months announced on X that he had quit the company because he feared it and others like it were building AI systems that before long would be out of their control. As another Anthropic researcher put it, it was plausible that by 2030 “AI could kill all humans.”
Forty-eight hours after Coxon’s resignation thread was posted it had some 150 million views. Which again raises the question of why. Why did Coxon’s warning meet the moment in a way that previous warnings did not? For more than ten years other such cautions fell on deaf ears – despite having been given by the likes of the “godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton; by Mega-Man Elon Musk; by pathbreaking tech elder Bill Gates; and by current tech luminaries such as Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman.
To the questions that I raised – why Coxon? why now? – there is an answer. The answer is the leadership system. Recall that the leadership system consists of three parts: 1) the leader; 2) the followers; and 3) the context.
- The leader. Coxon. No question that he was a leader. Though previously unknown, in short order he had tens of millions, maybe even hundreds of millions of followers. Millions of people were virtually immediately persuaded that Coxon’s warning should be taken very, very seriously, and very, very soon.
- The followers. No question that legions were convinced or at least shaken by what Coxon had to say. Many moreover did something or at least they said something. Among the prominent examples was Illinois Governor JB Pritzker who responded to Coxon by writing on X, “It’s becoming more clear the threat AI poses to humanity, so I’m calling for immediate action from the industry and Washington.” Paul Tudor Jones, a legendary, serious-minded hedge fund manager, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Even for someone like me, who has followed tech closely for decades, what’s happening is shocking…. The threat is real and demands coordinated action by the U.S. and China.” Be clear here. In this instance Pritzker and Jones were followers. They were following Coxon’s lead, building on what he had posted.
- The context. No question that America was primed for Coxon’s alarm. Already America was threaded with anxiety about what AI is and what it is doing. What AI is doing to education. What AI is doing to work. What AI is doing to relationships. What AI is doing to our families and to our communities. The widespread objections to data centers are mere manifestations of our frustrations.
What happens in consequence of Coxon’s caution remains to be seen. But no question it was heard. It was heard not because he was an extraordinary leader. He was not. Day before yesterday he was an ordinary twenty-something. But this was a case of the man meeting the moment.
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