The viral Anthropic resignation and the meter conspiracy theory
- YT :: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8IVKMGbUZE
- Original title :: I can’t believe this happening
Prime walks through the most viral AI-safety moment tech Twitter has ever seen - a researcher's resignation tweet from Anthropic that drew ~170M views - then maps out the effective-altruism funding web behind METR and asks, half seriously, whether Dario Amodei's "pace the frontier" proposal is a bid to control who gets to build superintelligence.
What happened
Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who had worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, tweeted that he resigned because neither company is acting responsibly and both are racing to self-improving superintelligence. The tweet hit roughly 170 million views, 800k likes and 200k reposts - by Prime's reckoning the largest tech-Twitter event of all time. Bernie Sanders, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Dario Amodei all weighed in; Trump brought Jensen Huang on stage to argue for acceleration instead.
Anthropic insiders backed him publicly. An alignment lead said he personally puts >10% odds on AI killing everyone within a decade and that Anthropic has no plan for superintelligence alignment. Prime's deadpan: Dario said 25% a year ago, so things are looking up.
The timing that feeds the theory
Several coincidences stack up. The Wall Street Journal published an article referencing Coxon eighteen minutes before the tweet - he had given journalists exclusive access before resigning. The account itself was created this year, renamed twice, and had exactly two tweets. A Netflix documentary on AI danger, three years in the making, landed the same week, as did a Time cover on pausing AI. Four days before the tweet, Anthropic's CEO warned that within 6-12 months an agent swarm could take over the internet.
The METR web
Dario's "We must pace the frontier" post proposes embedded third-party evaluators with employee-like access to frontier labs, and names exactly one: METR. Prime draws the graph. METR was spun out of ARC (Paul Christiano), and has taken money from Open Philanthropy, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and FTX. Christiano is the trustee of Anthropic's Long-Term Benefit Trust and used to live with Dario; his wife Ajeya works at METR and previously did AI safety at Open Philanthropy. Holden Karnofsky co-founded Open Philanthropy, married Dario's sister Daniela, and is an early Anthropic investor - the three of them once shared a house. Dustin Moskovitz, Jaan Tallinn and Sam Bankman-Fried are all early Anthropic investors and EA funders. Coxon himself reportedly took ~$20k from Good Ventures and was a fellow at Newspeak House.
This is essentially David Sacks' argument: stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic's investors and staff, and stop pretending you need antitrust relief to form a cartel.
Prime's actual read
He thinks the boring parts are true and the grand-cabal part is unknowable. Dario genuinely believes he should be the one to shepherd superintelligence, genuinely wants regulation, and genuinely has deep ties to METR - none of which requires a conspiracy.
His own theory is funnier: Sam Altman and Elon Musk are gassing Dario up. They agree loudly that we must pace the frontier, privately delighted that he might police himself, while they go straight to the moon.
A bonus ending: Coxon claimed live on TV that he worked with no third parties to set up his resignation, but the WSJ piece shows he coordinated with anti-AI policy heads beforehand.