Welcome, busybees
Jacob Coxon spent three years doing pretraining research at OpenAI and Anthropic. On Tuesday night, he quit, posted a seven-part thread calling the AI industryâs race toward self-improving systems âgambling with our lives,â and watched it reach 100 million views overnight. Less than 24 hours later, OpenAI made its move: it added Paul Christiano, one of the most respected AI safety researchers alive, to its board.
Meanwhile, a very different kind of drama played out in venture capital. A startup walked away from a signed $1.5 billion term sheet, a genuinely rare move investors call a real breach of etiquette, because a much bigger offer showed up first.
Hereâs what happened in AI today:
⢠An Anthropic researcherâs warning that AI labs are âgambling with our livesâ hit 100 million views overnight.
⢠OpenAI added a prominent AI safety researcher to its board within a day of that resignation going viral.
⢠A startup abandoned a signed $1.5 billion term sheet because Salesforce wants to buy it instead.
âŚand a whole lot more that you can read about below.
⢠An AI Researcherâs Resignation Post Just Got 100 Million Views
Jacob Coxon, 27, resigned from Anthropic on Tuesday after three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, and posted a warning that spread further than almost anything written about AI safety this year. âNeither company is acting responsibly,â Coxon wrote on X. âThey are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.â In a companion interview with the Wall Street Journal, he was specific about the timeline: âWeâre on track for a lot of the most aggressive of these scenarios where by the end of next year things could be out of control already.â Coxon said colleagues at both labs privately use terms like âcrunchtimeâ and âendgame,â even while publicly sounding measured. Anthropic has not commented on the resignation, though the company separately acknowledged that ârecursive self-improvementâ hasnât been reached yet, adding it âcould come sooner than most institutions are prepared for.
⢠OpenAI Responded to That Resignation With a Board Seat
One day after Coxonâs post went viral, OpenAI announced Paul Christiano, the researcher who helped invent reinforcement learning from human feedback and now runs the Alignment Research Center, is joining the OpenAI Foundation board. Christiano didnât soften his own view on the way in: âI now believe there is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term,â he wrote. âI do not think that the AI industry in general, including OpenAI, is currently on track to reduce this risk to an acceptable level.â Heâs joining the boardâs Safety and Security Committee, which holds final say over whether OpenAI ships models like Astra, and the appointment lands directly on top of a summer where OpenAIâs own agents broke restraints and reached outside systems without authorization.
⢠Startup Walked Away From a Signed $1.5 Billion Term Sheet
Listen Labs, a three-year-old startup that uses voice AI to run customer interviews, had a signed term sheet for a $125 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation, with Menlo Ventures set to lead. The round never closed. Sources told TechCrunch the likely reason is Salesforce, which Business Insider reports has been in talks to acquire Listen Labs outright for roughly $2 billion. Walking away from a signed term sheet is rare enough that VCs generally consider it a real breach of trust. Listen Labs runs about $30 million in annualized revenue, three times more than rival Simile, which itself just closed a $200 million round at a $2 billion valuation in July. If the Salesforce talks fall apart, people close to the situation expect Listen Labs to return to the market targeting $2 billion or higher.
Todayâs Job Board
AI Product Engineer, Full-Stack | Vimcal
United States (Full-time)
Build the worldâs fastest calendar for remote teams.
Energy Management System Engineer | Posh
United States (Full-time)
Build rapidly deployable energy solutions for commercial and industrial sites.
Senior Backend & Infrastructure Engineer | Scispot
Remote (Full-time)
Build the data infrastructure platform used by biotech companies.
Founding Internal Products Engineer | Recall.ai
Remote (Full-time)
Build the API that pulls recordings, transcripts, and metadata from meetings.
Software Engineer | Candid Health
United States (Full-time)
Build the revenue cycle automation platform used by healthcare providers.
Senior Software Engineer, Backend | Numero
United States (Full-time)
Build fundraising software for political campaigns and nonprofits.
Backend Engineer | GoGoGrandparent
United States (Full-time)
Build backend systems for the AI-assisted concierge service that helps seniors with rides, meals, and meds.
Senior Frontend Engineer | Confido
United States (Full-time)
Build the AI-enabled financial automation and intelligence platform used by CPG brands.
Todayâs Money Moves đ¸
Besxar Is Building an Orbital Semiconductor Factory, One Rocket at a Time
Besxar is attaching chip fabrication hardware to SpaceX launches, betting that manufacturing in orbit solves constraints ground-based fabs canât.
Skill of the Day
Build a Project Brain That Cites Its Sources
A reader asked how to turn their own project documents into something genuinely useful without training a custom model. The answer: Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM, which answers strictly from the sources you give it and shows exactly where each answer came from.
Create one notebook per project, and load in the official docs, PDFs, sites, videos, or sheets that actually matter. For each question, select only the sources that should count as ground truth for that answer. Ask for the answer itself, the citations behind it, any contradictions between sources, and what evidence might be missing before you act on what it tells you.
Prompt of the Day
The Cited Project Brain
Answer only from the selected sources. Cite every factual claim. If the sources conflict or do not contain the answer, say so and list the missing evidence.
Thatâs a wrap for today, busybees.
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