The Doomers Who Shaped the AI Safety Freakout

Not content with ruining the mood at parties, the AI safety crowd has finally made the front of the Wall Street Journal, which has discovered a Berkeley co-working space called Constellation where researchers have spent more than a decade worrying about the end of the world. Ten-plus years is roughly the lifespan of a Bernese mountain dog and only marginally less cheerful. The article's central revelation is that these 'doomers' weren't lurking in a bunker — they were among the earliest employees at OpenAI and Anthropic, which is a bit like learning the fire warden helped design the furnace. The Journal's headline calls it a 'freakout,' which is the word you reach for when a decade of professional concern becomes inconvenient to call a forecast.

The event that supposedly roused a sleeping superpower is the resignation this month of one Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon. One man. One resignation. And the Journal's framing is that this 'woke up the American public' to the possibility that runaway AI development could end humanity — quite the workload for a single departure. A decade of quiet concern from a Berkeley co-working space couldn't shift the needle, but one departing employee manages it in a month, which suggests the doomers' real problem was never the message but the distribution strategy.

And do savour the résumé detail the article keeps returning to: these doomers were among the earliest employees at OpenAI and Anthropic. The people who built the things now publish the warnings about the things, presumably once the equity had vested. That is less a conspiracy than a career arc, and a rather comfortable one — capability in your twenties, concern in your thirties, and a Berkeley co-working space to host the retrospective. The American public, freshly woken, is welcome to the memo that's been sitting on that desk for a decade.