In the same week Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published his call to "pace the frontier" and OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk voiced rare agreement, a different voice emerged inside Silicon Valley: a group of executives and investors openly questioned whether the warnings about AI destroying humanity might simply be a tactic to boost company valuations ahead of potential IPOs.
According to The New York Times, the trigger for the debate was the resignation of Anthropic pretraining researcher Jacob Coxon. The 27-year-old, who spent three years at OpenAI and then Anthropic, announced his departure on X, saying both companies "have not acted responsibly" and are racing toward self-improving superintelligence without adequate safeguards. "The people developing AI genuinely believe it might kill us all before the end of this decade," he said. His words ignited a broad Silicon Valley discussion over AI existential risk.
But the warnings did not win unanimous acceptance. Grindr CEO George Arison publicly called them "dangerous"; Altimeter Capital founder Brad Gerstner questioned the authenticity of the "doomer" narrative; Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue voiced skepticism as well. In their view, depicting AI as a monster about to run wild serves the safety camp's narrative needs while also generating buzz ahead of record-breaking IPOs — both Anthropic and OpenAI have reportedly been preparing landmark listings. Interestingly, some initially skeptical voices softened after Amodei's essay was published.
The split extends into policy. President Trump publicly dismissed the slowdown calls as a "SICK conspiracy," while Barack Obama urged Congress to establish a clear AI regulatory framework, and House Speaker Mike Johnson sided with Trump against "deceleration." The division inside Silicon Valley mirrors Washington's political fractures in uncanny parallel.
Observers note that at its core, this is a collision between the "safety narrative" and the "capital narrative": AI companies need a safety story to win regulatory trust and public support, but they equally need a capital story to fund astronomical research and development. When industry leaders, investors, and politicians each insist on their own version, the one thing certain is that the right to define AI's future has become a battleground worth more than the models themselves. As Coxon put it, "This debate won't be settled by whoever has more money — it will be tested by facts and time."