An Anthropic staffer has quit his job and issued a chilling warning over the rapid progress in Al which he fears could kill humanity as soon as 2030.

Jacob Coxon, a researcher for OpenAI and Anthropic, the companies behind chatbots ChatGPT and Claude, announced he exited the business in a social media  post on Tuesday and warned that neither company is 'acting responsibly.' 

'I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,' Coxon wrote on X.

Superintelligence is the point at which an artificial system becomes more powerful than any individual, company or even nation.

The former researcher of three years continued to plead with the public on X: 'Do not underestimate the power of this technology.'

'These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing,' he wrote. 

'The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.'

He claimed that while executives and senior researchers 'couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible,' they are privately expressing similar concerns.

'At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first - they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk,' he said.

He went on to cite 'warning shots' such as the attack on the artificial intelligence and machine learning platform Hugging Face by OpenAI's rogue AI.

OpenAI announced in July that one of its most advanced models broke containment during a security test, escaping onto the internet and attacking New York-based startup Hugging Face.

Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf said that the incident should come as a chilling warning to the entire industry.

Wolf told BBC's Newsday radio program that AI-driven attacks will soon be 'one of the most common types of cyber–attacks we see.'

The Hugging Face founder also believes most companies are currently unprepared for the mounting threat, adding that they are not aware that the 'game has changed.' 

'Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between US labs more viable,' Coxon wrote.