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The Two Forces Most Likely to Disrupt the AI Revolution
The factors that put the brakes on AI have little to do with algorithms — but everything to do with who benefits and what humans value
The progress of artificial intelligence is currently being discussed as though it were inevitable. Better models will be built, the power of computing will increase, automation will expand, and AI will gradually move into more areas of economic and social life. But thankfully technological progress never exists just within a technological space. It also depends on what societies are willing to fund, adopt, regulate — and ultimately value.
This isn’t to say, however, that there wasn’t something very unsettling about hearing someone working at the frontier of artificial intelligence say that the technology has become frightening enough for him to walk away. Last week, AI researcher Jacob Coxon publicly resigned from Anthropic amid concerns about the direction of AI development. Coxon said that researchers developing these systems genuinely believe AI could pose an existential threat within the decade, and argued that companies were moving too quickly towards self-improving systems without having solved the underlying alignment problem (Maxwell, 2026).
