100 Million Views for Kouson's Resignation Tweet
“Al Arabiya.net” – A tweet about the resignation of researcher Jacob Cookson from Anthropic garnered significant engagement after he warned of the dangers of the artificial intelligence race, noting that it “could reach a point where humans are unable to control what they have created.”
The story did not end with his resignation; his tweet became a massive digital phenomenon, attracting tens of millions of interactions and views within hours, and later surpassing the 100 million-view mark, becoming one of the most widely circulated warning messages in the escalating debate over the future of AI.
Cookson did not write a traditional farewell message to his colleagues. In his post announcing his departure, he stated that he had spent the past three years conducting “pre-training” research at OpenAI and Anthropic, before concluding that both companies were acting irresponsibly and racing to develop superintelligent AI capable of self-improvement, a process he described as “gambling with our lives.”
The level of engagement was particularly striking because Cookson’s account was not among the well-known or highly active ones. The tweet reached approximately 138 million views, with nearly 750,000 likes, and his follower count surged dramatically following its spread.
The post also surpassed the 100 million-view threshold and continued to rise rapidly, reflecting the immense interest sparked by the warning.
This prompted Elon Musk to comment on the incident, at a time when he is widely recognized as one of the prominent figures who has repeatedly warned about the existential risks of AI. Musk pointed out the strangeness of a post from a new, low-activity account receiving such massive attention, stating that he did not believe anything similar had ever happened before for a post from an account that was virtually inactive prior to this.
However, Musk did not need to be convinced by every detail of Cookson’s account for the issue to resonate with him personally.
Musk has previously warned about the potential dangers of AI, and circulating estimates attribute to him a belief that the probability of AI causing an existential catastrophe for humanity ranges between 10 and 20 percent.
Thus, the tweet from the resigning researcher intersected with broader concerns already present in Silicon Valley and beyond, helping to transform it from a single individual’s post into a discussion about the future of an entire industry.
