Sitharaman Questions AI Safety Pace After Researcher's Exit
Speaking at the Global Fintech Fest 2026, Nirmala Sitharaman cited Jacob Coxon's resignation from Anthropic to press the AI industry on safety safeguards.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Thursday raised doubts over whether safety measures being built by frontier artificial intelligence companies are advancing as quickly as the technology itself, pointing to the recent resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon.
Addressing the Global Fintech Fest 2026, Sitharaman said the departure had attracted global attention because Coxon's warnings about AI safety were acknowledged by senior figures within the frontier AI ecosystem.
Coxon, who worked on AI pretraining research at OpenAI and Anthropic, announced his resignation this week. He said leading AI companies were not acting responsibly and were racing towards self-improving superintelligence, warning that the technology could pose an existential threat without adequate safeguards.
In his resignation statement, Coxon said commercial frontier labs were "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives" — a line Sitharaman quoted in her address.
His exit comes amid wider concern within the industry over the pace of development and whether companies can keep increasingly capable systems aligned with human interests. Coxon has said he was particularly worried about competitive pressure among AI labs to build more powerful systems quickly.
Sitharaman said the weight of the resignation lay not in the social media post itself but in the fact that senior figures in the frontier ecosystem had acknowledged the substance of his warning.
"Who from the global AI industry will stand up and reassure the public? Who will demonstrate that safeguards are actually keeping pace with the speed?" she asked.
The Finance Minister said technology could also be used to address vulnerabilities created by technology, but cautioned that safeguards must be updated continuously.
"Unless those safeguards arrive quickly and update continuously, the question of AI going rogue is left for the society at large to answer," she said.
She argued that managing AI risks cannot be left solely to technology teams, and that regulators, boards and senior management must understand where AI is deployed and what risks may follow.
Sitharaman described the policy challenge as building systems that are "fast yet accountable" and "autonomous yet reversible", while preserving consumer trust.