In a recent interview, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon — who quit Anthropic over AI safety concerns — said he is 90% certain China has placed spies inside OpenAI and Anthropic. He also revealed that Anthropic employees call themselves "ants" in their pursuit of superintelligence.

Coxon called OpenAI "distracted and messy," arguing that projects like Sora lie off the core path to artificial superintelligence. OpenAI's defenders pointed back to recent output, including hundreds of AI-generated math proofs and looped-transformer efficiency gains on GPT-6 Astra.

The espionage claim is uncorroborated — no evidence has been made public — and should be read as one researcher's warning rather than an established fact.