What Are We Racing Toward? AI increasingly feels like an arms race.

What Are We Racing Toward?

AI increasingly feels like an arms race. Every few weeks, another company announces a more powerful model. More reasoning. More autonomy. More agents. More capability. We measure progress by what AI can do next. But we need to spend more time asking a different question: What are we racing toward?

Concerns from Leaders in the Field

Today I read about Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who previously worked at OpenAI and Anthropic and recently resigned from Anthropic while raising concerns about the race toward increasingly powerful AI systems. You don’t have to agree with his predictions about where this ends to take the warning seriously.

Governance and Accountability

If companies are competing to build increasingly autonomous and powerful systems, governance cannot be something we add after the technology is built.

We need people asking: What should this system be allowed to do? Where must humans remain accountable? What happens when it behaves in ways we did not anticipate? Who has the authority to stop it? These are no longer questions only for AI researchers. They are questions for executives, policymakers, technologists, project managers, educators, parents, and the generation growing up alongside this technology.

A Principle for Project Managers and the Next Generation

For project managers in particular, there is a principle worth remembering: Speed is not success if we lose control of what we’re delivering. And for the young people who will inherit what we are building: Your generation won’t just use AI. Some of you will decide what gets built, what the rules are, and where the line should be.

The race is underway. We should make sure humanity is deciding where the finish line is.