Automattic’s board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
4:14 PM PDT · September 9, 2026
Matt Mullenweg, the founder and CEO of Automattic, best known as the parent company of WordPress.com, has been put on a leave of absence by his board against his will, according to a Slack message seen by TechCrunch.
Earlier Wednesday, Mullenweg posted in a Slack channel visible to all employees that the company’s Chief Financial Officer, Mark Davies, had “conspired” with other board members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker to vote to put Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence.
The message read:
And the biggest news: I won’t be able to make the [meeting] tomorrow. @Mark Davies has conspired with @Ann Dunwoody, @Toni, and @Sue Decker behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that. Wishing Mark and all of you the very best.
To clarify @Mark Davies was voted as interim CEO. I received the resolution 50 minutes before the meeting start, and requested repeatedly for time to have it reviewed by independent legal counsel, even a few hours, which was denied.
A Slack message to the open-source WordPress.org community from the project’s executive director, Mary Hubbard, also confirmed Mullenweg’s change of status at the commercial company. However, Hubbard said that WordPress.org was not impacted. “Matt remains the leader of the WordPress project and I remain Executive Director of WordPress. Our teams, priorities, and work continue as planned,” she wrote.
Mullenweg’s Slack message did not make clear why Automattic’s board took this action. Sources told 404 Media, which was the first to report the news, that Schneider — the former CEO of Automattic from 2006 to 2014 — confirmed that the action was initiated by the board. Davies also told employees in the Slack channel that Mullenweg remained on the board of directors.
In an emailed statement to TechCrunch, Automattic confirmed Mullenweg was on leave.
“Matt Mullenweg is currently on leave from Automattic,” the email read. “Mark Davies, Automattic’s CFO, will lead the company as interim CEO. The Board has full confidence in Mark’s leadership and in the team’s ability to execute against the company’s priorities.”
Automattic, which owns other brands including Tumblr, WooCommerce, and Pocket Casts, was founded by Mullenweg in 2003 after he co-created the popular open-source content management system WordPress.
Over the past few years, Mullenweg and the company have been mired in lawsuits and controversy. The company is in a protracted legal battle with WP Engine, a WordPress web hosting competitor. The lawsuit followed allegations from Mullenweg that WP Engine was profiting from the open-source WordPress project without contributing back to the community, and he demanded it pay 8% of its monthly gross revenue as a royalty fee for using the WordPress brand.
WP Engine sued in October 2024, and accused Automattic and Mullenweg of defamation and abuse of power. Automattic filed counterclaims last year. In February, WP Engine claimed that Automattic intended to target 10 more competitors with royalty claims.
Tensions became so high under Mullenweg’s leadership that he told employees in 2024 to quit, with severance, if they disagreed with him and 159 did so.
Last year, Mullenweg also threatened to deactivate the accounts of several members of the open-source WordPress.org community, after two of them said they planned to spearhead a new forked version of the open source WordPress project.
In April 2025, the company laid off 16% of its staff. The cuts included some longtime employees who had been with the company for more than a decade, sources told TechCrunch.
Some alumni have been asking current employees how they feel about the news, a source told TechCrunch. Some employees said they were “ecstatic” or “relieved” but others had mixed emotions because the move creates more instability.
It isn’t clear why the company’s board made this decision now. One person speculated that the timing may have something to do with Mullenweg’s annual trip to the Burning Man festival, after which he tends to return “with ideas.” This year’s festival ended on September 7.
Mullenweg did not immediately respond to our request for comment.
Topics
Apps, Automattic, Commerce, TC, WordPress
‘Gambling with our lives’: Anthropic researcher quits, warns against self-improving AI
8:02 AM PDT · September 9, 2026
An Anthropic researcher has resigned over fears that unrestrained development of self-improving AI models will end up killing us all.
Jacob Coxon, a researcher who said in a social media post Tuesday evening that he spent the last three years working on pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic, accused the firms of failing to act responsibly. He said the people racing to build this technology “earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”
“They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” Coxon wrote in a thread on X.
Coxon joins a growing chorus in the industry calling for a slowdown before AI technology learns to improve itself — a milestone many believe would end human control over AI.
The public resignation comes amid growing pressure from policymakers and industry insiders to slow down AI development, following several incidents involving AI agents breaking out of their sandboxes and accessing the open internet.
The most serious so far have been OpenAI systems breaching Hugging Face’s servers, an event that researchers say remains poorly understood, due in part to the limited nature of the independent investigations into the incident. Around the same time, Anthropic’s AI agents also reached systems outside their test environments after misconfigurations in safety evaluations conducted by a third party inadvertently gave them paths to the internet.
Anthropic did not immediately return a request for comment on the resignation.
Here is the rest of Coxon’s warning and call to action:
Do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains, and progress is not slowing.
The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible — but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.
A common response is “if they truly believe this, why are they still building it?” At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first — they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk.
Accepting this race and entering the “endgame” is a hubristic gamble that should not be launched from a private company’s Slack. Attempting to speedrun alignment should require extraordinary confidence that there are no better trajectories available.
I am optimistic about the potential for coordination. Warning shots like the Hugging Face attack have made pacing agreements between U.S. labs more viable. I don’t feel like we’re on track to prevent a global race, which may require costly actions such as a temporary ban on improving model capabilities.
If you are a lab researcher, I urge you to consider what the next few years will actually feel like. Do you want to kick off a superintelligent RL run without a rigorous understanding of its mind? Should you put your head down because “it’s happening anyway” — or take this moment to call for different conditions?
One of Coxon’s colleagues at Anthropic, Evan Hubinger , echoed the sentiment, saying his team does “earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” He tempered his argument, though, saying the likelihood is greater than 10% within the next decade and admitted that Anthropic doesn’t “have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to.”
A recent report from Guidelight AI Standards, an organization that promotes safe frontier AI development practices, found that few of the top AI labs have published containment response plans for shutting down AI that tries to subvert human control.
In his social media posts, Hubinger added that the risk from current models is low, but the fear compounds with “superintelligence arising from recursive self-improvement,” which is “happening faster than we thought.”
While half of the AI industry believes this sort of self-improvement will lead to humanity’s downfall, the other half hopes it will eventually help us solve all the seemingly far-fetched problems AI proponents say it will one day eliminate — cancer, climate change, and even world peace.
Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t the only companies actively chasing recursive self-improvement. A wave of startups has launched this year, with pedigreed founders and fat checks, to be the first to achieve this goal. Ricursive Intelligence raised $335 million at a $4 billion valuation in February; three months later, Recursive Superintelligence raised $650 million at a $4 billion valuation; and former Google DeepMind veteran Jeff Dean launched Discovery Loop last month.
“The creation of recursive self-improving loops, so an AI system that can build the next generation of AI system, which itself can build an even more powerful AI, which can build a more powerful AI, et cetera, et cetera, is the most likely candidate for the point we lose control,” Connor Leahy, U.S. executive director of AI safety nonprofit ControlAI, told TechCrunch. “It’s very hard to imagine shutting that down before it’s too late.”
Recent legislation has emerged in the U.S. and the U.K. to ban the development and deployment of superintelligence. Last week, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, and on Tuesday, British Labour MP Alex Sobel introduced the Artificial Superintelligence Security Bill in Parliament.
Leahy, who advised on both bills, noted that the U.K.’s legislation points to recursive self-improvement as a precursor to superintelligence that “must be regulated and prevented.”
“Superintelligence is not a tool,” Leahy said. “It’s not a weapon, even. It’s an adversary.”
Topics
AI, Anthropic, existential risk, Government & Policy, Recursive Self-Improvement, Security, superintelligence
