by Mark E. Jeftovic
September 28, 2026 - They want you scared, stupid and subservient. Just heading into mid-September, a purported moral panic broke out amongst the frontier AI leaders that their own products were "too dangerous" and so the only remedy would be for the government to regulate all AI models.
Weeks earlier, Senator Bernie Sanders (Ver.) had introduced The Ban AI-Superintelligence Act, which would make it illegal to create an AI model that was more intelligent than humans, going so far as to prescribe a 20-year prison term for any person who did and the "corporate death penalty" for companies.
Sanders' Bill is truly the domain of dystopian science-fiction. It reminded me of an episode from the ill-fated Twilight Zone reboot (Examination Day) which culminated in a distraught couple mourning their child, who had just been exterminated by the state for testing too high on his pre-adolescent IQ test.
It all started with a “resignation in public” tweet from Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon, posted on September 8, sharing his parting thoughts on X, stating that AI could exterminate humanity within 10 years.
That original resignation tweet, now closing in on 200 million views, which emanated from a heretofore unknown X account, less than a year old, with no followers, and two name changes in the last six months went absolutely viral - with some well-timed, fortuitous boosting from some of the biggest "AI Alignment" personalities on the Internet, and then the Wall Street Journal came out with an "exclusive" on the story, which actually went live on the WSJ site 18 minutes before Coxon's tweet.
Before long, Sam Altman said we "definitely" need more government regulation on AI and even Elon Musk chimed in and agreed that the frontier labs should be reviewing each other's models for safety.
Within days a full-blown hysteria was underway - for me it bore all the hallmarks of mass formation psychosis or at least a well-organized attempt to manufacture one. Within a week, King Charles was speaking at an AI Safety summit at Buckingham Palace, urging government oversight and increased regulation of AI.
The "AI Safety Summit" itself was announced on September 7, the day before the Coxon tweet that ignited what has become at this point, a global(ist?) furor. Even the Pope weighed in on AI safety, and not to be left behind, Bill Gates hit the Sunday talk circuit this past weekend with another doozy of a soundbite suggesting that billions of people are going to die.
Several things about this relatively sudden AI panic did not pass the smell test; among them, the facts emerging around Coxon himself, who had "barely been at the company long enough to find the bathroom", turned out to be neck-deep in the "Effective Altruism" movement, a well-connected
network of young Marxist WEF types, which espoused global governance over potentially harmful technologies like AI.
He had received scholarships and grants from the EA Infrastructure Fund, the Long-Term Future Fund, and was a fellow at the Newspeak House in London. Effective Altruism (EA) is a movement that purports to "use evidence and quantitative reasoning to identify the most consequential problems and direct resources toward reducing them".
One of their earlier recruits was Sam Bankman-Fried, whose FTX empire was run by a cadre of EAs at the top and who seed-funded Anthropic as the lead investor with $500M of a $580M Series B round in 2021.
A recurring EA strand is its fixation on existential risk from advanced AI, advocating stronger safety research, governance and oversight to reduce the chance of catastrophic or irreversible outcomes. We have all seen this movie before, with global warming, then with Bitcoin mining (causing more global warming) and now, AI exterminating humanity.
The common through-line is that the "problem" is some unfalsifiable calamity that could happen someday and for which the only logical response is to put a bunch of globalist technocrats in charge of... well, everything.
Global warming meant personal carbon quotas, limits on travel, even living space, and according to some "degrowth" advocates, how many new outfits you could buy.
The panic around Bitcoin mining wasn't about that, it was about energy - and who gets to decide how much you are allowed to consume and for what you can use it. Bitcoin mining today, Netflix tomorrow. Why not? Once you concede oversight to some external authority for one form of energy use, you have tacitly done so for all of them.
The problem that politicians and aspiring technocrats see with AI is that it grants the rabble cognitive superpowers. More specifically, open-source AI does.
Frontier models are proprietary. They have guardrails, training biases, and actively scan and filter your conversations for potential safety issues. It is arguably their purview to do so. But it is the open-source software movement that is the unfiltered Promethean agent here and just you wait - we will soon see what the ultimate target of this AI Doom cult really is: open-source LLMs
(large language models).
That is why the frontier labs are gleefully courting government oversight - not because their own products are "too dangerous" (if so, then why are you going public?) but because oversight instantly creates an AI oligopoly - a cartel, namely Anthropic, OpenAI and xAI, on the inside - and everything else, effectively outlawed - at least that would be the preferred outcome.
The next best thing they can do, since they can't put the genie back in the bottle, is to convince the masses that AI is bad, and rogue AIs are going to literally exterminate humanity.
Hence the AI doom psyop and, of course, this has become a political issue. Now, the same people who were wearing N95 masks in 2025, adding improper pronouns to their names, putting the Ukrainian flag in their bio, and keying Teslas and stomping around in "No Kings" parades, are now protesting data centers.
They want you scared, stupid and subservient, instead of spending your time creating software, building out your personal business empires, not to mention analyzing public data and proofreading all these hypothetical models they use as a justification for incessantly changing the rules.
What they really need are legions of frightened and stupid voters, not cognitively supercharged and wildly entrepreneurial or creative cyberpunks. AI Doom vs AI Boom is a choice, and the choice is yours.
