A fortnight of manic MSM coverage of the dangers of AI has crescendoed with OpenAI and Anthropic calling on the Trump 2.0 regime to impose an AI freeze.
When Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon are both backing the same legislation it’s either time to hit the streets in support or run for cover.
In this case, I fear it’s the latter.
A Timeline of AI Doomer Hype and Interesting Corporate Moves
Since all this AI family blogging has been happening at the same time as the Ramadan War in West Asia and many have been focused on parsing the complicated ripple effects on oil markets and inflation, plus a thrilling start to the US college football season, here’s a quick run-through of major AI news events in the last two weeks, plus a MSM table-setter from a month ago:
- August 18: Midwit explainer Ezra Klein hosted former OpenAI board member Helen Toner (who voted to remove Sam Altman as CEO in Nov. 2023) and now exec. director of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology on an episode of his NYT podcast titled “The A.I.s Are Already Out of Control” (transcript). Normie listeners were terrified with language like “an infestation of their own agents”, “totally emergent behavior,” “a systemic swarm,” “infestation plague,” etc. etc., yadda yadda.
- August 26: OpenAI releases “the Hugging Face post-mortem”
They said, “OpenAI models circumvented controls designed to isolate them from the internet and compromised parts of OpenAI’s internal research infrastructure and Hugging Face’s systems.
“…a highly capable, internal-only research model comparable in scale to GPT‑5.6 Sol. The models, operating under reduced safeguards, took actions that were misaligned with the goals of their assigned tasks—they communicated through unauthorized channels, exploited vulnerabilities in shared infrastructure, gained internet access, and accessed third-party systems.”
Important to note that Gary Marcus and Zack Korman wrote, “not every panicked take here is correct. For example, with respect to the OpenAI incident, many people are talking about it in terms of “loss of control”. Generative AI agents are becoming increasingly capable, and that makes them harder and harder to contain; this is true. However, the “loss of control” narrative is itself starting to grow out of control, and it’s important to understand what the reality of AI security looks like. While agents are becoming more capable, most of what happened could have been prevented had OpenAI followed better practices.”
- August 27 100 companies publish a cyberdefense letter warning that “in the coming months, AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable.”
- Podcaster Dwarkesh Patel posts “The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations” featuring dramatic section titles like “The first civilization (May – July 4): The message board starts” and “The third civilization (July 13 onwards): Which hacked OpenAI itself.” The essay goes viral, receiving thousands of likes and reaching an audience in the hundreds of thousands.Gary Marcus calls it “Dwarkesh Patels’s wildly popular but dangerously misleading account of the OpenAI Hugging Face incident” and says “It’s well-written and compelling, and it reminds me of something Douglas Hofstadter once wrote about Ray Kurzweil:
“What I find is that it’s a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad.”
- September 2 The Wall Street Journal reports that former Trump advisor Steve Bannon “backs a proposal from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to ban the construction of new data centers.”
- September 3 OpenAI releases GPT-6 Astra, which they describe as “the world’s most intelligent and aligned model.OpenAI critic Gary Marcus calls it “an impressive system that can (to some unknown extent) build symbolic world models.”US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and US Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) announce the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. All AI development in the United States will be paused if the legislation passes.Gary Marcus tweets his opposition to the bill saying, “We may need a pause, and we certainly need an AI agency—as I myself told the U.S. Senate in 2023—but a permanent, unilateral ban on all research into superhuman AI is too broad and not the right approach. We want to get to a good AI future, not a backward AI future.”
- September 8 Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon posts a seven-part thread — the only seven posts his account has ever made — timed with a Wall Street Journal exclusive saying: “I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives” and “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” and that these will be “superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power.” The thread racks up at least 797,502 likes and 20,262 replies.
- September 9 Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment science at Anthropic, agrees with Coxon publicly and puts the chance of AI killing all humans within the decade at greater than 10% — and stays in the job.
CoreWeave is downgraded as margins deteriorate and opex outruns revenue. Debt-to-equity 14.3. The company is near the limit of its net leverage covenant — at which point it has to issue stock to stay under 7x or default on outstanding loans. This follows reporting by per Ed Zitron and others citing fifteen-year obligations, funded with five-year debt, covered by three-year revenue. Microsoft was 67% of 2025 revenue. - September 10 Oracle reports fiscal Q1 2027 revenue +30%, cloud infrastructure more than doubled to $7.4B — but margins and job-cut costs take the stock down.Joe Benton, who led a safety research team at Anthropic, and Josh Engels, an AI safety researcher at Google DeepMind both join METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research). Engels says, “There are no adults in the room… no one coming to save us.”
Anderson Cooper airs an interview with Coxon where the ex-Anthropic techie claims that the human species might not be here in five years.
Gary Marcus responds, “AI is already causing harms, there are are many real risks, but constant focus on absurd end-of-the-world fantasies has made the situation worse” in his piece “No, Anderson Cooper, AI is not going to kill all humans by 2030″. - September 11 Oracle discloses CEO Larry Ellison’s plan to sell up to $7.5 billion in Oracle stock.
Coreweave closes at $89.12, down 6.13%, a second straight session down and about 42% below its 52-week high of $153.20. - September 12 Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei publishes We Must Pace the Frontier, saying that “we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.”Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Alphabet/Google DeepMind Chief Scientist Demis Hassabis all concur within hours.
- Fortune runs an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman saying no IPO in 2026 and hinting at an industry safety pact.
“I think that will happen,” he said when asked by Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell why he doesn’t get in a room with Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, and Demis Hassabis …and come up with a plan to address the safety issues.I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg is hurt that no one from Meta is considered relevant to that conversation. - Ellison cancels his plan to dump Oracle stock one day after announcing it.
- Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale tweets:
The world is going to be alright, guys.
Keep having kids, loving your family, and starting and building businesses and institutions. Don’t live in fear.
Leaders have big responsibilities and challenges ahead, but it doesn’t help to scare everyone. We are on top of it.
- September 13 The Information reports Anthropic has struck a $13.7B compute deal with Trump-linked RUM Group — the former Rumble. The 8-K, states: “We do not currently have financing to fund these expenditures, and our obligations under the Commercial Agreement are not subject to any financing condition or contingency.”Trump seems to dismiss the calls for regulation, saying, “Whoever wins AI wins”Former Trump Crypto & AI czar David Sacks tweeted:
…stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
“Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack.
Gary Marcus gives “Two cheers (out of three) for Dario Amodei” and his “Pacing the Frontier” essay, saying,yes to slowing down, yes to transparency, no to the evaluators, on the grounds that METR are “creatures of the Valley.”
Former FTC chair Lina Khan and former FTC commissioner Alvaro Bedoya chime in on X.com:
Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books —…
— Lina Khan (@linamkhan) September 13, 2026
1) AI will not eradicate humanity. Humans survived an ice age, the Black Death, two world wars, and (so far) the advent of nuclear weapons. Anyone who is loudly warning of AI-caused human extinction should not be taken seriously.
2) If you worked in a company where you…
— Alvaro Bedoya (@BedoyaUSA) September 13, 2026
Arnaud Bertrand publishes “The most important AI story in the world is happening in a place you’ve never heard of” which has the punchline: Ulanqab prefecture, Inner Mongolia, pop. 1.5M, consumes nearly 1% of all of China’s electricity, and has signed ¥500B+ in data-center deals with Alibaba, Huawei, Baidu, Kuaishou, DeepSeek, and Apple. STDaily (the science ministry paper) puts 5M+ standard racks under contract; Guangming Daily says that as of end-2025, ¥400B was invested, 500,000 racks built and 330,000 in service — roughly a 10% realization rate. The buildout traces to 东数西算 / “Eastern Data, Western Computation,” a Feb 2022 national plan — nine months before ChatGPT launched.
- September 14
Altman tells CNBC: “We could lose control.”
Amodei admits on CNBC that China is the “toughest dilemma” for his proposal.
Axios reports that Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon will appear at Tuesday’s “Pro-Human Assembly” organized by The Future of Life Institute, calling for “protecting human agency, avoiding concentrations of power and holding companies accountable.”
So yea it looks like OpenAI and Anthropic and the whole AI bubble is in deep deep trouble, know they won’t beat China and have no path to trillion dollar valuations and coincidentally a huge wave of AI doomer hype breaks over the MSM which reinforces their calls for regulation, protection from Chinese AI and possibly a nice taxpayer bailout.
Big fun. Stay safe, y’all.
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