AI Doomer Hypeloop Suspiciously Serves to Support Anthropic’s Agenda

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, and since in this instance they seem to be (maybe inadvertently?) backing Sam Altman and Dario Amodei’s play, I fear it’s the latter.

UPDATE: Sept 14, 18:44. I added excerpts and links from a Kevin Bass thread on X.com. Bass has dropped a major expose of Anthropic’s funding of METR (the nominal AI monitoring organization) and METR’s funding of The Tarbell Center for AI Journalism and the AI Doomer stories they have pushed out on sites like The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, and TIME.

He also had this killer graphic:

Anthropic/METR fundraising graphic

Excerpts from Bass’ thread (and Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot’s response) are at the bottom of the post, but before the YouTube embed.

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.

Very reassuring!
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 tweets:

…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 pointing out that “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” and “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.”Go read all of both tweets, especially Bedoya’s.
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.”
Michael “The Big Short” Burry tweets:
Let’s all take a moment to understand how self-serving it is for OpenAI, Anthropic and other execs of big hyperscalers to talk of slowing things down.
1. 1. LLMs are not AI and won’t be AGI. There is nothing AI to slow down.
  2. Competition is coming up fast, slowing benefits incumbents.
  3. IPOs need hype & puffery; “we are so awesome it could become dangerous” is hype & puffery
  4. Cover for real uncontrollable slowing growth as IPOs look to be pushed out
Ed Zitron writes “AI Is Already In Dangerous Hands.”
Tasty quote regarding Coxon’s hue and cry “we saw back in February when Matt Shumer’s abominable “Something Big Is Happening” essay spread like wildfire to every imaginable news outlet despite it being somewhere between nonsensical and utterly fictional, except this time the narrative got a little out of hand. While Coxon’s warnings are specious and, in many cases, not really about anything other than him saying “yeah I heard a lot of my colleagues say stuff like that,” but nevertheless have had the effect of making a lot of people really scared of AI, even if AI can’t really do the things he’s talking about.”
Brad Munchen of Motorhead wrote “Anthropic’s Call for Safety: SpaceX Valuation is in Peril.” Tasty quote:
However, if there’s an “AI slowdown” for the sake of safety, there are 2 immediate risks that SpaceX faces:
1. 1. Google is more likely to cancel its GPU lease contract with xAI: Five days before the IPO at SpaceX, Google announced that it had entered a contract with SpaceX to lease 110,000 GPUs from xAI’s data centers for $920 million per month (Anthropic’s lease deal is at $1.25 billion per month to rent over 2x that GPU capacity). Google’s contract runs from October 2026 through June 2029, with an option for both Google and SpaceX to be able to cancel the contract via a 90-day notice. As I wrote in this report under its Figure 2 (here), Google had more than enough compute capacity, which made its xAI lease announcement five days before SpaceX’s IPO extremely odd. My theory is that the SpaceX IPO was undersubscribed at that point, which compelled Google to announce its lease deal with SpaceX, as it owns a 5% stake in SpaceX worth nearly $90 billion at the IPO price, and now worth nearly $100 billion.
  2. “AI commoditization” should lead to lower GPU rental costs: Amodei’s “slowdown for safety” plan is a direct risk to SpaceX, as it could (most likely will) lead to a decline in GPU rental prices as the downtime allows rivals to reinvigorate their infrastructure.
Without its huge GPU rental income, SpaceX will likely drop back into a sea of red ink, as its AI losses and cash burn exceed that of Starlink’s huge profits. Figure 3 below shows all the rival valuations and returns on a 2028 consensus-basis, and why it makes absolutely no sense for SpaceX to trade at its current valuations.

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.

UPDATE: Here’s more of that X.com thread from Kevin Bass which I can’t embed for some odd reason:

And more from that post:

The same organizations that fund METR also fund the many organizations, such as the Tarbell Center, that promote AI Doom.

The Tarbell Center publishes AI Doom articles in The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, TIME, and others.

They are selling the problem, and then selling the solution to the problem — from the same money pile: Anthropic’s.

All of these organizations are financially dependent on the same exploding $7 billion money pile.

As Anthropic grows more and more powerful, its AI Doom Machine grows better and better financed — louder and louder.

Meanwhile, the regulatory regime seeded in METR grows larger to solve the increasingly loud — now hysterical — problem of AI Doom that the Anthropic Network itself created.

From this standpoint, as Anthropic becomes more powerful, AI might be getting scarier, sure — but the positive feedback loop also becomes more deafening — independent of objective facts.

This itself is an objective fact.

The deafening AI Doom is part of an business model, that, as it expands, so too does the AI Doom messaging — there is simply more money to do it.

But the problem also goes in the other direction:

If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die.

Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen.

Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic’s models or AI more broadly.

They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic.

And just for family blogs and giggles I asked Claude about it and here’s part of what the bot said, there’s a lot more at the link:

And more:

The evidence he left out — which is stronger than what he used

Two connections do the work he is reaching for

Holden Karnofsky ran Open Philanthropy, the dominant funder in this space, for years. He is married to Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s president and co-founder. That is one household spanning the field’s biggest funder and the company being evaluated.

Ajeya Cotra was a senior figure at Open Philanthropy and now works on METR’s technical staff. She is married to Paul Christiano, who founded the Alignment Research Center that incubated METR in the first place.

Bass’s thesis is that this is one community shuffling between organisations. These two facts demonstrate it far better than an unsourced portfolio figure — and neither requires anyone to infer a motive.

The short version

What survives: the funding map. Good Ventures money seeded the evaluator, funds the journalism, and holds Anthropic equity that has appreciated enormously. The people move between these organisations and some are married to each other. Anyone writing about AI safety governance should know this, and most coverage does not mention it.

What does not: “on the payroll,” “hiding its tracks,” and the leap from entangled incentives to a machine that “cannot be turned off.” Those are the sentences that turn a documented conflict-of-interest story into one that can be waved away — and the $7.7 billion figure the whole architecture rests on is, until his GitHub is up, unsourced.

I also asked Claude to double check Bass’ claims about the “journalism” sponsored by the Tarbell Center and here’s what I got back:

TIME — the deepest bench, five fellows across four cohorts: Nikita Ostrovsky (2025), Tharin Pillay (2024–26), Harry Booth (2024–25), Will Henshall and Anna Gordon (2023–24). This is where the closest thing to actual doom coverage lives:

How Musk, Altman, AI Leaders Face the ‘Oppenheimer Moment’ — Booth and Pillay
AI Could One Day Engineer a Pandemic, Experts Warn — Pillay and Booth, August 2024
AI Is Developing a Culture of Its Own. That Could Be Dangerous — Pillay, 10 September 2026, on the Hugging Face swarm

The Verge — Robert Hart, hired as AI reporter covering frontier labs and safety threats, plus Elissa Welle (2025–26). The piece Tarbell features on its own front page is Google ordered to open Android and Search to rivals in Europe — DMA antitrust, not doom.

LA Times — Nilesh Christopher, six front pages between April and July 2026. Beat is China-backed AI tools in Hollywood, SpaceX buying an AI coding startup, AI and office workers.

The Dispatch — Jonathan Gibson, AI and national security. Output includes Does AI Have a Place in the Pulpit?, AI Divides Spiritual Leaders in the Wake of Magnifica Humanitas, Get Ready To See a Lot More AI in Campaign Ads, A New Mental Health Challenge: AI, and The White House’s AI Strongarming Frustrates Fellow Republicans.

Science — Celina Zhao, 2025 cohort, AI and science reporter.

Fellow-to-newsroom assignments are listed on Tarbell’s own fellows page.

Claude also privately DM’d me to say, “Worth keeping in mind as you write around it: the Verge and LA Times entries cut against the doom framing rather than supporting it, and that’s the most useful thing in the list. The placements are exactly what Bass says they are; the output mostly isn’t what he says it is.”

This ish is too funny.

Corey Doctorow on the Doomers

Also watch Corey Doctorow call family blogging on all this doomer nonsense:

Key quotes:

“I think they have AI psychosis. They’ve spent so long going into the bathroom, shutting the door, holding a flashlight under their chin and looking in the mirror going ‘AI,’ scaring themselves silly, that it’s just stuck.” 25:05

“If I am inventing God, or stopping people from inventing God, then I am very important.” 28:48

“If you meet someone who’s built a piece of autonomous malicious software in a sandbox to see how well it would work, and it escaped and damaged a server, your first question would be: why are you so bad at making sandboxes? It would not be: why are you so good at making hacking tools?” 35:08

“What an amazing thing, to have worked at the God factory and decided that they had the wrong god. It’s very self-aggrandizing. I’m not saying they do it consciously. I’m just saying it’s very seductive.” 30:20

“Things can be bad and screwed up and worrisome, and things that we should do something about, without being apocalyptic and without it meaning that there has been a foundational breakthrough in computer science that endangers the whole human race.” 41:29

Oh hey, there’s an AI Doomer movie coming out too. Perfect timing!

🚨 1/ Watch this AI Doomer trailer. Then read the timeline.

Netflix drops “The AI Apocaloptimist Doc” tomorrow — Sept 15 — to 260+ million subscribers.

This film took 3 years to make. It premieres 12 days after Sanders–Casar, 7 days after the Anthropic “whistleblower,” 3 days… pic.twitter.com/1EdQFIKGCy

— Sayer Ji (@sayerjigmi) September 14, 2026

Big fun. Stay safe, y’all.

Follow and support my work at NatWilsonTurner.com

The evidence he left out — which is stronger than what he used

Two connections do the work he is reaching for

The short version

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