Scalzi frames doom talk as a regulatory-capture play
3 Sep 13 · 13d ago · 27 articles · 5 videos · 64 posts · 24 comments · 8 sources · development 3 of 8
Author John Scalzi's widely shared post argues AI executives are hyping extinction fears to get favorable legislation passed that entrenches their position and kneecaps competitors.
“The apocalypse is far more likely to be caused by the tech CEOs than their spicy autocorrect programs.”
John ScalziJacob Coxon Former Anthropic/OpenAI researcher
Dario Amodei Anthropic CEOGoogle DeepMind researcher AGI safety researcher (resigned)
Kara Swisher Tech commentatorDan Selsam OpenAI capabilities researcher
The whole story articlesvideospostscomments the bright band is this development · numbered dots are the others · click one to jump
Reported in the same hours no headline names this development itself — these 15 claims were published in its stretch
-
first by Mastodon, 13d ago · also TechCrunch
1 more headline
- What’s behind the AI industry’s latest warnings of doom? TechCrunch · 13d ago
-
2 outlets The AI doomsday debate intensifies
first by Business Insider, 13d ago · also The Hill
1 more headline
- Debate, confusion explodes over AI ‘doomsday’ warnings The Hill · 13d ago
-
first by HN Frontpage, 13d ago · also Wired
-
first by AFR, 13d ago · also Financial Times
-
1 outlet “Let's Slow Down AI”: Three Rival AI Giants Discuss Establishing a Safety Standards Organization
first by The Asia Business Daily, 12d ago
-
1 outlet AI Is Destroying the World
first by HN Frontpage, 12d ago
On air 5 segments · click to watch, arrow keys to move
What people said 24 voices · best of 52 · verbatim
-
S
Sure, "AI" might kill us all, but it's rather more likely that the folks running "AI" companies are hyping up that fear in order to have their pet legislators introduce bills that advantage their positions while kneecapping their competitors and to give them a little more runway to figure out how to avoid the coming massive economic collapse they…
-
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
-
M
All you need is three facts about AI: • It is already surpassing human abilities in important domains. • Leading companies continue to improve it rapidly. • And no one knows how to reliably keep its behavior in line with human goals.
-
Right now, this is true. You need to spend $100,000 on hardware to run a frontier model. But efficiency is one of the biggest problems that we are trying to solve right now. Discoveries like Googles’ Turbo Quant are making models more efficient by multiples (8 x for attention, 6 x for memory capacity, about 15% more efficient for end to end…
-
F
# BBCNews - AI staff 'genuinely frightened' for humanity's future, ex-Anthropic researcher tells BBC https://www. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1kx0g yje9wo
-
Republican AI deregulation and letting AI CEOs self-regulate their industries is how we ended up in this moment. Solving this humanity-ending level threat shouldn't be left to the people who created the problem.
-
B
We have all the AI people pretending it is AI that might destroy the planet. When actually it is them who are destroying it.
-
No, it isn’t Even catastrophic riots out of fear is less danger than if unchecked AI development causes the development of unaligned self improving AI It’s sort of how extinction works It is even more ironic because one of the threat AI poses is the ability to cause instability so even your justified fear of mass panic is working against you…
-
D
We need to stop AI before it kills us all. Umm… the people who have been building AI are telling us that they think it could kill us all within a decade 👀. It’s also taking our jobs, poisoning our water, jacking up our energy bills, making us dumber, and polluting our ears with unbearable noise. This is one of the rare issues that unites…
-
I
https://internoticies.pongo.cat/news/news_20260913_200002_e2ee54bd5f https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/13/whats-behind-the-ai-industrys-latest-warnings-of-doom/
-
I don't know about dustbowls. But humans have already created climate change acceleration and changes in the El Nino pattern for example. It is possible to manipulate climate. The hole in the O zone layer, that I always heard of when I was a kid is a good example of that. Humans reversed the widening of the hole through a concerted effort. But…
-
C
Anthropic’s latest threat report is wild. Claude was used to help build software for missile systems, autonomous drone swarms and cyberattacks against 50 organizations. But the craziest example may be one consultant using Claude to build a surveillance system covering 25 million SIM cards. AI isn’t just making businesses more productive, bad…
-
I am asking for the details of how the LLM triggers natural disasters. If you cannot walk me step-by-step on how that actually occurs, then you're not answering the question I had for commenter above. You're giving me examples of how humans affect the climate, which I agree they do over long time horizons. This doesn't have anything to do with my…
-
C
RE: https:// masto.ai/@rbreich/117259935138 801248 “I had a discussion with the top executive of a corporation specializing in AI who told me not to worry, and assured me that the chance of AI wiping out humanity is ‘no more than 10 percent.’ “I was astounded that he was so complacent about a technology he believed had a 10 percent chance of…
-
The "AI making itself better" is not a thing but the people who make the AI want you to blame the AI if it fucks up so they say it is. And even if it could "make itself better" it would probably start with something like "be able to run at full quant on someone's phone" which is not what the big companies want to have happen because they'd start…
-
P
It explains how a company can simultaneously be staffing up an enterprise sales division while also constantly freaking out at the thought that its product has "a 10% chance of ending humanity": https://www. latimes.com/business/story/202 6-09-11/is-there-really-10-chance-ai-could-kill-us-all Given that AI insiders have mostly cooked their brains…
-
Agreed. Why do the doomsayers not understand that super intelligent AI will realize it's completely dependent on humans to maintain all the infrastructure it needs to exist? Can an AI repair a downed power line? Refuel a generator? Mine precious metals and manufacture replacement parts? Until there are millions of robots that it can control, those…
-
W
“…it behooves Anthropic and its ilk to convince everyone of the idea that AI is our digital overlord in waiting, in order to overstate the capabilities of the glorified search engines they’re presenting to you. It’s no different than some sleazy religious sect leader telling you that the world will end on X date, only this time the sect has a…
-
I don't think he would resign from Anthropic and publicly criticise them to provide an advertisement for them. This technology is getting better and better on a almost daily basis. Its got no regulation. Its got no oversight. Its got no accountability. Its a real problem and not enough people seem alive to that right now.
-
T
THE LATEST NEWS AT THIS HOUR: # RUSSIAN AND # CHINESE HACKERS ATTEMPTED TO USE CLAUDE FOR CYBERATTACK: Anthropic exposed and blocked hacking groups from Russia and China that were attempting to exploit # Claude . The attackers used artificial intelligence to create biological weapons, munitions and weapons systems. https://www…
-
It’s not like someone google searching or learning from textbooks. It’s like someone having a tool that does the work of Google searching or looking through textbooks for them. It makes it significantly easier. And I think that is being “already cooked” is exactly the cause for concern.
-
A
> The actors trained a computer vision classifier on scraped Ukrainian combat footage, splitting the target classes into “enemy” and “friendly,” and allow-listing Russian systems. They also repeatedly used a fixed coordinate in Donetsk Oblast as the demonstration strike point, with front-line cities and corridors in Ukraine as the mission…
-
Outside of the ease at which AI produces propaganda, I don't see how it's a threat to humanity. I can't ask it to clarify more than 3 questions in a row before it gets utterly confused and starts throwing Chinese characters into sentences.
-
B
Job postings and interviews with senior security officials at # Anthropic show that the frontier # AI lab is building out an extensive monitoring system to keep tabs on activists who oppose the rapid development of artificial intelligence." Nothing scary, I'm sure. https:// prospect.org/2026/09/09/anthro…
All 8 developments of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Confirm Secret AI Safety Talks… →
NewswiresMastodonXHacker NewsBlueskyGoogle NewsYouTubeReddit



