Doom and Capture

Inside the Campaign to Exploit AI Fears for Political Control

The Age of AI Doomerism is here.

What appears to be a series of independent institutions and tech titans warning of the purportedly imminent existential crisis AI poses to humanity is, in reality, a coordinated campaign. The AI sector is exploiting public fear for its own gain, with lasting repercussions for the United States. It is weaponizing legitimate concerns about AI’s risks to advance its own interests—and to implement its own eschatological vision.

The AI doomer nexus includes Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, a constellation of left-wing NGOs and nonprofits, and influential Democratic politicians (and even some Republicans). Their strategic campaign is being disseminated through journalists (and their publicists), much like the spiritual warfare Machiavelli covertly taught as part of his quest to undermine the Christian moral teachings of his time.

Evidence of the media’s role includes the cover story of the latest issue of TIME magazine. Investigator Jordan Schachtel found that two of the three reporters who wrote it had received funding from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, a mostly AI-skeptical nonprofit founded by left-wing billionaire and Democratic fundraiser Dustin Moskovitz.

The same pattern is evident in whistleblower Jacob Coxon’s anything-but-organic rise to prominence. Coxon claimed in a viral post that OpenAI and Anthropic are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” But investigators Parker Thayer and Brian Chau found that Coxon is a long-time AI skeptic, was funded by AI-pessimist nonprofits, and was boosted by Democrats who want to use AI for their own nefarious purposes. As the New York Times reported, Barack Obama recently told a private fundraiser that Democratic presidential hopefuls for 2028 should “make A.I. one of their ‘central agendas’ and ‘have a very clear plan’ for responding to safety and economic concerns around the technology.” Translation: The Democrats are going to do to AI what they’ve already done to the health care industry.

The AI doomers are even pushing their message in denominations and parachurch ministries. The Future of Life Institute, which received a sudden infusion of more than $660 million in cryptocurrency from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, has funded organizations such as the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, Faith Matters (Mormon), New Polity (Catholic), and The Gospel Coalition.

What is the AI doomer scheme ultimately intended to accomplish? The apparent contradiction at the heart of the AI movement—that CEOs of the very companies driving the AI revolution are warning that their products could easily lead to human extinction—points to the answer. The contradiction disappears once you understand the larger strategy: cynical maneuvering to ensure market dominance, coupled with deep philosophical and theological confusion.

Understanding the practical effects of the administrative state is key to navigating the first part of this strategy. Regulatory capture occurs when an administrative agency begins regulating in ways that benefit the companies it oversees rather than the public good. What looks like high-minded altruism from the AI sector may be a calculated effort to use the government’s many tentacles to push out open-source competitors and secure its dominant position in the field.

On the philosophical and theological front, books with overheated titles such as If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All present an eschatology of catastrophe without the Second Coming. This outlook is closely associated with effective altruism (EA), a blend of radical philosophical currents that has influenced Silicon Valley. EA consists less of serious engagement with human anthropology than of late-night dorm-room philosophizing. As The Washington Post columnist Jason Willick describes it, EA is an “extreme form of utilitarianism, which holds that morality is all about achieving ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number.’” One of its most famous proponents is Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX founder who is now serving a decades-long prison sentence for fraud.

The theology of catastrophe at the core of AI doomerism must be distinguished from a prudential judgment about AI’s capabilities and its potential drawbacks. A sober assessment of AI’s risks is one thing; overwrought fears that AI will suddenly become sentient and decide to wipe out humanity seconds later, à la Skynet in The Terminator franchise, is another. Casually assigning arbitrary probabilities to the prospect of human extinction is not serious reflection on AI’s potential negative effects. It is instead a rejection of right judgment in favor of the kind of fanaticism that reached fever pitch at various points throughout the 20th century.

There were the global-cooling scares of the 1970s. Then, as technologist Phillip Lamb has pointed out, came the one-two punch of The China Syndrome and the Three Mile Island reactor accident a little less than two weeks later. This fear reduced public confidence in nuclear power and helped stop the construction of new reactors between 1977 and 2013. The result was an energy policy that left the U.S. more dependent on Middle East energy sources. Then there were the tactics of Al Gore, author of The Assault on Reason, who tried to scare Americans into believing that global warming was an imminent crisis that essentially required the destruction of the U.S. economy to stave off.

But none of these most dire prophecies has come to pass. New York City is not 12 feet underwater. Mass famine has not swept across the globe. Fears that AI would decimate the workforce and drive unemployment to 20% have not materialized. (As of August, the unemployment rate stands at 4.1%.)

Recent AI incidents do demonstrate genuine risks, but they don’t demonstrate the apocalyptic scenario that AI doomers envision. Though there is some disagreement over what exactly led to the recent AI swarm attack on Hugging Face, Brian Chau found that Anthropic’s own logs suggest that a lack of proper parameters allowed the bots to escape their sandbox. Curtis Yarvin pointed out on a recent podcast that Anthropic’s report shows that the bots stopped immediately after they were told they had hacked a real-life corporation. Greater intelligence does not necessarily lead to malevolent actions or behavior beyond human control.

Instead of siding with Bill Gates and others who want to create an international bureaucracy to regulate AI, a better path is for the federal government to ensure that necessary guidelines are in place that can serve republican aims. What’s needed is prudential regulation that can help unleash AI’s great potential—not more boondoggles like the European Union or the U.S. environmental regulatory regime.

As Phillip Lamb has argued, AI must be catechized with the key sources of Western civilization and Christendom. LLMs should mirror, Lamb writes, the best of frontier American virtues: they should avoid “flattery,” “offer accurate responses,” and “avoid blanket refusals when helping researchers formulate new technologies.” He also stresses that “we must not confuse properly ordered civic protections with regulations that would turn general-purpose models into licensed encyclopedias for an approved scientific guild.”

This is a crucial moment for setting the country on the right path, because the AI revolution is not going to stop. Evangelicals, especially, must have the wisdom of the serpent (Matt. 10:16) to avoid the traps set by the AI doomers. We must ensure that AI serves American citizens—that it helps cure diseases, solve immense mathematical and technical challenges, break up the bureaucracy, and allows self-government to flourish. The future of America is at stake, but not in the way the AI doomers want you to believe.