Rob a gas station for $200: 10 year prison sentence Orchestrate wide-scale cyber security breaches and a fake news media campaign to pressure the Feds into killing your competitors and propping up your multi-trillion valuation ahead of an IPO: no problem

I went to an rationalist/EA AI doomer event last night with the goal of meeting someone who could calmly explain to me the argument for how they get to the conclusion that AI will kill everyone. Because these are rationalists, I expected to find people who could lay out a serious extinction pathway, walk through the assumptions and intermediate steps, identify choke points where negative pathways could potentially be regulated, and entertain disagreement about where their assumptions might break down. My experience was the exact opposite. The people I spoke to seemed psychologically unable to entertain the possibility that their conclusion (that AI literally kills everyone, which was a point that many would not even budge on) might be wrong. Their most extreme conclusion was treated as an axiom. I had multiple people walk out of conversations with me when I questioned their inevitable extinction premise. At one point during a panel, the moderator asked everyone in the audience who was still skeptical of AI doom to raise their hands. About half the room did. He then told all of the skeptics to leave the panel and go with one of the speakers, who would answer their questions separately. They filtered out all the skeptics, and continued the panel only with the subset who accepted their extreme position. I genuinely felt like a heretic just for questioning whether superintelligent AI inevitably leads to the extinction of humanity, or entertaining the possibility that the future might actually turn out well. That does not mean AI safety is fake. Obviously there are serious questions about rapidly advancing AI systems and what happens as they become much more capable. Those are exactly the conversations I went there hoping to have. But what I encountered was an apocalyptic death cult. These people are not rational. They are deeply afraid, they reinforce that fear in one another, and they have become so emotionally committed to apocalypse that they refuse to be reasoned out of it.

-Redwood Research @apolloresearch -Apollo Research @ApolloResearch -FAR.AI @farairesearch -Palisade Research @PalisadeAI -SecureBIO @SecureBio -SaferAI @SaferAI_org Also, of course: -UK AI Security Institute -U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation -Japan AI Safety Institute

🚨 Attackers stole a METR API key and used it for three weeks, consuming credits worth about $600,000. A fail-open bug disabled Google authentication on a public agent dashboard. The attacker prompted an agent to reveal the key and added SSH persistence. How the exposed app was abused: thehackernews.com/2026/09/at…

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 — a point @FTC emphasized repeatedly during my tenure. 1. There is an extensive set of laws that govern dangerous and defective products. For example, releasing unvetted AI models or agents can violate consumer protection laws. Shipping flawed AI tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents can be an “unfair or deceptive” act or practice under the FTC Act (and analogous state laws). And some state AGs are already exploring holding AI firms and their CEOs criminally liable when their models participate in criminal activity. 2. Existing laws also prohibit “unfair methods of competition.” This covers instances where AI firms appropriate the competitively sensitive information of their customers, including through tracking their use of various tools. It can also cover instances where firms pursue dangerous behavior, aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same. As the Supreme Court has noted: “A method of competition which casts upon one's competitors the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt, even though it is not criminal, was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the [unfair methods of competition] statute was aimed." 3. The highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest. We had started investigating these partnerships and cross-investments across the stack (and released a preliminarily overview of some findings: ftc.gov/news-events/news/pre…). Both federal and state enforcers should be scrutinizing these opaque relationships and inter-dependencies. We are already seeing how these relationships could undermine accountability. For example, OpenAI could face liability given the Hugging Face incident, but Hugging Face being bought up by Nvidia means that we’re unlikely to see it file a lawsuit over this — given Nvidia’s strong incentive to see OpenAI continue full speed ahead. 4. As AI tools dramatically change the landscape of cybersecurity risks and hacks, all businesses should be doubling down on having core security protections in place. Firms that fail to invest in adequate data security measures or fix known vulnerabilities can also be breaking the law. A recent analysis showed that around 1/3 of Fortune 100 companies do not even have a way to notify them about security issues. During my @FTC tenure, we sued firms for poor data security practices and held CEOs liable when they were personally responsible. this.weekinsecurity.com/doze… ftc.gov/news-events/news/pre… 5. As policymakers consider new legal regimes, we should be looking to lessons from prior efforts to govern major sectors, such as banking and other networks, platforms, and utilities. Tools like structural separations, nondiscrimination, and supervision could be key, and there’s a rich history of what works and what doesn’t. But we can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws.

Behind the viral Coxon story is a tightly financially entangled regulatory capture cartel. The story is almost too clean to beelieved. Almost everyone involved in the past couple of weeks leading up to the viral Coxon story are paid for by investors in Anthropic. Good Ventures and Open Philanthropy/Coefficient Giving is owned by Dustin Moskowitz, who led Anthropic's Series A. Survival and Flourishing Fund funded others who pumped up the hysteria in parallel. Survival and Flourishing Fund are run by Jaan Tallinn -- an investor in Anthropic. Then you have amplifiers of Coxon, who are at Anthropic itself. All of these individuals serve to benefit financially from the doomer hysteria and the regulatory capture that could result in its wake. Coxon himself is a nepo baby -- he doesn't need the money. He just harvested the virtue signal. Hence the smug smile while talking to interviewers about humanity's impending extermination. Nepos gonna nepo.

I've served in two White Houses and in Congressional leadership, and I can tell you when the last time a CEO or an industry at large asked to be regulated: never. That's what makes Dario's letter so striking — it's an admission that we're driving down a dark, winding road on wet pavement with the headlights off. And where's President Trump? Looks like he nodded off again. It’s time to turn the lights on, put both hands on the wheel, and regain control before it’s too late.