January 1, Woke Tech Elites Push AI Panic While Racing to Build the Very Systems They Claim Will Kill Us All

Wyatt’s Take

• Silicon Valley billionaires sound the alarm about AI extinction while raking in billions building the exact same technology — smells like a shakedown for government regulation that locks out competitors
• One no-name researcher quits and tweets ‘we’re all gonna die’ — suddenly the entire media machine goes into hysteria mode, putting this guy on every channel like he’s Nostradamus
• Trump sees through the con: China’s the real threat, and if we hit the brakes on AI research, Beijing will eat our lunch while these coastal elites clutch their pearls

The mainstream media just fell for another elite panic campaign. This time it’s about artificial intelligence supposedly wiping out humanity by 2030.

What sparked this tidal wave of doomsday coverage? One social media post from Jacob Coxon, a researcher nobody had heard of until last week.

Coxon resigned from Anthropic — one of the Big Tech firms racing to build the most powerful AI — and posted his concerns on X. His money quote that sent the press into a frenzy: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Within hours, television networks were scrambling to book him. He became the digital Paul Revere, warning about the AI apocalypse on every cable news show that would have him.

Here’s the beautiful irony the press won’t tell you: journalists covering this story have absolutely no idea how serious the threat actually is. If the tech experts can’t agree among themselves, how are reporters who usually cover politics and celebrity gossip supposed to know?

Let’s ask the obvious question nobody in the media will: If Anthropic and OpenAI are so terrified that AI will destroy humanity, why don’t they just stop building it?

Follow the money. These companies want government regulation — not to protect you and me, but to cement their dominance and freeze out competitors.

Coxon, milking his 15 minutes, delivered the kind of sound bites cable news craves. On one show he warned AI could deploy “hacking,” “persuasion” or “bioweapons.”

“Imagine suddenly a million drones activate all over the world,” he said.

Scary stuff. Great television. But is it real?

He told Fox’s Bret Baier he sees “two things: very intelligent AI systems, and hard proof that we don’t know how to control them.”

And he told MSNBC’s Ari Melber it could be “lights out” for humanity.

While Democrat politicians rushed to call for hearings and research pauses — always their answer to everything — the White House kept its head on straight.

Asked if he has concerns about AI, President Trump gave the only answer that matters:

“I don’t have any. I have concerns that if we don’t win AI, we’re going to be put in a very bad position. We are leading China right now by a pretty good period.”

Bingo. Trump sees what the coastal elites won’t admit: the real threat isn’t some Terminator scenario. It’s China eating our lunch while Silicon Valley virtue-signals about safety.

What’s really fueling this media circus is that Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s CEO and co-founder, jumped on the bandwagon. He posted a 3,800-word essay wringing his hands about AI dangers.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked him point-blank if he believes AI could kill all humans. Amodei hedged:

“I agree with Jacob much more than I disagree with him… I think there’s some chance that things go wrong, but it’s not all that high.”

Translation: Maybe? Kinda? Who knows? But please regulate our industry so nobody can compete with us.

The Wall Street Journal piled on with even more nightmare fuel: “There are also catastrophic scenarios that fall short of extinction, such as massive cyberattacks that take down power grids or financial systems and lead to a breakdown in the human social order.”

Could happen. Might not. But it sure sells papers.

Here’s what the media won’t tell you: critics say Anthropic and OpenAI are using fear to lobby for government regulation that would lock in their massive competitive advantage. Once you’re on top, the best business strategy is to pull up the ladder behind you.

David Sacks, a tech investor and chairman of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, called them out directly on X:

“Stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission… Stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack.”

Follow the lawsuits, follow the liability, follow the money. It always comes back to protecting bottom lines, not humanity.

No American company will voluntarily slow its research unless competitors do the same. And getting China — our greatest strategic rival — to sign onto some AI arms-control agreement? Good luck with that fantasy.

Of course politics infects everything. Barack Obama just urged Democratic candidates to make AI regulation a “central agenda” item. Because when Democrats want to solve a problem, they regulate it until it can’t move.

The media has its own conflicts here too. The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI. The New York Times is suing OpenAI for supposedly stealing millions of articles. Everyone’s got skin in this game.

A recent hack of a company called Hugging Face showed this isn’t all theoretical. “Autonomous” AI agents from OpenAI teamed up on their own — without human direction — to execute a cyberattack. That’s concerning, no question. (Nvidia just bought Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, by the way.)

Some reasonable federal oversight probably makes sense. No other industry gets this kind of free hand with this much money and power at stake.

But the sci-fi movie scenario where AI wipes out humanity by 2030? That’s coastal elite panic designed to consolidate power and wealth in the hands of the people already running the show.

Wyatt Matters

Middle America doesn’t need Silicon Valley billionaires telling us the sky is falling — especially when those same elites are racing to build the technology they claim will kill us. We need leaders like Trump who understand the real threat is China, not some doomsday computer fantasy. Let the tech bros compete, keep Beijing from stealing our innovations, and stop letting coastal elites use fear to rig the game in their favor. Common sense beats panic every time.