On Tuesday, an AI researcher named Jacob Coxon flounced from his job at Anthropic, posting on X that he was afeared of the monster he had been helping to build.
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. More thoughts below.
— Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) September 9, 2026
His warning was immediately everywhere, a chorus of prominent media and legislators amplifying it at dizzying speed while Congress-critters clamored to bring down the regulation hammer.
But how in the world did this one warning blow up so quickly and so completely? It’s not like plenty of other intelligent, sophisticated people hadn’t been expressing concerns about AI and leading an informed public debate. Why was some guy no one had ever heard of able to short-circuit this healthy process? Was this new narrative launch orchestrated somehow?
You may have noticed by now that these successive waves of hysteria seem to materialize out of thin air and are suddenly everywhere all at once. Examples over the years have included global warming/"climate change," fear of nuclear energy, "systemic racism," "gender fluidity," "affordability," George Floyd, COVID, Flock cameras, data centers, and AI.
You may have gotten the feeling that there was some kind of confab cooking these things up, so that by the time they explode into the public consciousness, they are already fully formed, with many moving parts, activist organizations, websites, foot soldiers — and new legislation waiting in the wings to address the “crisis” they highlight.
And you might even have cottoned on to the fact that each wave has an ultimate, transformational goal, which always seems to leave the United States in worse shape than when it was supposedly mired in the “crisis.”
None of this is an accident, of course.
“A sad realization is that nearly every single moral panic in recent years is a politically funded operation, pure propaganda from a completely manipulated mainstream media,” observes physicist Andrew Côté. "The [lever] of control in a democracy is controlling the narrative, and public discourse is constantly under attack from foreign agents, subversive social elements, and political agent provacateurs."
But who would do this, and why? Côté explains:
What China wants most is to shut down new data centers in the US. It makes you think - How many COVID-era BLM riots that caused billions in damage are funded by political operations? How many nations have destroyed themselves with disastrous 'climate change policies' that have shuttered *nuclear plants* of all things, created energy dependence on foreign adversaries, slowed manufacturing.
The advantage of an open and free democratic society is the adaptation to change and meritocratic advancement of responses to new challenges, but this leaves it vulnerable to manipulation and subversion in the name of free speech. So of course there are anti-data center funding campaigns across the Midwest and in every state.
And now it is the enemy within - the politicization of a technology of liberation and economic freedom in the guise of 'safety' […]
Côté’s musings were sparked by a post from Parker Thayer, a twenty-something investigative journalist who deserves major props for catching something interesting about Coxon's departure from Anthropic: It looks an awful lot like the moment a brand-new anti-tech campaign — a panic — was launched.
Thayer managed to pinpoint the very second this anti-tech putsch burst forth from the shadows of the planning phase to the stage lights of the narrative-building phase. This is how leftists have always built momentum to effect the changes they want, of course — convince the public that there's A Crisis!, and thus build political pressure for the next phase: codification.
Thayer's investigative analysis is brilliant, and once you see the facts of how this messaging went down, you can't unsee them:
This post looks like the start of a VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion. Let me show you how it works:
1.) This guy, with minimal followers and no previous account activity, goes to the Wall Street Journal which publishes an exclusive with quotes from him on his resignation 18 minutes BEFORE this post goes up. Planning was clearly done in advance.
That right there is damning enough, in my opinion. But don't imagine for a minute the planners stopped there.
2.) Within hours, it has tens of thousands of reposts and the account has 100k+ followers. The post is punchy, quotable, it almost seems professionally written. The first three accounts to quote tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement beforehand, so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely.
According to Grok those accounts are @_NathanCalvin (General Counsel at Encode AI), @peterwildeford (Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network), and @DKokotajlo (Head of the AI Futures Project), all of which are up-and-coming AI-Doomer policy advocacy nonprofits.
Thayer details these three reporters' anti-AI bona fides (and you can read his full post to see that) before continuing:
What are the odds that the first three quote tweets of Coxon’s post would all be major AI-restriction policy advocates funded generously by the same donor, who also happens to be one of the leading investors in, and a board member of, Anthropic, the company Coxon was resigning from? And all within 15 minutes of posting (two within ten)?
3.) Jacob Coxon doesn’t have much of a resume, but we do know that, in 2022, he got a $20,159 scholarship for the “long term future scholarship program” from the Good Ventures Foundation, one of the philanthropic vehicles of Dustin Moskovitz, a notorious AI-doomer who has spent tens if not hundreds of millions on policy advocacy to strictly regulate AI, while also being an Anthropic Investor himself.
It also just so happens that the 14th person to quote Coxon’s post was @MaxNadeau_ (27 minutes after posting) who is the program officer for the Technical AI Safety team at Coefficient Giving, another of Moskovitz’s philanthropic spending vehicles. Max is not a frequent poster, his last posts before quoting Coxon were before Labor Day, but he was remarkably quick off the mark for this one.
4.) Basically every major Democrat politician and candidate has suddenly glommed on to this post, and conveniently, as the people cry out [for] answers, Bernie Sanders already has a bill written to “ban super intelligence” and regulate AI into oblivion, and will be releasing later this week. […] isn’t it fortuitous that this whistleblower came forward with his oh-so scary stories so close in proximity to the release of the most radical piece of AI legislation ever introduced?
The media quickly jumped onto the bandwagon, with even Fox News interviewing spokesman Coxon. And the politics-media complex will continue to amplify these fears in the coming days. Just this morning, Axios added its contribution with an article titled “Congress gripped by AI panic after doomsday warnings.” It reiterates the dire warnings early on:
Driving the news: Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon kicked off the frenzy Tuesday with a post on X declaring that "the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade."
- Coxon quit his job at the AI giant after just four months to publicly raise the alarm about the dangers of the technology, giving up his equity in the process, Axios' Madison Mills reported.
- His warning was echoed by several current Anthropic employees, with one, Evan Hubinger, responding on X that "we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!"
- "AI developers believe their technology could cause human extinction," wrote another, Samuel Marks. "This could happen in the next few years."
Oh noes! We're all going to die!
Hmm … could kill us all in a few years … where have I heard that before? Ah, yes!
This Greta Thunberg post turns 8 today.
— Chris Martz (@ChrisMartzWX) June 21, 2026
Time flies. 🥹 pic.twitter.com/W5padaV3S3
Axios goes on to describe all the stalwart Democrat legislators chomping at the bit to smother in the cradle start regulating the emerging technology: “‘This is an enormous issue and should be one of our top priorities in the next Congress,’ Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.) told Axios, saying Republicans ‘should be ashamed that they did absolutely nothing the last four years.’”
Part of the reason these panics work is that they contain a kernel of truth. As my colleague Rick Moran frequently notes, AI does indeed have the potential to become menacing. And as many perfectly sensible PJ Media VIPs argue in the comments of my pro-camera pieces, the data these devices collect, combined with AI tools, can indeed fall into the wrong hands. (And yes, sorry, but the China-Soros-Indivisible clown car is behind the anti-Flock movement, too — they love to hobble effective law enforcement. But I digress.)
But remember always that the people behind these panics are the enemy of the nation. Their goal is demoralization, disorder, destabilization, retardation, and regression — anything that weakens Western culture, especially the USA. They might be domestic Marxists, globalists, Islamists, the CCP, Russians, or any combination of these and/or other enemies.
If you are Team AI Development, call out this psy-op for what it is. If you are Team Caution, don't be too quick to abandon your rational persuasion to ride this new tiger. A panic and its attendant pressure campaign is no way to decide something this important.
Basically, we're in a Manhattan Project moment. No one with a soul wanted the Bomb to exist, but the Bomb was going to exist, one way or another. Thus, our concern was whether we or our enemies created it first. In such a situation, the most moral (not to mention the most existential) option is for us to get there first.
Related: Data Centers and Flock Cameras and AI, Oh My!
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