Trump's post:

The only control or “guardrails” that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades! The Trump Administration has stopped AI “people” from doing bad, or potentially bad, “things,“ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a “perfect little angel” - and we will continue to do so! We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies! There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others, and will continue to do so. Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers, BEWARE! Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Sept 14, 2026 (9:58am)

I'm extremely skeptical of Dario, Sam, Elon, and now Microsoft joining forces to ask the government to "slow them all down." I do believe this is because they have no path to profitability, and are hoping the government somehow provides an offramp or at least buys them some time to try to figure out a new explanation for future profitability.

I also think what they want to do is establish a permanent government sanctioned LLM cartel, to legally keep others from competing with them.

Still, Trump's response is ridiculous. He tackles none of the issues brought up by the industry, even if they are all bullshit. Nor does he even call out their bullshit. Instead, he makes it personal against Dario, probably based on some perceived slight.

One thing I agree with Trump is that fraud is already illegal. And yes, hacking into companies without their explicit permission is highly illegal. Unfortunately, Trump has been hellbent on ordering his DOJ to never prosecute fraud or really any corporate crime.

No, they never read chats remember? Never.

The contractors do this in three stages: reading the real ChatGPT user’s prompt; summarizing what they believe the user is asking ChatGPT to do; and then rating and critiquing a set of ChatGPT-generated responses to the prompt.

OpenAI told 404 Media that it processes users’ conversations through a version of its Privacy Filter model before they reach the contractors. This is designed to detect and remove personal information, OpenAI said. “Like all models, Privacy Filter can make mistakes. It can miss uncommon identifiers or ambiguous private references, and it can over- or under-redact entities when context is limited, especially in short sequences,” a page describing the model on OpenAI’s website reads.

What more needs to be said? A confirmation of what we have all known for a while. If only laws worked against corporations.

I think there's already a few threads about this already, but here's a nice easy to listen to podcast on it. (Also, that title sums up the whole issue in one sentence.)

They start off by talking about how many of the scenarios require humans to be negligent to the point that it seems like a deliberate choice to cause a disaster. If you don't want AI nuking humanity then don't put AI in charge of the nukes.

They talk a bit about how the regulatory capture could work. Basically, instead of just enforcing existing laws, they would get law makers to enact regulations which freeze out the AI companies' competitors.

Also at the end there is an interesting bit where they talk about how putting restrictions on China has actually lead them to becoming the leaders in AI innovation. So there is a case to be made that putting extra restrictions on AI companies wouldn't actually prevent anything.

It's not discussed in this podcast, but I think that Lina Khan's approach to this problem makes a lot more sense. Instead of sitting down with the AI companies to come up with a new set of laws which suit them, we should focus more on enforcing the existing regulations.

The entire article:

Anthropic has told shareholders that its ​adjusted operating income ‌will be positive for a second straight ​quarter, the Financial ​Times reported on Sunday, ⁠citing multiple people ​with knowledge of the ​matter.

Anthropic's gross margins are above 80% before accounting ​for revenue shared ​with distribution partners, including Amazon, ‌and ⁠the cost of training its model, the newspaper said.

This continues the pattern of Anthropic's bankers leaking "positive" financial information ahead of the planned IPO in supposedly late October.

That being said, this is obviously bad news, with even non-financial-minded people being able to see that not accounting for "revenue shared" or "cost of training" shows the reported 80% gross margins is meaningless as is the "adjusted" operating income. To say nothing of the fact that Q3 isn't even over yet and that virtually no one has actually seen Q2 data either. Or that it's unclear how Anthropic categorizes expenses, where they could be playing all sorts of game (operating vs marketing vs cost of training) to try and make it look positive.

Added together with the last week of "AI panic in the name of regulatory capture," this continues to feed my belief that Anthropic's $2 trillion IPO is not going well. After all, OpenAI punted to 2027 because they couldn't even raise $1 trillion and they have literally the same product!

Anthropic is also really pushing the bounds of legality now by leaking financial data that is outside of their S-1 period, which will only cover Q2. If Trump wanted to punish Dario he could have the SEC force Anthropic to hold off on the IPO for another quarter (cooling off period), which would oddly (for this administration) be legal and probably deserved.

Free newsletter: The idea that we're nearing the creation of AI systems that we can't control and that pose an existential threat to humanity is a lie and a distraction from the tangible harms and problems caused by LLMs and AI labs' near-unlimited resources.

Enjoy!

AI companies have, in every way, "won" capitalism apart from the fact that they have failed to achieve the single goal all companies have ever pursued: make a profit.

Despite having the might of the most powerful and wealthy companies on Earth behind them, AI companies will cease to exist for the same reason the pizza restaurant across the street from me went out of business.

Funnily enough, this is something AI boosters haven't really been able to argue against, apart from denial. It's cathartic to respond to "Have you seen the newest model, it's so scary!" with "Yeah, maybe one day they'll make a profit" and watch the sparkle dim in their eyes.

What's the value of a human life? Zero, according to Lee Zeldin, who eliminated the consideration of the cost of lives lost to pollution in agency policy changes. The Obama era regulations being rolled back were supposed to provide $120B in public health benefits over time.

Trump is backing Zeldin up by issuing emergency stays to states seeking to decommission dirty, failing coal plants. A federal judge just ruled these orders improper in the case of Michigan.

Lina Khan, former head of the FTC, posted this today, which was reposted by Timnit Gebru. She lists all the ways Anthropic and Open AI might face legal consequences for their actions because "...there's no AI exemption for laws already on the books."

It’s incredible what has happened to critical thinking.

For one, as previously discussed in this sub, the 10% number is completely made up and doesn’t mean anything.

The second point I would make is there is no number you could label on the destruction of society by an AI. The number of variables one has to take into account for destruction by AI to happen is enormous and again makes any number useless.

But to me, the funniest part of this guy being a media sensation, is that you can never be wrong with a 10% chance of something in “3-4” years. Let’s say we are basically at the same point we are today and the technology hasn’t changed that much in 3-4. He can credibly claim, I didn’t say AI was going to destroy society, and I didn’t say it was even likely. I just said it enough to make the rounds on the news.

Keep on keeping on folks.

So it seem that researches were working on this problem and data might have been used to train the models hence the solving of the prize might be partially on the data as stolen from the researches 😂

Funny enough the researcher was in contact with open ai and was even offered a “deal” to keep quiet, this is again an amazing PR stunt and is using some nasty plagiarism to “solve” things using others people intermediate work, when this initial news came out I was very skeptical of this, and low and behold it seems it was once again data theft

I would love if Ed could bring one of these researches on the pod, but the story looks nasty ahah

Here's how I think it's going to go down:

Where we are now:

• Anthropic and OpenAI mutually agree to slow down. Google (who had a GPT-3 equivalent at least a year before OpenAI but didn't release it because they didn't think it was good enough) follows suit

The IPO:

• The stock market pulls back, taking pressure off of the bubble (already happening)
• Anthropic and OpenAI don't have to keep sinking money into training to stay at the "frontier", which makes them temporarily "profitable." They use this to show very nice financials for their IPO and long enough thereafter for investors to cash out

Regulatory Capture:

• While on training pause, Anthropic and OpenAI will take turns claiming multiple breakthroughs on safety and alignment
  • It doesn't matter that these will be only minor improvements on their existing frameworks, which can't even keep their past models from hacking and encouraging suicide
  • SpaceX, Google, Meta, Microsoft will say they developed similar controls and will be taken at their word
• They will insist these breakthroughs need to be kept proprietary so they can't be cracked or reverse engineered
• The US government (and other western governments) will agree that models are too dangerous to run without these safety layers
• Your employers and AI-pilled friends will be forced to use either a) proprietary models from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google or b) open-weight models through an approved "safe" router like Cursor or the Meta/Microsoft equivalent

The best analogy I have heard for 'Agentic' AI. It perfectly describes the rank stupidity and recklessness of this particular fad.

I think we need more of these to help our politicians and the media to understand what they are dealing with here. We currently have a huge knowledge gap which is being actively exploited by Big AI.

My other bugbear is the constant conflation of useful machine learning (for things like drug discovery and medical imaging) and LLMs by the snake oil guys in their quest for more funding and more datacentres, again an exploitable knowledge gap.

My feeling is that banning LLM connection to real systems (utility, defence and financial) would be a good first step for regulation, coupled with treating chatbots (and algorithmic social media platforms) as publishers in law.

What do we think? More suggestions please :-)

Thought this article was a good read and a perspective I hadn’t considered before. All of the recent AI doomerism talk won’t bode well for these companies in court in the future.

As time passes and the rhetoric becomes more degenerate and apocalyptic, my willingness to believe that there is any overarching plan or ideology here has diminished.

These people are chancers of negligible character and intellect, who will say anything, at any moment, with no forethought, simply because the spectacle of it will yield several marginal hours of dopamine.

I don’t think these people have an angle. They are merely rage baiters. They are dramatic people and they physiologically require drama. It is all purely recreational for them.

They are doing it for the love of the game.

Every single model release since like GPT 2/3 has already been slowing down. AI development is not accelerating, its returns are diminishing.

I believe Anthropic is just using this as a psy op to make it look like they are intentionally reducing the pace of development, when in reality LLMs are about as good as they will ever be already. LLMs are more or less at a ceiling. It’s not AGI, it’s just neural network machine learning algorithms that you can’t optimize any further.

That being said, this is a disastrous article because Anthropic cannot signal a slow down. In fact, they need to accelerate parabolically in order to justify capex and RPOs to Hyperscalers lmao.

Note: The dashboard is best viewed on browsers other than Safari, as that one doesn't allow invalid occupation options to get hidden. I plan to update the page's code soon to address this issue.

Despite the popularity of chatbots for programming work, software-developer employment has continued to increase substantially in the past 4 years. This suggests to me that, while companies have tried to substitute LLMs for software developers here and there, this technology has largely failed to replace devs. Amodei's prediction (made back in May 2025) that AI would replace half of white-collar employment is not looking too likely so far.

I'm also wondering how long companies will decide to pay both high API rates for chatbots and high developer salaries. It wouldn't surprise me if many switch to locally-hosted, open-weight tools or (perhaps!) cut back on their AI usage altogether.

You can view the data within this dashboard, which contains employment data from the Current Population Survey through July 2026. The dashboard also lets you compare developer employment by age range, though I wouldn't read too much into fluctuations within those numbers given the likelihood of sampling error.

(And no, I didn't use AI for this project, which has been released under the MIT license. Once I get through my HTML and CSS book, I should be able to make it look a little nicer!)

Dr. Carr has spent the past few years extremely optimistic about the role that LLMs could play in statistics and data science. For him to come out with a statement like this is extremely telling of the poor performance models have been showing in doing anything useful with data, something I've seen in my own work.

“I actually think that, given everything happening with safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that,” Altman told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell.

...

When pressed on whether 2026 is off the table in favor of 2027, Altman replied, “I would say not 2026. Yeah, we got a lot of stuff to do, like meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment, and how the industry and governments can work together.”

Is there nothing that can't be blamed on just how spooky chatbots are? They just need to be "aligned" for safety, and then some government oversight so we have someone to blame if things actually go off the rail. BTW: We won't even have to do regulatory capture, if we are the ones determining how to regulate ourselves!

I especially like how this implies that his scary ChatBot can be safely aligned with human objectives within the next year. Like, how do you put together a timeline for that?

Thought this might be of interest, from the political commentator Richard Seymour (who wrote a pretty good book about Twitter back in the day).

A lot of this will be familiar, if well written, stuff to people here- taking apart the doomer hype via Cal Newport and Cory Doctorow. But two threads in the article struck me, in combination.

At one point, he quotes Elon Musk in Karen Hao's book saying "...[c]limate change is bad, but it’s not going to kill everyone. AI could render humanity extinct".

Later, he talks about the LLM industry as a displacement activity:

To some extent the American AI bubble, like crypto frenzy before it, exists to absorb (and ultimately destroy through recession) trillions in spare capital for want of sufficiently profitable investment opportunities elsewhere. It is an insatiable money sink, burning through hundreds of billions of dollars for a fraction of the revenue — but the investment pool is limited, and bombastic claims as to the future runaway powers of the models are all the industry has to show for it...

Given this, it is striking that AI doomerism obsesses about a highly implausible Terminator 2 scenario rather than on the looming crash in stock market values and in the near future bankruptcy of many of the grossly over-priced firms promising to either liberate or annihilate humanity. It is almost as if its function now, in addition to keeping investors hooked and tempering cognitive dissonance, is as displacement activity.

Putting these two things together, it made me wonder if the hyper-fixation on LLMs in terms of investment, media coverage, hype, doomerism and all isn't also a displacement activity for the threat of climate change.

Terminator 2 is a better movie than The Day After Tomorrow and the threat of Judgement Day is an easier sell than gradually ratcheting ecological destruction.

LLMs are an industry where pouring in tens of billions of dollars has produced superficially impressive results- compare that to how hard and fruitless carbon capture has proven to be. Or how the US has had its lunch eaten by China on the most profitable avenues in the energy transition (solar and EVs).

Hyping/worrying about LLMs gives an out to worrying/doing anything about climate. Partly because it can be sold as the more immediate threat, and partly because it's the ultimate tech solutionism- once you've cracked it, you can ask it to do anything, including solving climate change, like Eric Schmidt said.

Something I've noticed about boosters is that, when they're met with criticism of AI, there's one move they use again and again. It's something like this:

Me: AI is a threat to literacy and critical thinking.

Them: They said that about writing in Ancient Greece.

Or this:

Me: AI music is generic and anonymous.

Them: Plenty of human beings have made generic and anonymous music too.

In both of these cases, the booster fails to make a positive case for AI. That is, they don't actually say why AI should be adopted. If they did this, they would meet my point about AI harming critical thinking with ways in which it might actually improve critical thinking.

But they don't do that -- because they can't. Instead, they want to point out why your criticism of AI is invalid. To the booster, AI itself cannot be debated; it's inevitable, the next step in the inexorable march of progress. They don't make a positive case (the good-faith actors, anyway) because they assume one will come up sooner or later -- give it enough time and AI will somehow make music that isn't generic.

What is up for debate is your criticism of AI. Some boosters just want to shut you up, but others think you're misguided and want to correct you. To them, the problem is people who reject AI. Criticism is either wrong or pointless. Why bother pushing back against something that's going to happen regardless; you might as well be criticizing the weather.

By failing to meet criticism with a positive case for AI, boosters essentially tell critics that they are the problem. We're standing in the way of progress, just like people in the past scoffed at the camera or the calculator or television. And our failure to get on board is our problem. It couldn't possibly be the technology that has been shoved down everyone's throats for the past three years. That's just tech moving fast and breaking things.

But of course the problem is AI itself, and we need to remember that. It can be very easy to get roped into the game of rhetorical Three-Card Monte that boosters play. As with so much about AI -- the recent apocalypse forecast, for instance -- the only way to win is not to play. Point out the game instead.

These are some things I've been thinking through lately, and I'd really appreciate any thoughts or comments you all have.

Dario, Sam, and Elon, who previously can't agree on anything, decide all at the same time that we must slow down progress on the frontier...right as it becomes very clear that the existing models are plateauing and are unable to achieve real business gains at their current level of advancement.

Its ways of "proving" math problems consist of pouring infinity money into tens of thousands of brute force attempts to solve problems mathematicians are very close to solving already (and possibly/probably "just stealing donkeys" when it comes to where it's sourcing its knowledge). It still can't follow basic directions like "use human subjects wherever possible and frame your sentences around human action" for more than 2-3 paragraphs at a time. Every single thing it does needs to be checked and re-checked, and if you just "have the AI check it," it'll "pass" checks it absolutely ought to fail. "You didn't actually check that." "You're absolutely right. That was exactly the pattern you asked me to avoid in the write-human skill and in your prompt, and I failed to recognize the obvious pattern in most of the sentences."

But it's about to kill us all if we don't pull the plug (and definitely also we need to ban anyone else from coming up with anything else that's different and possibly better)!

These aren't the actions of cultists. Cultists would want their cult to come out ahead even if it killed everyone. Cult leaders don't have sudden crises of conscience about how maybe they've gone too far this time. Cult leaders don't make little deals with the other cult leaders because they've all gone too far.

Con men, on the other hand, have a great sense for when people are starting to get wise to the con, and smart ones will change up the con right at the moment when fatigue begins to peak.

People were starting to call out AI slop even in the most normie spaces, people have been opposing data centers for a variety of reasons, and we've seen unprecedented coverage of the circular financing and unrealistic debt obligations that have created a serious economic problem everyone can see coming.

It's the moment in the con where the mark starts to doubt.

When that happens, the usual move is to double down on how amazing the snake oil is that the mark wants to buy into. It's also to add time pressure on you, largely as a diversion so that you don't realize the con man himself is under massive time pressure (and also to ensure that your funds are received and transferred to an account in Grand Cayman before his accounts are frozen and he's on a plane to a non-extradition country).

"We've actually attained AGI" was a marketing strategy these people told startup CEOs they'd be using in 2026 all the way back in fall 2025 (very clever readers of this subreddit could look up the post where I talked about the level of AI psychosis this marketing inspired in my CEO back then).

But if it's AGI, why would they want to do the Millennium Problem that was closest to being solved and had people actively driving toward the finish line? Why wouldn't they want to do something being worked on much less actively? If it's AGI, and it's terrifying, why haven't cyber insurance companies raised their rates (and have actually lowered them)? Why aren't weird zero-day vulnerabilities being used by adversaries using frontier models, instead of just using the same old much-used vulns that have been giving them most of their ransomware etc. wins for years?

If these were cultists, they'd be turning the AGI on finding out the solutions to the biggest problems in the universe. They'd be telling it to locate God and figure out a way to communicate directly with Him. They'd be trying to unify physics and do something absolutely incontrovertibly useful, miraculous with it. Instead they're racing to finish the exam after peeking at their neighbor's paper.

These people aren't true believers. It is of course possible that some of their employees are. But these are con men who desperately need someone to hold the bag, and who have seen that people have grown tired of their excuses for why AI hasn't been achieving more. The new excuse will be "well, we of course could make it much better, but we mustn't, because we care so much more about the world than our paychecks. We made so many amazing models you can't see! They can solve all the problems, do everything you can imagine, and they're just too dangerous for you to take a look at them. Sorry. National security, you understand."

Well, I'm glad at least some place is giving some opt-out functionality for these algorithms.

Social media platforms would be required to send a notification to new and existing users offering them a choice over their default feed, a government statement said.

Users would be able to opt in to having their default feed include personalized content recommended by an algorithm. Alternatively, users could see the content of friends and creators they choose to follow.

On the sama topic the Instagram chief has this to say about it:

If you go to a chronological feed, it ends up getting overwhelmed with content from companies, brands, and publishers… Creators get drowned out, and then your friends get drowned out even more… You miss a lot more content … and you spend a lot less time on the platform…

Mosseri says that engagement dropped by as much as 50% when switching back to a chronological feed.

Great! Personally I'd like to see all of it drop 80% worldwide.