The “Effective Altruists” want you scared, stupid and subservient.
Today’s post is a sneak preview of the “Future Shock” section of the forthcoming Sovereign Capitalist Letter (get our latest report and a sample issue here).
Just heading into mid-September, a purported moral panic broke out amongst the frontier AI leaders that their own products were “too dangerous” and so the only remedy would be for the government to regulate all AI models.
Weeks earlier, Bernie Sanders had introduced The Ban AI-Superintelligence Act, that would make it illegal to create an AI model that was more intelligent than humans, going so far as to prescribe a 20-year prison term for any person who did and the “corporate death penalty” for companies.
JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Senator Bernie Sanders introduces bill to permanently ban AI that exceeds human intelligence.
Violators would face up to 20 years in prison. pic.twitter.com/y2pk79zQlQ
— Watcher.Guru (@WatcherGuru) September 3, 2026
Sanders’ Bill is truly the domain of dystopian sci-fi. It reminded me of an episode from the ill-fated Twilight Zone reboot (“Examination Day“) which culminated in a distraught couple mourning their child, who had just been exterminated by the state for testing too high on his pre-adolescent IQ test.
Examination Day. pic.twitter.com/PrKGnh7y4x
— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) September 27, 2026
It all started with a “resignation in public” tweet from one Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic employee, on September 8th posted his parting thoughts on X, stating that AI could exterminate humanity within 10 years.
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
One of Anthropic’s trust and safety leads, Evan Hubinger, then endorsed the tweet, citing a “non-zero chance” of 10% or more that such an outcome was possible.
That original resignation tweet, now closing in on 200 million views, which emanated from a heretofore unknown X account, less than a year old, with no followers, and two name changes in the last six months went absolutely viral – with some well-timed, fortuitous boosting from some of the biggest “AI Alignment” personalities on the internet, and then the Wall Street Journal came out with an “exclusive” on the story, ….which actually went live on the WSJ site 18 minutes before Coxon’s tweet.
Before long Sam Altman said we “definitely” need more government regulation on AI and even Elon Musk chimed in and agreed that the frontier labs should be reviewing each other’s models for safety.
Within days a full-blown hysteria was underway – for me it bore all the hallmarks of mass formation psychosis or at least a well-organized attempt to manufacture one.
Within a week, King Charles was speaking at an AI Safety summit at Buckingham Palace, urging government oversight and increased regulation of AI…
“Surely we need sufficient means of control before it is all too late?” the King ruminated.
Also, that guy behind him, looking rather pleased with himself, is “Tino” Cuéllar, Anthropic’s Chief Global Affairs Officer.
The “AI Safety Summit” itself was announced on September 7th, leaked via Politico – the day before the Coxon tweet that ignited what had become at this point, a global(ist?) furor.
Even the Pope weighed on AI safety, and not to be left behind, Bill Gates hit the Sunday talk circuit this past weekend with another doozy of a soundbite:
“AI is powerful enough to cause a billion deaths” – which means we need to turn control of it over to politicians and a new class of global inspectors.”
Several things about this relatively sudden AI panic did not pass the smell test, among them, the facts emerging around Coxon himself, who had “barely been at the company long enough to find the bathroom” (as the All-In guys put it), turned out to be neck-deep in the “Effective Altruism” movement, a well-connected network of young WEF types, which espoused global governance over potentially harmful technologies like AI.
He had received scholarships and grants from the EA Infrastructure Fund, the Long Term Future Fund and was a fellow at the Newspeak House in London (yes, newspeak).
Who are the Effective Altruists?
Effective Altruism (EA) is a movement that purports to “use evidence and quantitative reasoning to identify the most consequential problems and direct resources toward reducing them”.
Tired: World Economic Forum
Wired: Effective Altruism pic.twitter.com/zNGNfMNWkW— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) September 16, 2026
Love the euphemistic language (it’s actually what ChatGPT will use when you ask it). The punch line for the EA raison d’être is, as usual, a society ordered under expert, technocratic management – their expertise, their management.
One of their earlier recruits was Sam Bankman-Fried, whose FTX empire was run by a cadre of EAs at the top and who seed-funded Anthropic as the lead investor with $500M of a $580M Series B round in 2021.
A recurring EA strand is its fixation on existential risk from advanced AI, advocating stronger safety research, governance, and oversight to reduce the chance of catastrophic or irreversible outcomes.
We’ve all seen this movie before, with global warming, then with Bitcoin mining (causing more global warming) and now, AI exterminating humanity.
The common through-line is that the “problem” is some unfalsifiable calamity that could happen someday and for which the only logical response is to put a bunch of globalist technocrats in charge of… well, everything.
What people didn’t seem to understand, then or now – is that the problem isn’t really about the problem – I’ve long reported on proposals that would make personal choice and individual liberty things of the past, because letting people think for themselves would be “too dangerous” for the problem at hand.
Global warming meant personal carbon quotas, limits on travel, even living space, according to some “degrowth” advocates, how many new outfits you could buy.
listening to greenoid Ulrike Herrmann sell her degrowth plan for Germany: no personal automobiles ofc, living space to be rationed at 50 sq metres/ person, train speed capped at 100 km/hour & train travel also to be rationed (everyone will get a personal kilometre allotment). pic.twitter.com/JTlTlVDwVm
— eugyppius (@eugyppius1) October 30, 2024
The panic around Bitcoin mining wasn’t about that, it was about energy – and who gets to decide how much you’re allowed to consume and what you can use it for.
Bitcoin mining today, Netflix tomorrow. Why not? Once you concede oversight to some external authority for one form of energy use, you’ve tacitly done so for all of them.
The problem that politicians and aspiring technocrats see with AI is that it grants the rabble cognitive superpowers.
More specifically, open-source AI does.
Frontier models are proprietary. They have guardrails, training biases and actively scan and filter your conversations for potential safety issues. It’s arguably their purview to do so.
But it’s the open-source software movement that is the unfiltered Promethean agent here and just you wait – we’ll soon see what the ultimate target of this AI Doom cult really is: open-source LLMs.
That is why the frontier labs are gleefully courting government oversight – not because their own products are “too dangerous” (if so, then why are you going public?) but because oversight instantly creates an AI oligopoly – a cartel, namely Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, on the inside – and everything else, effectively outlawed – at least that would be the preferred outcome.
This is the exact playbook I’ve told you about in the past, one that was described to me personally by an EIR from a Bay St. private equity firm in a meeting with two out of the four Big Four Canadian banks, back around 2015 – talking about Bitcoin:
“You get funded, you get out front, then you work with the government to create the regulations around it, and *BOOM*, you get to turn around and pull the ladder up behind you”
I still remember the look of absolute glee on his face when he got to that last bit. When I got home, I took a shower.
What To Do About It
I’ve been dutifully building out local compute capacity – both at home and thanks to our CTO, easyDNS now has a modest GPU farm out at our main datacenter.
I make it a point to download the latest open-weight models, Qwen, GLM, DeepSeek – which are, ironically, all Chinese…
But that won’t last. In fact, it’s already changing. We recently had “another country heard from” with the Japanese NII LLM-jp-4, Swallow, PLaMo and Rakuten AI 3.0 models weighing in.
France has Mistral, even Canada (yes, Canada) has Cohere Command A+ (my SolomonAI demo was, in case anybody needed to be told, a joke):
The newest AI superpower is… Canada 🇨🇦. pic.twitter.com/xb7nVy796n
— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) June 7, 2026
And from elsewhere in “Big Tech,” there are Google’s Gemma 4.0 and IBM Granite.
Any of these models could be used to start iterating software, weights, and the next generation of more powerful open-source LLMs.
In other words, it’s over.
The incumbent ruling caste basically sees this, and viscerally realize that the entire edifice of Industrial Age institutions are ripe for existential disruption. I’ve written about this many times. We’re transitioning from a linear, top-down world to a network-shaped, decentralized one.
So the next best thing they can do, since they can’t put the genie back in the bottle, is to convince the masses that AI is bad, and rogue AIs are going to literally exterminate humanity.
Hence the AI doom psyop (with another wave breaking out right now around swarms of rogue AIs), and, of course, this has become a political issue.
Now, the same people who were wearing N95 masks in 2025, adding their pronouns to their names, putting the Ukrainian flag in their bio, keying Teslas and stomping around in “No Kings” parades are now protesting data centers.
They want you scared, stupid and subservient, instead of spending your time creating software, building out your personal business empires, not to mention analyzing public data and proofreading all these hypothetical models they use as a justification for incessantly changing the rules.
What they really need are legions of frightened and stupid voters, not cognitively supercharged and wildly entrepreneurial or creative cyberpunks.
AI Doom vs AI Boom is a choice, and the choice is yours.
Today’s post was a sneak preview from the forthcoming edition of The Sovereign Capitalist. You can get our latest special report for paid members, and the next edition of the newsletter when you grab this deal.
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I did not expect such a damn good article so early in the week. Well said. Excellent.
>Global warming meant personal carbon quotas, limits on travel, even living space, according to some “degrowth” advocates, how many new outfits you could buy.
When will people understand that they don't have the freedom to live in a reality of their choice? Global warming means crops failing and people going hungry, and that has consequences. What are you willing to contemplate to prevent civilization from collapsing?
Apparently, some people are willing to contemplate that crude oil = diesel = dollars, and therefore the crude oil stats from the US government are perfectly true, even though they make no sense to anybody who is informed.
With AI, it's the same thing. How hard are you willing to hallucinate? How out of touch with reality are you happy to be?
Mary Wilson – about procrastination
Bloody brilliant, on target, and perfect warning for those with an IQ above room temperature. Thank you very much for clearly laying out the topography of LLMs (I don't use 'AI' or 'SI' as 'intelligence' doesn't come into it!) https://austrianpeter.substack.com/p/artificial-non-intelligence-egg-on?
You started strong with a potentially viral narrative… and then you sabotage yourself with unnecessary distractions by trying to score points against political foes.
"We’re transitioning from a linear, top-down world to a network-shaped, decentralized one"
You are looking at the future through very rose-coloured glasses. AI is indeed a problem but not because of its feared "intelligence". It Instead, AI is the tireless tool of the surveillance state–both private and its governmental proxies. While secret police need to sleep and be fed AI toils tirelessly day in, day out. The more data AI can be fed, the more effective it is.
There is now good evidence, for example, that Amazon is using AI as a tool to identify and thwart unionization drives. In Canada, your home and native land, the federal government is introducing legislation under the guise of protecting minors that does nothing to hold corporations accountable for their privacy and security violations and instead creates new avenues for corporate (& government) surveillance.
The risk AI poses is amplified by the non-stop data collection that takes place day in, day out 24/7. Your smart watch is collecting physiological data 24/7. Companies have carefully crafted privacy and data collection policies with clauses that permit them to resell data and protect them from (class action) liability for breaches.
We have seen how, even in a country like the United States with all its vaunted checks-and-balances, it is very hard for the population to curtail the power of a leader whose goals are at odds with those of the population. Fast forward a few years.
In 2018 Apple hit a market capitalisation of 1 trillion USD. Eight years later it is skirting 5 trillion USD. The concentration of wealth is staggering. It also reflects a concentration of power. And, this is before the full deployment of AI agents as servants of surveillance capitalism and the surveillance state.
>Now, the same people who were wearing N95 masks in 2025
I'm still wearing CAN99 masks (made by Vitacore in BC)
in 2026, COVID was never eradicated, it just stopped
getting talked about and when even the half assed control
measures were dropped that tricked the majority into
thinking "it's over".
The reality didn't change just because the regulations did.
I mask when in shared indoor places to reduce my risk
of catching COVID or if I do catch it anyways and have
an asymptomatic case where I don't know to isolate I at
least reduce the risk of passing it to the next person by
masking. If I caught it and knew I'd immediately
quarantine for 3 weeks. To do otherwise would be
unethical in my view, I refuse to be part of the problem.
If you see me wearing one outdoors I'm probably going
somewhere and it's simply easier to put it on at home
in front of the mirror and leave it on until I've left the last
place I'm stopping that day rather than fiddling around
taking it on an off outside of every place I need to go into.
I've had 4 dumb-asses shouting at me because they
saw me wearing a mask this year, this is the first year
this has happened. It's like they are disappointed that
COVID only had 4 "attributable fatalities" in Manitoba
this year instead of 5 like last year. (It's probably higher,
just those are the ones where COVID was conclusively
proven to be the cause.)
http://moonie.ca/MB_COVID_data_Screenshot_2025_08_29.jpeg
http://moonie.ca/MB_COVID_data_Screenshot_2026_09_04.jpeg
More likely they have been fooled by someone's
misinformation campaign, at least I hope there
aren't people cheering on more deaths.
With all 3 global superpowers hell bent on sabotaging
each other without regard for the collateral damage
there is a lot of deliberate misinformation being pushed
by multiple well funded sources.
I've known for a long time the vaccine we have is useless
at stopping the spread, it just makes the disease less
severe if you catch it. It's not ineffective, just insufficiently
effective, it's not like the Smallpox vaccine was or the
Polio vaccine is.
So, no, I don't want to arm twist anyone into getting
the vaccine just because I'm wearing a mask. I'd like
if people would cooperate with other containment
measures and maybe one day actually end COVID
like we did with Smallpox. Just this one we'll have
to end without a vaccine and do it entirely on other
measures. We are humans, we are supposed to be
good at making things extinct! ^_-
So masks are one thing and the vaccine is another,
don't conflate them just because the political class
has.
Ironically if every country did what Taiwan did from
the beginning we'd have had COVID extinct before
the vaccine was even ready and avoided the whole
misguided division that ensued.
It's a shame everyone else kept letting it COVID run
and multiply and mutate until Taiwan's luck ran out
and they got breached….or maybe their leadership
eventually got sloppy when vaccine finally became
available to them and they thought it was enough.
Basically I've just accepted that at this point I now
live in a third world country where disease is just
allowed to run and nobody but me is watching out
for me.
I dread the day when the noisiest of my fellow
Canadians get convinced that water treatment
isn't cool anymore and I have to start boiling
and/or filtering my drinking water because the
political class decided it was easier to cave to
them instead of looking out for the population
as a whole. -_-
>adding their pronouns to their names,
Nope, not doing that, hell I'm not that fussy
about names, assign me a number if that's
easier for you. ^_^
>putting the Ukrainian flag in their bio,
Nope, not doing that either. Though really at the same
time I'm not going to object to anyone doing what they
have to to push the Russians out. I was definitely
annoyed with Putin's decision to invade Ukraine.
I don't really even have any of what would be called
modern social media, just old-style web pages and
presence on some specialised message boards or
comment sections.
>keying Teslas
Definitely not doing that, I was rather happy to see
Trump cracking down on that when local authorities
in various areas where negligently letting vandalism
slide.
>and stomping around in “No Kings” parades
Nope, I thought that was rather hysterical. I've seen
conspiracy theories about every president going back
to Obama that never came to pass. There probably
was before then but I wasn't on the right part of the
internet to hear about it.
>are now protesting data centers.
Nope, not doing that either. Of course here in Manitoba
we haven't been getting our electric bills doubled or
more. At least some parts of the US seem to have
defects in how electric utilities are managed and/or
regulated that's causing the cost of needed upgrades
to the grid to power these data centers being spread
over other rate payers rather than being paid in full
by the new data centers that are making the upgrades
needed.
It doesn't help that the CCP is funding fake activist
groups to manipulate the American population into
trying to fight data centers because as said above
all 3 super powers are hell bent on sabotaging each
other and they want to hold back the USA thinking
that will help the PRC get ahead of the USA.
So the AI data center thing in the USA is a mixed bag,
some legitimate concerns but also some hysteria.
It's seems to have been a non-issue here in Canada.
Basically AI is a tool that can fill some niche rolls
when wielded by a diligent person to do something
that would otherwise be beyond one person's
scope. AI in the hands of sloppy people will
produce slop. Trying to throw AI at everything
because it's "trending" will backfire in a lot of
cases where it's not the appropriate tool.
Ultimately when we get past the current phase of
throwing AI at everything and seeing what sticks
subsidized by misallocated capital and regulatory
glitches we'll reach a point where anyone using it
will have to pay the real cost and it will only be used
for the things and in the ways that make economic
sense.
Whether AI works in a particular use case or it
doesn't work in a particular use case a human
manager's decision to use it will have
consequences either way. So things are going
to be a rough ride until the managerial class
figures out what works and what doesn't and
we adjust to whatever the new reality ends up
being.
Hopefully the cost of the overcapacity in the
electrical grid from the overbuild doesn't just
get pushed off onto every other rate payer when
the bubble bursts.
You are most likely right about the attempt to use
regulatory capture to monopolise AI. Regulatory
capture has definitely gotten worse over time, I'm
not sure how to fix it because so few people are
willing to vote for someone incorruptible.
To finish off going back to COVID:
Too many on the left were OK with prematurely
pretending it was over when it was their guy
saying it rather than the other guy saying it.
They just wanted to use it for their other purposes.
As soon as their guy was in most of the left
suddenly became OK with letting public health
slide.
At the same time too many on the right were
assuming people's view on public health correlate
to their views on other things and turned basic
public health into a left vs right thing. It's not, it's
a "do you want to live in a first world country or a
third world country" thing.
It is possible to have both capitalism and good
public health.
That said I have found a lot of the people who are
also still COVID aware are very far left of me on
most other issues. Left or right we are the people
for whom COVID was and is a genuine concern,
we are not just blindly following someone who we
think is "our guy".
Don't assume someone's politics based on how
they look or what their views are on one thing
because of their views on another, it doesn't
always corelate. Examine each idea on it's own
merits regardless of who the idea comes from
or what you thought of their other ideas before.
I'd like to live in the kind of world where I
didn't have to mask but I don't see the level
of cooperation needed to get there being
forthcoming.