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Add The New York Post on Google AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI suddenly started sounding a five-alarm fire last week, insisting their tech is just too good, developing too fast for humanity to handle and could kill us all.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wants to “slow the pace” of the entire AI industry and demanded government intervention. Just hours later, OpenAI chief Sam Altman chimed in to say he agreed, as did Elon Musk.
Business leaders were quick to point out that nothing is stopping these companies from independently slowing their innovation. But nobody would deliberately handicap themselves — it seems what they really want is for the government to bring in industry-wide regulation.
Such a move would quickly squelch many of the smaller players, while the biggest companies — namely Anthropic and OpenAI — would be able to ride it out.
It’s a well-worn playbook of regulatory capture: Incumbents warn of impending catastrophe and agitate for regulation, which handily prevents competitors from eclipsing them.
Amodei also advocated in a blog post for Washington to give frontier labs a so-called antitrust waiver, which would allow them to coordinate with one another without raising federal collusion or monopoly concerns — essentially a pass for companies to regulate themselves — to ensure safety.
Now, you don’t need an antitrust waiver to make sure technology is safe, as former FTC Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya pointed out. You do need one if you’re looking to coordinate on other areas beyond keeping people safe.
Any wavier, as Bedoya put it, “should be met with deep skepticism in light of the economics of the industry and the threat they face from open [source] models.”
In some respects, I can’t blame them for taking this approach. These companies have burned hundreds of billions in development and are still losing money — OpenAI lost approximately $39 billion in 2025 — so they depend on hitting record-setting values in their IPOs.
And while their technology may be used to cure cancer or infinitely increase productivity, the companies themselves won’t necessarily profit from such innovations.
Maybe they are sincere in their belief AI could doom the world, but it’s awfully convenient to push for regulation when they are on the cusp of cementing their role as worldwide leaders.
Anthropic’s public prospectus is expected within weeks and could value the giant at $2 trillion. OpenAI pulled their IPO plans, with reports suggesting they will now go public in 2027.
Amodei also has a history of causing alarm — such as in May 2025 when he said half of entry-level white collar-jobs could be eliminated by his new technology. For the record, AI has created more jobs than it has eliminated and the World Economic Forum predicts that will only continue.
The whistleblower behind the latest panic is also suspect. Jacob Coxon — the 27-year-old researcher who quit Anthropic after just four months, following three years at OpenAI — went viral warning the companies were “gambling with our lives.”
His post racked up more than 100 million views on X, despite the fact he had almost no prior history on the platform. And within the next few days he had landed wall-to-wall coverage and interviews with Fox, CNN, NBC, ABC, The New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.
Nothing odd about a young nerdy researcher with no known media experience dominating an entire news cycle. On Tuesday, he is slated to appear at the Future of Life Institute’s “Pro-Human Assembly” alongside figures such as Steve Bannon, Bernie Sanders, and Randi Weingarten (Sanders, for his part, has previously appeared alongside Chinese Communist Party officials at an event trying to slow the pace of AI).
Really? That’s Coxon’s solution after warning that AI could kill us all? Bring in a man old enough to be his grandfather and the widely reviled head of the Teachers Union to devise a plan? I could hardly conceive of a more bizarre, not to mention feckless, group to create a framework for reining in the most advanced technology known to mankind.
The best take was perhaps Clement Delangue, the CEO of AI company Hugging Face, who claimed asking Coxon “about AI extinction risk is like asking your AC guy about climate change.”
Amid all this AI doom and gloom, you have to ask — who stands to benefit? The answer is, of course, incumbent frontier labs and our foreign adversaries who will happily race ahead if we slow down.
Fortunately, the White House isn’t playing into it. JD Vance said frontier AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” felt like “a Trojan horse.”
Trump, meanwhile, explained, “We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI, wins.”
It is fair to have questions and concerns about AI, its bias and its impact on people. But maybe the best place to get answers isn’t always from the people who are running it, especially when rivals like Amodei and Altman seem so suspiciously eager to fall on their swords.
As Trump put it: “When, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy? AI, and Data Centers, will be the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History.”