Politics

What’s Behind the Current Anti-AI Propaganda Campaign?

Jim Taft
By Jim Taft 12 Min Read
What’s Behind the Current Anti-AI Propaganda Campaign?

No doubt you have been inundated with the “revelations” from the “whistleblower” who quit his job at Anthropic, the company that designs, trains, and runs the AI chatbot and programmer Claude.

It’s hard to miss. The 27-year-old mid-level researcher and trainer who worked at OpenAI for three years and Anthropic for only a few months has been everywhere, and his X posts outlining his warnings about the dangers of AI were viewed millions of times on the very day he posted them, despite the fact that he had almost no followers and hadn’t been active on X at all prior to posting them.

I have a small account with a few thousand followers, and my posts are generally viewed by fewer than a thousand people; his went viral in minutes, was reposted by top AI CEOs, and The Wall Street Journal had the story before it even went up.

Somehow, an unknown AI company employee, who was saying absolutely nothing we haven’t heard before, had the profile of the President of the United States in the media.

What’s striking is that Coxon literally said nothing that hadn’t been said before, even by the CEOs of AI companies that are racing to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and superintelligence, which could bring in the “singularity,” where AI becomes vastly more intelligent than human beings and changes the world.

I won’t challenge his thesis here, because while I am skeptical about much of the argument, I seriously don’t know whether AI will really present an existential threat, and neither does anybody else. And it bears thinking about, obviously, and even some worry. Coxon’s and others’ warnings are not idle.

But what we should be skeptical of is the fact that Coxon has garnered so much attention, and wonder why it is his warnings, and not those of others, that generated all this interest. When Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, said such things, it was treated as a story of modest interest. When Coxon said them, it became international news warranting nonstop media coverage.

It didn’t happen by accident. This was a coordinated campaign that serves many political and financial interests, including those of the AI companies themselves, as strange as that may seem. These companies actually donated to some of the very NGOs that are “fighting” AI, and with good reason: they want the government to crack down on open-source AI that threatens their business.

They welcome government regulations because they will help their bottom lines; no government can ban AI entirely, but it can stop open-source companies and create a consolidated industry with few customers.

China, too, has a strong interest in slowing or stopping American AI progress. There is absolutely no way Western governments can stop the rapid development of AI in China, which threatens American companies’ dominance, and any slowdown of progress in America will benefit China tremendously.

The massive and sometimes grassroots, sometimes grasstops campaign to stop the data center buildout that is partly fueled by real concerns and often the product of well-funded propaganda campaigns filled with misinformation serves the same purpose. And these campaigns are highly coordinated.

The top-down lobbying and propaganda campaign helps fuel the often-legitimate grassroots campaigns against AI-related developments. Think of it as corporations and governments piling onto a less-noticed spontaneous movement that would otherwise have only a modest impact. It’s like the COVID hysteria, which would never have reached the fever pitch it did without a whole-of-establishment effort to make it happen.

It’s no accident that the very people funding these campaigns have a huge financial stake in stimulating government regulations. The Chinese want American AI efforts to stall, and the AI companies want competitors fenced out. A massive federal infrastructure that focuses on regulating AI without killing it serves their purposes nicely.

To be clear about what I have and don’t have:

•I have no evidence Bill Gates directed the Coxon post.

•I have documented: Gates → $200M to Anthropic → an IPO worth up to $2T → a bill that would ring-fence Anthropic’s competitors → an “insider whistleblower” launching it with a pre-placed WSJ exclusive.

There are, literally, trillions of dollars at stake. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are aiming for IPOs that will value their companies at $1-$2 trillion each, making them wealthy beyond measure. China wants in on the game. And none of them can be, or will be, stopped — there is way too much money at stake. Both companies have signed contracts with suppliers totaling trillions of dollars for infrastructure buildouts that they can’t pay for without the capital the IPOs will provide.

.@DavidSacks referring to this @BretBaier question from last night: “I think your first question to him last night was the correct one, which is you asked him who he was working with. He said nobody. The internet has had a day to review that and what they’ve seen is that this is an account of a relatively low level staffer at Anthropic, who had never tweeted before, who had no followers, and all of a sudden he posted this tweet and ot gets amplified by the biggest doomer NGOs. So the odds that he is not working with them are very low.”

They have tapped out venture capital — there aren’t trillions of dollars left to be vacuumed up, and venture capitalists now doubt AI will generate the profits needed to pay for all those data centers. These companies are bleeding cash at an unsustainable rate that no amount of profit will ever make profitable. They lose tens of billions of dollars a year right now and will run out of cash soon. Far from taking over the world, they could go bankrupt without new cash infusions.

Fencing out competitors by banning open-source AI that can be loaded and run on your personal computer, and that could NEVER take over the world, would give them a better case in the public markets that they will become profitable.

Apple’s new computers could run most AI models we actually use faster for ordinary users than cloud models, whose sophistication only big corporations could benefit from. You and I don’t need the ‘frontier’ models for almost anything we use AI for.

These companies have to kill that market, and what better way than government regulation?

Coxon’s warnings may be correct, although, practically speaking, AI progress is as impossible to stop as any other technology’s progress. But government regulation could kill competitors to the established companies.

And that is the point of this campaign. The arguments may have some merit, but that’s not why it’s everywhere.



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