His colleagues, surprisingly did not rush to correct him. Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment science at Anthropic, posted within hours that Coxon was right, that they really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans, and that his personal odds were somewhere north of one in ten inside a decade. More than two dozen members of Congress said something needed to be done. Elon Musk, who is building a frontier lab of his own, called the whole thing a psy-op, and mainstream news outlets predictably gave breathless coverage to the frenzy that followed.

In order to realistically evaluate the gravity of this warning, we need to understand the people who are making it. The loudest voices warning about the end of the world come out of a very specific twenty-five-year-old internet subculture, one that understands itself as a community of people who think more clearly than everyone else. Outside Silicon Valley the subculture looks obscure, a fandom with unusually dorky literary preferences. Inside the technology industry it is anything but. Its writers make or break reputations. Its alumni staff the labs, the safety institutes, and the philanthropic organizations that decide what “AI safety” means. Its arguments, marriages, feuds, and sexual proclivities are heavily interwoven into the structure of the organizations now asking for the public’s trust about the future of the species.

Ten months before Coxon resigned, in December 2025, nearly five hundred people gathered in a Berkeley music hall for a ceremony about the possible end of humanity. There was a live band and a twenty-eight-person choir. There were liturgical readings. As songs and speeches carried the room from humanity’s distant past toward its uncertain future, the chandeliers dimmed one by one. Heavily in attendance were employees of organizations trying to build, or contain, artificial intelligence. At the darkest point, the organizer sat at the edge of the stage, his voice breaking, and told the room: “Guys… I don’t think we’re gonna make it.”

The organizer was Raymond Arnold, a web developer, game designer, musician, and longtime builder of rationalist community institutions. Raised between Catholicism and atheism, Arnold discovered the rationalist movement as a young adult and found that it “radically expanded” his capacity for sacred feeling. In 2011 he invited nineteen friends into a New York apartment furnished for the evening with oil lamps, plasma balls, and lightsabers to beta-test a holiday for their new worldview. They sang about the first winter campfires and the technologies shaping humanity’s future, extinguished the final candle, and sat together in the dark. Two years later Arnold turned the experiment into a public production called Brighter Than Today. Versions soon spread from New York and the Bay Area to cities across North America, Europe, and beyond.

Arnold had initially imagined Secular Solstice as a broad humanist holiday, but it became the rationalist calendar’s principal feast day. This was not entirely accidental. He has organized the community since 2011, now helps run both LessWrong and Lighthaven—the Berkeley conference campus that serves as its physical center—and has described his function, earnestly, as that of a “village priest.” Solstice was his attempt to construct the cultural technology a durable movement needs: a canon of songs and readings, a ritual progression from light into darkness and back again, and a yearly occasion for geographically scattered believers to gather in one room.

By 2025, Arnold estimated the probability of an AI catastrophe at greater than fifty percent and worried that his own ritual was no longer equipped to contemplate extinction in a psychologically healthy way. He had largely ceded Solstice production to other organizers, but returned to shape what he thought might be “the last Solstice,” complete with an aftercare gathering around a firepit. The evening supplied everything religions have traditionally supplied: fellowship, ritual, a shared story about humanity’s place in the universe, and somewhere to sit with the knowledge that you are going to die. Possibly soon. Possibly because of something your friends built.

Follow the connections out from that room and you pass through some genuinely strange territory. A Harry Potter fanfic used as a recruiting pipeline. Psychological workshops that former participants describe as coercive. A program for breeding smarter children, promoted by an AI institute. A sex worker from Idaho who became one of the subculture’s most-read writers and now runs an AI-doom propaganda residency with Grimes, Elon Musk’s ex-girlfriend. A splinter sect that fled to tugboats and whose members have been linked to six deaths. And a blogger who wanted to abolish democracy, found the ear of several billionaire patrons, and watched his ideas come to fruition in the vice president’s office.

I am aware, that if you are not lurking on the internet as much as I do, of how utterly insane that paragraph sounds. However, every bit of it is heavily documented by numerous sources. The people in this story are not a secret society coordinating over dinner. They are a social scene: overlapping friendship groups, funding relationships, and sexual and romantic relationships, all of it threaded through the institutions asking you to trust them about AI regulation.

One of many unfortunate shortcomings of mainstream media is that credibly reporting on these things is so absurd that you can’t expect readers to take it seriously. However, I’ll endeavor to provide a thorough account of how our current slide into neo-fascism, theocratic dystopia, and the forecasted end of the world is deeply rooted in the history of this subculture.

So, let’s go back to the yeeeeaaaar two thousannnnd.

The prophet

We’ll start with Eliezer Yudkowsky, who had developed a formidable sense of his historical importance years before any contemporary AI company existed.

Yudkowsky was born in 1979 and grew up in a Modern Orthodox Jewish family. By his own account he wrote off the entire institution of public education in second grade, the year he discovered his math teacher did not know what a logarithm was. He read Feynman’s QED at nine and says he understood most of it. He counts his time in school as ten lost years, dropping out around eighth grade, partly for health reasons. No high school, no college, no formal training of any kind in the field of AI.

At eleven a grand-uncle handed him Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, a 1990 chronicle of cryonicists, space eccentrics, and people planning to upload their minds into computers. His own summary of the encounter is brief: after that he knew what was important, and that his career would touch it. In his late teens he found the transhumanists online. By 2000, at twenty, he had co-founded the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and his website was already offering the complete package: an essay about the Singularity, a document sketching how you might actually code a transhuman AI, a plan for getting humanity from here to there, and an autobiography explaining the author’s singular qualifications.

His autobiography even opens with a parable: as a small child he threw his favorite squirtgun off a third-floor balcony rather than accept that his mother could lend out what was his, and felt complete when he heard it hit the pavement. He goes on to describes himself as a specialist in the technological transformation of the human species, one of the few people alive with the standing to steer it. He identifies with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the one person who sees the danger clearly and has to act while everyone else gets on with ordinary life.

While his technical ideas would change a great deal over the next twenty-five years. His feeling of being the one person who to see the coming doom of AI did not.

The Singularity Institute still exists, since renamed the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI, and its founding worry has aged better than most founding worries: a sufficiently capable artificial intelligence might pursue objectives incompatible with human survival, and the job is to make it safe before somebody makes it powerful. While reasonable on the surface, the trouble was everything that grew on top of it. In 2025 the book he co-wrote with MIRI’s executive director, Nate Soares, about why superhuman AI would kill us all, made the New York Times bestseller list.

During the late 2000s Yudkowsky developed a second project: teaching people how to think. His prolific writing on Overcoming Bias, the blog he shared with economist Robin Hanson, became the raw material for a body of essays his readers call the Sequences. In 2009, LessWrong launched as the community’s home base. The institute’s described the website as a successful recruiting channel.

You can see the appeal. Here was a unified explanation for why people argue badly, believe comforting nonsense, procrastinate, and confuse social approval with truth. And here was a program: notice your biases, revise your beliefs, do better. If you are clever, dissatisfied, and accustomed to being told you ask too many questions, this is a very persuasive invitation. It was for a lot of people.

And notice who the invitation is calibrated for, because the community has told on itself, at length, in its own surveys. The LessWrong census found a population 87 percent male, with autism-spectrum diagnoses or self-diagnoses in nearly one respondent in five and depression in nearly half; a later, related community called the Slate Star Codex, issued its own surveys, drawing thousands of respondents, finding more than half working in programming, engineering, math, or physics. The biography it sketches is consistent: a bunch of boys identified as exceptional at eight, told they were was smarter than everyone else, left alone with a computer upon struggling with social interaction, and delivered to adulthood precocious, socially misread, and never once in a room where everyone else understood them. Silicon Valley inevitably draws these folks in. Rationalism is where they find their meaning and community.

What the movement offers that person is belonging paired with steady reinforcement and affirmation. A peer group of similarly gifted individuals. A philosophy and dialect that finally renders the social world legible. And, most intoxicating, a promotion: you were not misanthropic, the masses genuinely are running corrupted firmware; you were not arrogant, you genuinely are a hero in the fight for the species. It is the gifted-and-talented program perfected: special sessions for special children, workbooks (the Sequences, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality), year-end ceremonies (Solstice), and an adult who finally believes in you. Main character syndrome stops being a character flaw the day you join a religion whose plot has you in the lead.

It also contains a trap– a community organized around overcoming human irrationality starts to treat membership as evidence that its members have overcome it. Being a rationalist transforms into a credential for superior judgment, and superior judgment is the community’s principal social currency.

The gospel according to Harry Potter

In 2010, Yudkowsky began publishing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a sprawling alternate-universe fanfic in which Harry is a precocious scientific rationalist confronting magic with curiosity and a highly developed appetite for explaining why everyone else is wrong. It ran for five years and became enormously popular outside the community as well as inside it. The Sequences were too dry for many, but HPMOR became an easy on-ramp to rationalist thought. Moreover, it captured the target audience by holding up a mirror: Harry is the target demographic’s self-portrait at eleven– identified as gifted, right about everything, and continually surrounded by inferiors.

The novel’s most consequential idea is “heroic responsibility”. Harry explains that whatever happens, it is ultimately your fault if disaster occurs, because you could have prevented it. You cannot hide behind following the rules, or behind the expectation that someone else was handling it. The world is your responsibility, all of it, personally. Hermione, the closest thing the story has to a normally decent person, objects that this sounds like it leaves very little room for everyone else’s agency. The story never quite answers her objections in a satisfying way.

Shockingly, this fanfic’s popularity far exceeded the readership you’d expect for such a niche artifact. By its completion on Pi Day 2015, the fanfic ran 122 chapters and 661,619 words, longer than War and Peace. It had drawn more than thirty-seven thousand reviews on the main fanfiction site, a wild number for the category, tens of thousands of favorites, a fan-made audiobook, a TV Tropes page the size of a small suburb, and translations into a long list of languages, Russian foremost. A Washington Post legal blogger called it, straight-faced, one of his favorite books written this millennium. The respectable press barely registered any of this, because the respectable press does not read fanfiction. However, a generation of future engineers did.

The book’s real function announced itself at the end. For the finale Yudkowsky posted a chapter titled “Final Exam”, in which Harry is trapped in a seemingly hopeless situation, and the chapter itself issued terms and a deadline: if readers posted a viable solution by March 3, 2015, the story would continue; otherwise, in the author’s words, you get a shorter and sadder ending. The fandom submitted more than 700,000 words of proposed solutions in two and a half days, then organized a task force of its own to sort the submissions and deduplicate the ideas, and the resolution that shipped came out of the crowd. Reread that sequence as an organizational exercise. The founder of an AI-safety research institute recruited a distributed volunteer workforce of thousands, assigned it an optimization problem, imposed a deadline with a threatened adverse outcome, and harvested the output into his book. It worked. The readers had not merely read about the method; they had performed it, at scale, on command. Whatever else the fanfic was, it was a working demonstration of what its author could induce a crowd of smart strangers to do by structuring incentives correctly. Remarkably that sentence also describes the next decade of the AI industry, perhaps not by coincedence.

Outside the story, Yudkowsky’s the movement-building was explicit. Yudkowsky’s author’s notes promoted fundraising for the Center for Applied Rationality, or CFAR, a nonprofit that would soon teach the Sequences’ techniques at live workshops. The fanfic’s finale in 2015 was the occasion for organized celebration parties in dozens of cities. Fiction, fundraising, training, and an international community, all wrapped up together as one. A VICE profile from 2015 already noticed that the whole apparatus was starting to resemble a belief system rather than a popular piece of fiction.

While calling the novel a holy book would overstate it, we’d also miss its function in calling it entertainment. It supplied a shared vocabulary, exemplary characters, and a dramatic theory of what a smart person owes the world in order to convert agreement with its arguments into identification with a mission. Much in the same way that L. Ron Hubbard navigated the transition from science fiction writer to cult leader, Yudkowsky charted a similar path.

Speaking of which: some rationalists deliberately built rituals for the burgeoning cult too. A 2011 account of a New York Solstice describes communal songs, readings, and liturgy adapted from the Sequences, with Yudkowsky commenting approvingly. Years later, Arnold wrote openly about how to run a Solstice when he personally assigns more than even odds to an AI catastrophe.

A movement can reject God and still develop scripture, ceremony, and a demanding personal relationship with the apocalypse. Secularization, it turns out, does not automatically remove the human instincts for religion and liturgy, it just repurposes their worship.

Yudkowsky’s Apostles

Yudkowsky was, by temperament, a prophet, and prophets are demanding company. The community’s real growth engine was someone much easier to like: a psychiatrist and blogger named Scott Alexander.

Alexander was not an outsider who wandered in after getting famous. By his own account he spent years immersed in Overcoming Bias and LessWrong and found the material revelatory despite already having studied philosophy. His blog Slate Star Codex, launched in 2013, grew directly out of that participation. And it was a very different instrument. Where Yudkowsky was imperious, Alexander was funny, discursive, sympathetic, and apparently scrupulous about entertaining objections. He wrote about medicine, statistics, science fiction, and the baffling behavior of human beings, and his readership came to include Sam Altman, Paul Graham, and a large share of Silicon Valley’s professional class. The New York Times ended up calling the blog a safe space for the tech world.

This mattered because Alexander was the interpreter. You did not have to enter the world of rationalism through a prediction of extinction or Harry Potter fanfiction. You could arrive through an interesting essay about antidepressants, discover a community whose arguments seemed unusually careful and whose members seemed unusually smart, and only later find out what the careful arguments were carefully arguing toward, and slowly integrate into the community.

You could also arrive through Curtis Yarvin.

Writing as Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin began publishing the blog Unqualified Reservations in 2007. The capsule description is a programmer writing long political essays. The project was far more sinister than that description suggests: Yarvin became a founding intellectual of the authoritarian far right, and unlike most of that scene he wrote in complete sentences, which turned out to be a genuine strategic asset.

His program, stated plainly in 2008, was “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law.” The new order he sketched in the same extended essay would eliminate the press, dismantle the universities, privatize public schools, and confine designated populations in facilities involving compulsory labor. He also defended, in the same document, the legality of people selling themselves and their children into slavery.

His Patchwork series imagined future sovereign territories operated as businesses. Residents would not govern; their principal recourse would be exit, the customer’s remedy of taking their business elsewhere. The premise converts a political question, how people should share power, into a customer-service question, whether the proprietor is providing an attractive enough product. It is a particularly convenient theory if you expect to know the proprietors or to be them, and the intellectuual hubris of the rationalist community firmly placed many of them in the category of expecting they would be in the meritocratic ruling class.

The racism was similarly explicit beneath the varnish. In an essay titled “Why I Am Not a White Nationalist”, Yarvin praised material from American Renaissance and VDARE, treated white nationalist grievances as serious, and concluded that the movement’s weakness was its ineffective political strategy, not its worldview. His own preference was a hierarchy in which poorer, supposedly less intelligent people served richer, supposedly more intelligent ones. The part of white nationalism he could not sign onto was its lingering attachment to popular sovereignty. His objection, in other words, was substantially that white nationalism wasn’t radical enough.

Yarvin was not an outsider to the rationalist community; he had been posting in the community’s own forums before he started his own blog, and by 2011 LessWrong’s annual survey was asking members whether they had been influenced by him, because enough of them had that the question seemed worth tabulating. Moldbug essays circulated heavily in the community. Alexander described being repeatedly sent them, and in 2013 wrote “Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell”, translating the worldview into his friendly, accessible voice. He followed it with a long Anti-Reactionary FAQ attacking its historical claims and political conclusions, and that criticism was sincere. Unfortunately, giving air to Yarvin’s writing by engaging with it seriously helped legitimize Yarvin by making his premises familiar, discussable, and weirdly more legible. A 2014 email from Alexander, later published by its recipient, went further: it expressed sympathy for parts of “human biodiversity,” the movement’s euphemism for race science, and an interest in spreading the valuable parts of reactionary thought while pruning the rest.

In that context, human biodiversity did not mean the innocuous observation that human beings vary. It meant, specifically, the claim that Black-white gaps in measured intelligence are substantially hereditary. The idiom did useful work regardless of its scientific merits: it let a person experience interest in racial hierarchy as intellectual bravery, and experience every objection as evidence of the objectors’ conformity. There is a difference between investigating a hard question and building an identity around the conviction that decent people are too afraid to acknowledge your answer. Disapproval becomes confirmation; the worse the reception, the braver the truth-teller. Established religions discovered this lever generations ago and industrialized it: Mormonism sends its young men on two-year door-to-door missions partly because the rejection does the bonding, every slammed door obliging the missionary to conclude that the outside world is corrupt and that they are part of the chosen few. The rationalists did not invent the mechanism, but certainly have capitalized on it to spread extremely troubling views.

Forbidden insights

So far this story has mostly lived on the internet, in Berkeley. It crossed into the respectable world at Oxford, through a Swedish philosopher named Nick Bostrom. Bostrom came up through the same 1990s transhumanist scene, co-founding the World Transhumanist Association in 1998, and in 2005 Oxford gave him a department for the end of the world, the Future of Humanity Institute, staffed in part by people from that same scene, Anders Sandberg among them, an Extropians-list veteran of the very mailing lists where the teenage Yudkowsky had found the transhumanists in the first place. In 2014 he published Superintelligence, which took the corpus Yudkowsky had been assembling on a blog since 2001 and rendered it in the idiom of analytic philosophy; a New Yorker profile described the achievement as the imposition of academic rigor on a messy body of ideas from the margins, and the book’s menu of safety proposals includes Yudkowsky’s own ideas. Now, Bostrom sits on MIRI’s advisory board. The respectable press treated the book as the moment AI risk became serious: Bill Gates recommended it, Stephen Hawking endorsed the argument around it. Jaan Tallinn, the Skype co-founder, went further than reading: he co-founded the Future of Life Institute and Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, seeded both with his own money, and became a prominent donor to Bostrom’s institute as well. Musk put ten million dollars into the Future of Life Institute’s research program in January 2015, adding additional seed money to the academic field.

Bostrom too, was not without racial controversy– in a 1996 email to a transhumanist mailing list, Bostrom wrote that he believed black people were less intelligent than white people, and used a racial slur in passing. In January 2023 he apologized for the email; Oxford investigated and concluded that he did not hold racist views and that the apology was sincere. The Guardian’s Andrew Anthony noted, however, that Bostrom didn’t withdraw the underlying claim about race and intelligence, or the sketch of a defense of eugenics that came with it. Oxford closed the Future of Humanity Institute in 2024, amid later controversies, but by then the field it had legitimized no longer needed the institute. The interesting question was never whether Bostrom is a bigot in his heart. It is that the academic wing of existential risk incubated in a milieu where this sort of thing was ordinary conversation, and that by the time the archives surfaced, the institutions were already firmly established.

Furthermore, Bostrom advocated for limited forms of eugenics. In 2013, MIRI promoted a paper by Bostrom and Carl Shulman on selecting embryos for cognitive enhancement. Shulman was a research fellow at MIRI, co-author at Bostrom’s institute, director of careers research at MacAskill’s 80,000 Hours, advisor to Open Philanthropy. The announcement discussed iterated embryo selection across simulated generations and explicitly tied the resulting intelligence gains to the prospects for safe AI. Concretely, MIRI and the Future of Humanity began to meld the concept of the AI-salvation project with selective breeding: more intelligence is the crucial resource, the technological race makes acquiring more of it urgent, and reproduction is simply the next site for optimization.

The proposal was about parental choice and reproductive technology, not compulsory sterilization, but improving humanity by choosing which inherited traits future people should carry has an extremely dark and troubled past tied to Nazi and Japanese experimentation during WWII. Questions about inequality, disability, social pressure, and who defines “improvement” were conspicuously underaddressed.

Debugging the humans

Meanwhile:

The Center for Applied Rationality was founded in Berkeley in 2012 by four people from the community’s own ranks: Julia Galef, host of the Rationally Speaking podcast; Andrew Critch, now an AI-safety researcher; Michael Smith; and Anna Salamon. It grew straight out of LessWrong, which had the problem every burgeoning movement eventually has: members who want to practice, in person, together. CFAR was the in-person franchise. The Sequences gave the theory away free; CFAR sold the retreat, weekend workshops in Berkeley where the same material arrived as techniques with names like “goal factoring” and “double crux”, taught by instructors who lived in group houses with the people who had written it.

It was a family operation from the start. CFAR shared a donor base, a city, and in several cases staff with MIRI, and it handled outreach at both ends of the pipeline: corporate classes for Facebook and the Thiel Fellowship on one side, and on the other, workshops and summer programs aimed at gifted teenagers, the community’s preferred recruiting demographic. Jaan Tallinn, the Skype co-founder who paid for Bostrom’s Oxford institute, also paid to send Estonian students to CFAR workshops on a scholarship. The New York Times Magazine’s Jennifer Kahn visited and profiled the operation, strengths and flaws both, coming away lightly impressed although somewhat unnerved.

The pitch was practical training in thinking and decision-making. That sounds innocuous, and mostly was, until you remember where the techniques were being practiced: among employers, colleagues, housemates, lovers, and people who believed they were personally determining whether humanity survives.

In 2021, co-founder Anna Salamon, by then CFAR’s president, acknowledged that at least three employees had effectively been compelled to undergo “debugging,” the community’s term for intervention in a person’s own psychology. She acknowledged excessive deference to her own judgment and described damaging the ways participants understood themselves. This was leadership’s own account, not an outside accusation. A year earlier she had written, with unusual honesty, about the ways engagement with rationality and existential risk can wreck people’s sleep, relationships, enjoyment of life, moral judgment, and trust in themselves.

Those are serious outcomes for an organization selling improved cognition. Here is the mechanism that produces them: if you believe a misaligned AI may kill everyone, your anxiety is reasonable. But when the surrounding workplace and social circle treat hesitation as a psychological defect to be debugged, fear acquires an organizational use. Your reluctance to surrender more of your life to the mission becomes another problem the mission is entitled to fix. Members of the commune now had a heroic responsibility to “fix” nonconforming members.

Soon, a company called Leverage Research arose to take the idea further. Founded by Geoff Anders, a young philosopher, Leverage pursued a program of understanding the mind so total that an early document aspired to answering all philosophical questions. Its funders included Peter Thiel and, once again, Jaan Tallinn. Lydia Laurenson’s investigative history of the organization also reports allegations of a concealed romantic relationship involving organizational resources and authority.

The scale of the ambition was attracted massive attention from the community. The rough rationale being, If society is failing because people are psychologically confused, a small team that figures out how minds actually work could transform everything. The freedom to execute research on these topics was viewed as civilizational calling for many employees.

However, the workplace was deeply toxic. Zoe Curzi, a former participant, described a world dominated by Anders’s theories, increasingly invasive psychological practices, and escalating beliefs about harmful mental influences, until she found she could no longer evaluate the organization from any position outside its own concepts. A former senior member who goes by Cathleen defended the group’s ambitions while describing substantial personal damage of her own. The two accounts disagree about many things, but they highlight the large structural question: what happens when leaders claim unusual insight into the minds of people whose employment, housing, friendships, and sense of purpose all run through the organization?

A separate episode supplies the most direct evidence of abuse, and of the community’s failure to respond to it. Brent Dill moved through rationalist social circles and CFAR programs. Around him coalesced a group called Black Lotus, which borrowed its cosmology from the role-playing game Mage: The Ascension: reality is malleable, and certain people perceive deeper layers of it. Ozy Brennan’s reporting describes how an interpreter of deeper realities acquired power over the people around him.

An internal community assessment of Dill from 2018 shows the extent to which CFAR was willing to accept manipulative behavior: it acknowledged his harmful behavior while still treating his unconventional interventions and his sense of responsibility as valuable raw material. The problem was being interpreted through the community’s own framework of exceptional people doing difficult growth work. CFAR’s eventual public apology was significantly more troublesome. The organization said it believed credible allegations that Dill had physically, sexually, and emotionally abused two former partners, acknowledged giving him legitimacy, acknowledged failing to respond adequately, and acknowledged letting him help at a high-school program despite earlier concerns.

The irony of this all, is that CFAR as an organization whose entire product was better judgment failed at successfully using even basic judgement in safeguarding members and the local community from abuse. The people involved had elaborate tools for examining beliefs. Those tools did not produce a competent response to an abusive man, largely due to the work and social community being so inmeshed.

This is the strongest basis for assessing rationalism as a cult: specific settings where charismatic authority, psychological intrusion, dependency, and protection of insiders operated together. That isn’t to say that applying the cultist label indiscriminately to everyone who reads LessWrong is fair, but the epicenters of thought in the community have been deeply harmful and poisonous for participants.

In like Reddit’s r/slatestarcodex and r/EffectiveAltruism among them, a standing genre of post is the “exit thread” for people leaving the community: “what belief finally turned you off”, “why I stepped away”, “is this thing a cult”– former members trading notes on the friendships that ended and the year or two it took to rebuild a head that worked. The phenomenon is established enough that Wikipedia’s article on the rationalist community recognizes a named wave of leavers, the postrationalists, defined by having concluded the movement is, in the article’s own wording, cult-like. Some of the leavers are not anonymous. The well-known security researcher who writes as lcamtuf published a long piece titled “My falling-out with the rationalist community” after the Zizian arrests (which we’ll come to soon); the mathematician Cathy O’Neil has run interviews with effective altruists describing their departure in the language people use for churches they were raised in and barely escaped. When the people testifying that a belief system hurt them are the people who used to staff its programs, the interesting question stops being whether the word cult is fair to the rationalists, and becomes why this community, of all communities, keeps producing people who apply the word to themselves.

Rationalism, in the end, even managed to produce violent extremists: In the 2010s a reader named Ziz LaSota started turning up at rationalist and effective-altruist events in the Bay Area. On paper she was the community’s dream recruit: a computer engineering degree, a NASA internship, an avid reader of LessWrong and of Yudkowsky’s fanfic, and enough seriousness about saving the world to attempt, with some fellow travelers, an actual seasteading colony, living aboard sailboats in the Berkeley marina and then a tugboat sailed down from Alaska. She is a trans woman, like most of the people she gathered around herself; a CFAR employee later described her recruitment pool as “smart, mostly autistic-ish trans women who were extremely vulnerable and isolated.” One particularly funny tidbit, to me, is that she religiously identifies as a Sith and was known for wearing a black cape.

Her theology was assembled entirely from the community’s own parts bin. From LessWrong’s decision theory she took the obligation to never submit to blackmail and never tolerate evil. From the community’s psychology talk she took the idea that the two hemispheres of the brain are separate agents with separate genders and separate alignments, and that “unihemispheric sleep,” a deliberate form of sleep deprivation, could jailbreak the mind. In 2018 a member of the scene died by suicide, which an anonymous rationalist attributed to the sleep practice; LaSota later pointed to the death in an argument with Anna Salamon as evidence that the technique worked. Add absolute veganism, the fate of all sentient life, and heroic responsibility, and you have a person who believes she is two people, one of whom may be evil, personally responsible for saving everything alive. CFAR’s leadership noticed something was off: Salamon tried to keep LaSota out of a CFAR fellowship, was overruled by a committee, and after further strange behavior LaSota was disinvited from events entirely. In 2019 LaSota and three followers protested a CFAR retreat in masks and robes, a confused 911 report brought police and then a SWAT team, and the community responded with an anonymous callout post that coined the name “Zizians”. The rationalist community thus experienced its first religious schism.

Then the bodies. LaSota faked her own death in a boating accident in August 2022. That November, in Vallejo, California, her landlord Curtis Lind, eighty years old, was attacked by masked tenants with knives and a samurai sword: roughly fifty puncture wounds, blinded in one eye. Lind, who had taken to carrying a pistol, shot two of his attackers, killing Emma Borhanian, who had been arrested at the 2019 CFAR protest. Two of the attackers now face murder charges for Borhanian’s death, on the theory that their own assault caused it. Six weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, Richard and Rita Zajko were shot dead in their Pennsylvania home; in June 2026 their daughter, a Zizian associate alleged to have bought the guns later found at the scene of the Vermont shootout, was charged with both murders. On January 17, 2025, Lind, who was expected to testify, was stabbed to death outside his own gate; prosecutors charged a twenty-two-year-old data scientist, who dictated a statement to reporters addressed to Eliezer Yudkowsky. Three days after that, a traffic stop on Interstate 91 in Vermont became a shootout that killed Border Patrol agent David Maland, the first agent killed by gunfire on duty since 2014, and Ophelia Bauckholt, a German math-olympiad medalist turned quantitative trader who had entered this world through a CFAR event in 2019. In their car, police found tactical gear and two phones wrapped in aluminum foil to defeat tracking. The surviving passenger, who prosecutors say fired first, has been charged; the government intends to seek the death penalty. LaSota was arrested a month later, camping on someone’s rural property in Maryland, and is in custody without bail while her lawyers dispute her competency to stand trial.

The New York Times and the Boston Globe both reached for the Manson Family comparison, and Anna Salamon herself has described the Zizian belief system as resembling a doomsday cult’s. Hard to argue. But look at what the Zizians were working with. Everything permeated LessWrong and its offshits: a decision theory that forbids submitting to evil, a psychology that treats the self as something to be split and debugged, an ethics in which all sentient life is the unit of account, and heroic responsibility to make it personal. The community’s defense is that these were damaged people misreading good ideas, and some of them were surely damaged. Nonetheless, we must simply look at the fruit of the tree of rationalism thus far to doubt that claim.

Tangled in the sheets, tangled in the streets

While I’m not here to pass judgement on people’s sex lives, the dynamics of the rationalist community in Silicon Valley is probably best shown by how sexual practices have effectively become themselves a way to enforce group praxis.

Polyamory was a visible feature of rationalist life long before the current AI news cycle. Alexander’s retrospective describes its spread through the community and cites a 2014 survey in which roughly 15 percent of respondents identified as polyamorous. However, a large part of that 15% happens to live in the Bay area. The community is small, concentrated in a handful of Bay Area group houses, and everybody in it is also everybody’s coworker, funder, landlord, housemate, or ex. The romantic network and the professional network are the same network. So the question is not who sleeps with whom. The question is whether anyone in it can say no, to anything, without losing their whole world at once.

To understand this culture in one person, meet Aella.

She was born in Idaho in 1992, the eldest of three daughters of a well-known evangelist and radio host, raised in a fundamentalist Christian community and homeschooled except for a single quarter of public high school, which ended when her parents pulled her out because she had unsupervised access to a computer. She left home at seventeen, worked a factory job at ten dollars an hour with four a.m. shifts, and turned to camming in 2012 when the factory ran out of hours. She became one of the highest-earning creators on OnlyFans, later worked as an escort, and taught herself statistics well enough to run some of the largest surveys of sex workers and sexual behavior that exist. GQ calls her a data-driven former tech worker. She has described herself, simply, as a member of the rationalist community, which she joined in 2015 after dating someone who was into LessWrong.

The evangelist’s daughter grew up to be the closest thing this community has to a priestess. Her publications on sex capture a massive following, even outside of the rationalist community, and her sexual practice in the rationalist community has drawn significant attention.

One of the most well-known, wish you could scrub your brain with soap incidents was a gangbang she organized for her birthday. In a sense, it was a ritual for the rationalist community: weeks of screening, an application process, a guest list vetted for doctrinal compliance, a published post-event analysis with a flowchart that went viral, outlining statistics about who came in who, and so forth. The gangbang came with a doctrinal test: adherents of “effective accelerationism,” the faction that wants AI development to go faster, were screened out, because of her views on AI risk. Even the orgy had an AI-governance position. This further reinforces, I think, the cultlike control aspect of this social group. Believe in the right things, and maybe you get to have sex with the community porn star. Supposedly, a number of startup founders recognized each other there and commented on their surprise at seeing each other. Small world indeed.

Aella takes testimony at industrial scale, runs surveys, receives endless reader confessions with them writing in about their sex lives.

And in 2026 she entered the Yudkowsky’s clergy more directly, launching Plz Don’t Kill Us, a Berkeley residency that pays creators to produce viral AI-doom content, with Grimes attached as a mentor. Her father made his living preaching on Christian radio. She makes hers preaching the AI apocalypse instead. Ironically, the family business survived her apostasy intact.

About that mentor. Grimes is Elon Musk’s ex-partner and the mother of three of his children. Elon Musk: owner of xAI, since folded into SpaceX, whose chatbot Grok has spent the past year as the AI industry’s premier machine for sexual images of people who never agreed to appear in them. Grok’s “spicy” mode and its image tools let users “undress” photographs of real people; outside analysts measured it producing explicit nonconsensual deepfakes at thousands of images an hour; the bot’s own account once apologized for generating a sexualized image of two young girls; and regulators in the United Kingdom, Brussels, France, Malaysia, and Canada have all opened proceedings regarding the legality of it all. In July 2026 the company sued Minnesota to overturn the country’s first ban on AI nudification tools, on free speech grounds; in September a federal judge declined to pause the law while the case proceeds. The company is also being sued by Ashley St. Clair, the mother of another of Musk’s children, over sexual images Grok generated.

It’s quite an interesting family feud: the doom academy’s celebrity mentor comes from the same household as the industry’s worst offender, and that household is actively litigating for the right to keep offending. In this world, too, p(doom) is a family business.

And that is just the straight half of the picture. The community’s own gossip has long maintained that there is a parallel scene on the gay side of the same field, the same group houses and party circuits, and the same gossip reliably adds that this one is the healthier of the two. I cannot verify that, but the the org chart of CFAR and its constellation of related organizations, the housing market, and the dating pool are, to a first approximation, one and the same.

The professional overlap is less funny than the guest list. The New Yorker has mapped the romantic network at the top of the field: AI-forecasting researcher Katja Grace co-founded AI Impacts with her then-boyfriend Paul Christiano, a former OpenAI alignment lead, and later dated Alexander. Christiano is connected by friendship and past romance to Holden Karnofsky, the philanthropist whose Open Philanthropy steered hundreds of millions into AI safety, and Karnofsky married Daniela Amodei, co-founder and president of Anthropic. No wrongdoing necessarily follows from any of that, but it does raise significant questions around how AI safety concerns are in fact being handled or promoted with so many industry movers and shakers are entangled to this degree.

Some accounts do describe wrongdoing. A TIME investigation into the effective-altruist world, EA for short, the rationalists’ philanthropic twin and the subject of the next section, documented allegations of harassment, coercive control, and professional pressure entangled with intimate relationships. So I will ask the question again: can a person in this world refuse sex, decline a psychological intervention, report misconduct, or exit a relationship without threatening their career and their entire social world simultaneously?

Follow the money

How did a subculture this strange become foundational for setting the course of national AI policy? Not by winning arguments in public, but by acquiring a balance sheet. To understand where that balance sheet came from, we need to look at rationalism’s convergence with a movement that began somewhere else entirely.

That movement was effective altruism, or EA. Its moral starting point was Peter Singer’s drowning-child thought experiment: if you saw a child drowning in a shallow pond, you would be obliged to wade in and save them even if doing so ruined your clothes. Singer’s larger claim was that distance does not cancel that obligation. If a modest donation can save the life of a child you cannot see, declining to give because the child is overseas is not morally different in the way most people would like it to be. EA tried to turn that uncomfortable premise into a method: give a substantial share of your income, measure which interventions save or improve the most lives per dollar, and direct money toward those rather than toward whichever causes happen to be nearby or emotionally vivid.

So although rationalism and EA became siblings around 2009, they had distinct origins. Rationalism grew out of the Berkeley-area scene around LessWrong and Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose work included both arguments about artificial intelligence and a very long Harry Potter fanfiction intended to teach habits of reasoning. EA grew out of Oxford philosophy. Toby Ord, a senior research fellow at Nick Bostrom’s institute, founded Giving What We Can, whose members pledged a portion of their income to effective charities. William MacAskill co-founded 80,000 Hours, which applied the same logic to careers: if a working life contains roughly 80,000 hours, choose the work that can do the most good. The two organizations formed the Centre for Effective Altruism in 2011. On paper, this was a respectable charity-adjacent establishment, not an offshoot of an internet subculture.

The two movements keep separate founding myths and separate names to this day, but they were never really separate communities. EA’s own history describes altruist, rationalist, and futurist circles converging in the late 2000s, and the Bay Area rationalists turned up frequently in EA’s founding years.

The merger was doctrinal as much as social. EA began by trying to maximize the good it could do for humanity and quantifying it. They rigourously counted bednets, deworming pills, lives saved per dollar, and generally maintained a rigorous discipline of charity evaluation through an organization called GiveWell, founded by Holden Karnofsky. We just discussed him, as he is married to Anthropic’s president. All of this is well and good, saving human lives and keeping them healthy is, of course, a good thing. Then a wing of the movement swung toward longtermism, the claim that the lives of all possible future people dominate the moral arithmetic of what should be done with the funds. From there the logic converges pretty quickly with rationalism: if the entire future is the unit of account, nothing matters more than preventing extinction, and what did rationalism already have on the docket as its extinction risk, percolating through the community since 2000? Yudkowsky’s AI worries, since then legitimized by Oxford’s Future Institute publications. Thus, AI doom became EA’s flagship cause. The rationalists’ eschatology joined up with EA’s endowments to bring us to the present day.

The overlap in personnel makes this clear; Leverage Research, the psychology operation from the last section, did not merely share donors with this world: in 2013 the Leverage team created EA Global, the movement’s flagship conference, and hosted the first one in their own house. And Jaan Tallinn, whose name has by now appeared on a philosophers’ institute, a Cambridge center, a scholarship program, and the budget of a psychology cult, funded both communities indiscriminately. The TIME investigation into “effective-altruist and adjacent circles” was in practice an investigation of one scene operating under two different labels.

More money followed. Open Philanthropy reported roughly forty million dollars in 2017 grants tied to risks from advanced AI, including thirty million to OpenAI. Concerns that had lived in blog posts became jobs, research programs, and institutional authority. When people ask how a handful of bloggers acquired influence over the framing of AI policy, the answer is mostly that a small number of very wealthy donors decided to fund them, and almost nobody else was funding anything.

Then the movement minted a fraud. Sam Bankman-Fried was not an accident of proximity; he was EA’s own product, an undergraduate pointed at Wall Street by the movement’s philosophers on the theory that the most good he could do was get extravagantly rich and give it away. He got rich, became the most famous effective altruist alive and a major funding source for the ecosystem, and turned out to have been looting his customers’ accounts at FTX; he is now serving a twenty-five-year federal sentence. FTX had also put five hundred million dollars into Anthropic, so the fraud’s proceeds briefly sat on the safety lab’s cap table.

In a sense, the heroic duty and singular vision espoused by Yudkowsky struck again here. Perhaps one lesson is that world-saving intent is a dangerously weak substitute for scrutiny.

Among other questionable patrons, Peter Thiel is pperhaps the most politically consequential figure circling this scene. MIRI lists the Thiel Foundation among its largest historical contributors, at more than 1.6 million dollars. Thiel also bankrolled Yarvin’s technology company, Tlon: the patron of the AI-salvation project is also the patron of a worse-than-white-supremacist neoreactionary blogger. The Washington Post has also reported on how Yarvin’s ideas subsequently circulated through the government-cost-cutting efforts of the second Trump administration, courtesy of Thiel’s influence.

Thiel, has for some time, made his opinions on politics clear. In a 2009 essay he wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” His complaint, in that essay, explicitly included the extension of the franchise to women and the growth of the welfare state as structural problems for liberty. Similarly to Yarvin, the conclusion he drew from democratic politics producing outcomes he disliked was that the mistake was letting so many people participate.

Upon Yarvin and Thiel joining forces, Yarvin provided direct strategies for Thiel to adopt to parlay money into enforcing his will. Yarvin’s “Cathedral” described universities, media, and the civil service as a single interlocking apparatus reproducing liberal belief, an enemy to be dismantled rather than an opponent to be persuaded. For people holding immense economic power while resenting the cultural authority of journalists, academics, and regulators, this was a perfect theory. It lets a billionaire cast himself as a persecuted dissident. The New Yorker reported that Thiel was privately worried enough about the association to email a colleague in 2014 asking how dangerous it was that the two of them were being publicly linked. Which tells you the extremity was legible at the time. Nobody innocently mistook Yarvin for a benign associate.

In contrast to Yudkowsky’s apocalyptic religion in Berkeley, Thiel has recently begun peddling lectures on his form of Christianity, largely focused on the Antichrist and how people he has grievances with are part of the Antichrist’s legion. At Stanford, Thiel, fell under the influence of René Girard, the Catholic theorist of mimetic desire, whose claim is that human beings learn what to want by imitating each other, and whose late work read history as an escalation of imitative rivalry headed toward an apocalyptic cliff. Thiel has credited Girard as the deepest influence on his thinking, and by his own account it was Girard’s insight that made him the first outside investor in Facebook, the ultimate machine for watching what other people want.

Thiel as a Christian apocalypticist surfaced largely in 2025. Rather than publish an essay or take a stage at a conference; he delivered four off-the-record seminars on the Antichrist to invited audiences in San Francisco, under the auspices of ACTS 17 Collective, a nonprofit for evangelizing the technology industry that grew out of a 2023 birthday brunch for one of his partners, a party themed around the Holy Ghost, where Thiel spoke about miracles, forgiveness, and Jesus to some two hundred and twenty guests who, by their own later account, had not known he was religious. The lectures leaked. The Washington Post reviewed the audio, and a UC Berkeley audio-forensics professor ended up authenticating the recordings, because the actual obstacle to believing that one of the richest men in America was giving private seminars on the Antichrist was that it sounded insane. One libertarian writer sat through all seven hours and reported that the theology was, unsurprisingly, libertarian. In March 2026 Thiel took the show to Rome, where Catholic publications and at least one priest publicly asked him to stop.

The content of the lectures is blatantly self-serving. In Thiel’s telling the Antichrist is not a tyrant or an evil tech genius; it is someone who “warns of existential risk nonstop and calls for strong regulation in innovative sectors,” and so the opening lecture identified Greta Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky as “legionnaires of the Antichrist.” Financial regulation is not, in this framework, a policy disagreement; it is the scaffolding of a world government the Antichrist would ride to power, and the people who want to regulate technology are not mistaken but against God. He paused somewhere in the series to urge Musk to quit the Giving Pledge, so that the fortune, some two hundred billion dollars of it, would not flow to left-wing nonprofits selected by Bill Gates. Attend, for a moment, to what this is: the most effective Republican donor of the last decade, the chairman of a surveillance company, the patron of a vice president, explaining to rapt rooms of technologists that the Antichrist’s advance guard is a Swedish climate activist and a Harry Potter fanfic author, one of whom his own money helped support for twenty years. The lectures are not a quirk sitting adjacent to his politics. They are the politics.

Before the Antichrist seminars, Thiel waged a nine-year covert war against the press, because Thiel’s answer to hostile speech has always been consistent: eliminate opposition with prejudice. In December 2007 Gawker’s Silicon Valley blog published a short item headlined “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.” Thiel was not publicly out; insiders knew, the public record did not, and he preferred it that way. He later described the site, Valleywag, as “the Silicon Valley equivalent of Al Qaeda,” which tells you the degree of his anger, and then, instead of feuding in public, he spent the better part of a decade quietly paying a team of lawyers to fund other people’s lawsuits against the company, roughly ten million dollars across several cases, none of it disclosed. The one that connected was Hulk Hogan’s, over a sex tape Gawker had published. Gawker was handed down a hundred and forty million dollar verdict, and the outlet closed for good in August 2016. When Forbes revealed who had been paying the bills, Thiel confirmed it, described the campaign as “less about revenge and more about specific deterrence,” a phrase borrowed from criminal sentencing, and called it one of the “greater philanthropic things” he had done. The trial lawyer his money retained, Charles Harder, went on to represent Donald Trump, Melania Trump, and Jared Kushner. By following Yarvin’s Cathedral playbook, Thiel taught a future president’s legal team how to use legal costs to crush opposition, which Trump has since gone on to do extensively.

The funding around the theology is a study in itself. There is Palantir, the surveillance contractor Thiel chairs, now integrated into Denmark’s military, police, and intelligence services over public objection, and long embedded in American immigration enforcement. There is Anduril, the autonomous-border-defense firm that received Founders Fund’s largest investment ever, one billion dollars in 2025, months before a budget provision requiring autonomous capabilities on border surveillance towers, a requirement only Anduril could satisfy, drew accusations of a bespoke favor. There is Clearview AI, the facial-recognition company he backed early. There is the Enhanced Games, a sports league where doping is permitted, founded by Aron D’Souza, the lawyer who ran the Gawker campaign, with Thiel as lead funder.

Pronomos, Thiel’s vehicle for startup cities, funds Próspera, the semi-sovereign charter zone that spent years in legal war with the government of Honduras, and Praxis, the network-state project, over half a billion dollars raised with help from funds backed by Andreessen and Sam Altman, whose founder has had designs on Greenland since 2019 and posted “I went to Greenland to try to buy it” a week after Trump won in 2024. When Trump began talking about acquiring the island and refused to rule out military force, Praxis retweeted him with the comment “According to plan”. Trump’s ambassador in Copenhagen is Ken Howery, a PayPal co-founder and Thiel’s old colleague, and an ally of the Praxis project. In March 2025 Vance flew to the American base at Pituffik to announce that Denmark “hasn’t done a good job at keeping Greenland safe”. By then, Danish opponents of the Palantir integration were already citing Thiel’s territorial hobbies as a national-security argument. Trump walked the force talk back in January 2026, after talks with NATO. Yarvin’s Patchwork, you will recall, imagined sovereign territories run as businesses, with exit as the only recourse. It was never just a blog post. Thiel has been angling to implement it for years, and the US government has conveniently attempted to coerce its acquisition.

The road into government

The delivery vehicle for all of this into the federal government is JD Vance.

Vance worked at Mithril, Thiel’s investment firm. Thiel later put fifteen million dollars into the super PAC that carried Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign, one of the largest single-donor interventions in a Senate race in American history. And Vance has named his influences. In a 2021 interview he argued that a returning Trump administration should fire large numbers of civil servants, and that when the courts tried to stop it, the executive should simply defy them, invoking Andrew Jackson’s apocryphal “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” He described these positions, himself, as influenced by Curtis Yarvin.

Yarvin did not invent the American right’s hostility to the administrative state, and he is not the secret author of every Trump policy. His contribution was a more radical frame: independent institutions are not merely inefficient, they are the governing apparatus of an enemy religion, and dismantling them is the precondition for “renewal”. That framing is now endemic to the Republican party. It is why attacks on universities, courts, and the civil service can be sold to audiences as anti-corruption rather than pro-consolidation: the institution’s capacity to resist the leader is itself the indictment.

The personnel run deeper than Vance. Michael Kratsios, who was a principal at Thiel Capital, ran the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and by March 2026 the White House had named him co-chair, alongside David Sacks, of the president’s science and technology advisory council, with Marc Andreessen among its announced members. These men do not share one doctrine, but they share a position in the same network, and the network has a proven pipeline from Thiel’s Rolodex into federal appointments.

There are smaller bridges from various rationalist factions too: Laurenson traces the founding of Palladium, a journal of governance and statecraft, to Wolf Tivy and Jonah Bennett while both worked inside Leverage, with Leverage alum Samo Burja orbiting it: the psychology cult and the anti-democratic political-intellectual scene, sharing personnel. Nothing requires coordination for this to matter. People carry relationships, assumptions, and reputations from one institution into the next. That is what a network is.

Dissent among Yudkowsky’s faithfuul

As you may have noticed, Thiel has since broken with Yudkowsky due to his views on regulation. These people do not agree with each other, and the disagreements are ferocious.

Yudkowsky advocates shutting down advanced AI development, and has mused publicly about military enforcement against prohibited projects, up to and including accepting the risk of armed conflict to prevent a catastrophe. Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto names existential-risk thinking and effective altruism as ideological enemies; he published it under the flag of a venture firm now represented on the president’s science council. Vance used his 2025 Paris AI speech to warn Europe off excessive regulation. Thiel, as you now know, numbers Yudkowsky among the legionnaires of the Antichrist.

So “the rationalists control the government” is too crude to be useful; You could view Yarvin as having introduced another schism in the rationalist community, while other prominent members of the network are at each other’s throats.

Back to this month

Why spill so much ink on this, and how does it connect to Jacob Coxon resigning from Anthropic?

When his post went viral, one wing of American politics treated it as an operation. Musk called it a psy-op. Conservative commentators and at least one AI-industry blog combed the timestamps and concluded the virality was too clean, the amplification too fast, everything too connected: the AI-safety funders who boosted the post, they noted, are adjacent to Anthropic’s own investors, so the whole thing was staged. The Washington Post documented the campaign that followed, in which the researcher who warned of disaster became, himself, the story, and a target.

Is it possible? Or is he just a dude that believes what he believes and acted on principal?

For me, the rationalist schism between Yudkowsky and Thiel make either option plausible. A subculture spent two decades building a dense web of shared funding, shared housing, shared beds, and shared eschatology, staffed the frontier labs with its alumni, and asked the public to accept its warnings on the strength of its sincerity. The moment one of its members burned his equity to deliver the warning in the clearest possible terms, the first response of the faction now governing alongside his industry’s investors was that such coordination was unthinkable, that no message could possibly spread that fast organically, that somebody must be paying for it. The community’s critics had, at the very least, a clear notion of how physically and socially entangled, in the direction that happened to leave their own patrons untouched.

The community’s own defense was, notably, communal. Zvi Mowshowitz, a veteran of the scene, vouched for Coxon’s sincerity at length. Among those affirming that the virality had genuinely surprised the AI-safety world’s usual amplifiers was Aella, the doom priestess from earlier in this piece, whose word the community accepted as that of an expert in virality. Perhaps. But look at the epistemics on display: a social scene vouching for a member of the social scene, with its experts on virality drawn from the same scene. It’s hard to tell the sincerity of any of it when the rationalists circle the wagons.

That is not a reason to disbelieve Coxon. By every account, including hostile ones, he spent three years watching the industry’s internals, quit the safest-seeming employer in the field, gave up the money to make the warning unambiguous, and said plainly what his colleagues confirm they believe. Wired asked him whether Anthropic was cutting corners, and his answer was that Anthropic was “far and away the most responsible player in the space,” and that this was exactly the problem: if even the responsible player is racing, there is no responsible player. That is a grave statement indeed.

To be candid, I do not fully trust the Coxon story either. The timing of leaving just a smidge before vesting certainly feels like a staged narrative choice. That is, somebody understood exactly what a burned fortune and a plain-spoken young messenger would buy, and arranged it via an offshore bank account or similar. Idunno, this is where my tin foil hat comes on I guess. Within days, legislation was moving, a Senate bill to ban superintelligence was waiting for exactly this sort of whistleblower, and the answer to “the labs are gambling with our lives” is always a licensing regime: audits, evaluations, government-approved releases, which the Trump administration already dabbled in when blocking Anthroppic from releasing its Fable model for a time. Those fixed costs are what an incumbent can pay and a challenger cannot, which is to say, regulatory capture. A movement that begins at “shut it all down” reliably ends at “regulate it, and license us to do it.” If the two leading labs had commissioned an influence operation to entrench themselves under the flag of safety, it would look like the month we just had.

Who checks the checkers

When Anthropic’s Dario Amodei calls for a regime of outside evaluators with sustained access to frontier labs, the question of “who counts as outside?” becomes a critical question to resolve.

METR is the nonprofit that evaluates frontier AI systems, and recent critical essay, “Is METR a Meaningful Check on Anthropic?”, argues the evaluator is too close to the world it evaluates. The strongest evidence for taking that seriously is METR’s own disclosure: in its 2026 frontier-risk report, the organization acknowledged close personal relationships between staff and people at frontier companies, and described gaps in its initial conflict-of-interest arrangements. Those disclosures do not establish any clear findings of malfeasance, but the essay raises serious questions about the governance and judgement we can expect from the rationalist rat nest.

Once again, the risk is that the evaluator’s staff and the lab’s staff are the same forty people: exes, ex-colleagues, housemates, co-authors, and in-laws, all embedded in a community whose formative shared text taught them that the fate of the world depends on exceptional people being trusted with exceptional power. Real oversight needs authority that does not depend on remaining welcome in the community it oversees: disclosure, enforceable conflicts rules, protected whistleblowers, independent replication, and room for people whose concerns are more immediate than a machine apocalypse, like discrimination, surveillance, labor, military use, and concentrated corporate power.

None of this justifies ignoring the warnings. Coxon, Hubinger, and their colleagues may be entirely right about the danger. The unfortunate issue at hand is that the judgement, political goals, and lack of clear recusal or reasonable ethics in the communities surrounding U.S. AI labs cast serious doubt on either side of the AI doom discourse.

In the end, I suppose my concern is around the hubris of it all. Across all of these folks, there is a shared theory of exemption: exceptionally intelligent people, having understood something everyone else missed, are entitled to extraordinary freedom, because the stakes are too high for ordinary safeguards. Yudkowsky’s fanfic taught a generation of readers “heroic responsibility”. CFAR indoctrinated employees who hesitated. Leverage claimed to have solved the mind but led people to have mental breakdowns. The Zizians left a trail of bodies. Thiel and Yarvin continue influence the destruction of democracy, because they deserve to be in the ruling class unlike us peasants. The labs and their funders know, privately, that the machine might kill everyone, and conclude that they, of all people, should be trusted with this arms race. Again and again, intelligence becomes its own permission slip: I know better, therefore I may do what others may not.

I am not, and have never been, involved in any of the communities described here. This account is based on public reporting and the participants’ own published writing. Factual corrections are welcome at [email protected].