The purpose behind the panic

It feels like the Babylon Bee is often mocking liberal predictions about the end of the world, but a recent headline hit a little closer to home than usual: “Anthropic Boasts They Will Kill Off Humanity Way Before OpenAI.”

It was hard not to laugh because the conversation over artificial intelligence took on a starkly dark cast in the last few weeks. We weren’t just talking about data centers’ electric and water usage rates—we were talking about killer robots wiping out humanity in a few years.

The doom-and-gloom started when Anthropic AI researcher Jacob Coxon posted to X: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible—but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”

That’s a dire warning, especially when echoed by another Anthropic exec: “Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade.”

President Trump put his finger on an important insight in his response via TruthSocial: We have seen this show from the left before. “The world is destined to end soon” crowd has been through several iterations—in the modern era, I think immediately of Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling 1968 book The Population Bomb, which predicted mass starvation from overpopulation. Then the Y2K phenomenon, when people feared the world’s computers would crash if they couldn’t transition to the new millennium.

The flavor of liberal Armageddon immediately prior to AI was climate change, as Trump pointed out: “The people that say that AI is going to destroy the World, and that Data Centers are bad for your neighborhood, are the same people that said, just a short time ago, that the World would be extinguished by ‘Climate Change.’ That HOAX never worked out for them, and now they’re on to the next one.”

That seems exactly right. By now, the characters are pretty well known. I’m sure Dario Amodei will be the Al Gore of AI, and we’re all anxious to see what lefty European teenager will emerge as the Greta Thunberg of AI. The United Nations will convene committees and panels, and the Nobel Prize committee will confer awards on the “AI Safety” advocates to the applause of the European Union.

The “AI Safety” crowd’s rush to pump the proverbial brakes on AI development reflects three deeper realities. First, much like climate change, they’re willing to handcuff the United States while the Chinese Communists have no such qualms with putting the pedal to the metal. Just as the Chinese will pollute their way to prosperity regardless of any UN carbon quotas, they will also pour whatever resources they can into AI acceleration without hesitation around moral or ethical limits for AI’s welfare. (They don’t even care about living humans’ human rights, little less the human rights of computerized intelligence.)

Second, the AI Safety advocates’ solution is always more government regulation. As Rahm Emanuel once advised, “never let a good crisis go to waste.” Creating an atmosphere of frenzy and panic always leads to the one big centralized institution—the federal government—stepping in to save the day (in this case, to save humanity itself) by accreting to itself more power in our economy and our lives.

Third, I am not worried about an AI Armageddon like in the movies because I’m confident we will someday experience an actual spiritual Armageddon like in the Bible. I don’t want AI-run robots with machine guns killing humans ala Terminator any more than the next guy. But I’m ready to embrace the hopeful side of AI—breakthrough discoveries in health and science, gains in economic efficiency, new horizons for human knowledge—in part because I know the end of the world will come in the clouds with a trumpet blast, not a computer crash.