Most of the Western media collectively lost their minds at the news last week that an Anthropic researcher had quit because of his concerns that developers genuinely believed superintelligent AI could “kill us all by the end of the decade”.
Jacob Coxon — who had only spent four months at Anthropic, as well as several years at OpenAI — notified The Wall Street Journal before publishing his ultra-viral thread on X. This made it clear the media frenzy was at least partly orchestrated, and lends credence to the theory it was a marketing tactic to instil a sense of awe and destructive power into the industry’s sycophantic conversation simulators.
That theory, however, is closer to regulatory capture than marketing. The fossil fuel industry realised in the early 2000s that outright climate science denial wasn’t going to work forever. It became important to admit that climate science was real, while soberly downplaying its severity and insisting that the fossil fuel industry (experts and hyper-rational technologists that they are) should be in charge of the solutions.
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This is why each year’s COP events are still sodden with fossil fuel lobbyists, and why they’ve infiltrated the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for decades. It is why media outlets so frequently interview fossil fuel company CEOs to comment on energy issues. It is why carbon capture and storage is a technology immune to its own persistent failures, and why methane gas — responsible for a material chunk of all climate impacts — is still presented and understood as a climate solution.
You can see the parallels in the modern generative AI industry. Weak, toothless councils and roundtables are packed with former tech employees and adherents writing about superintelligence and extinction, while ensuring actual threats remain unaddressed and profits remain untouched. We even see AI companies offering AI solutions to AI-caused problems. Big tech rattles the bell about human extinction because it knows it’ll help capture regulators and allow the companies to self-regulate.
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This is part of it, but it’s still not enough to understand the current landscape. The fossil fuel industry is capitalist, but the AI industry is cultist.
The Anthropic engineer who dramatically quit is the latest public face of a long-running, cult-like movement, originating in Silicon Valley, that is obsessed with the sci-fi risk of deadly computers. “Cult-like” is probably putting it way too mildly; these people are close to being actual cultists. “Effective altruism”, “longtermism” and other sub-sects all orbit this central idea that the only real threat is a self-aware language model.
This was laid out nicely when Fox News interviewed Coxon, who told Sean Hannity, “I agree with President Trump’s tweet that global warming doomsday scenarios were overplayed. Like, it’s a very slow process and talking about doomsday’s completely absurd.” He then later went on to explain that OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and Elon Musk are not “climate change alarmists”.
It’d be too kind to ascribe this to Coxon trying to please his Fox host. This was the AI researcher laying out his actual beliefs, only weeks and months after a deadly summer in the Northern Hemisphere killed tens of thousands of people. The climate catastrophe is here, darkening the sky to a bloody red and in no way sticking with Coxon’s characterisation of a “slow process”.
Effective altruism and the “rationalists” have a nasty relationship with the risks underpinning climate, always tuned towards downplaying the impacts. One of the founders of “longtermism”, William MacAskill, once mused that while 15 degrees of warming would be bad, it wouldn’t be extinction level because you could at least grow crops somewhere on Earth. What (and I hope you can hear this through my keyboard) the absolute fuck.
As soon as you realise this industry is packed with adherents to a cult of climate dismissiveness, everything clicks into place.
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Anthropic, which last year urged the Trump administration to legislatively support the construction of fossil fuels, this year decided to rent space in the most notorious (and notably still far from the worst) methane-gas-powered data centre in the US. In Australia, Anthropic’s 2 gigawatt proposal will be plonked in Queensland, comfortably the worst state in the country in terms of plans to keep its ultra-filthy coal fleet killing people as long as possible.
Anthropic’s “data centre energy lead” role in Australia doesn’t mention climate or emissions. As I wrote in Crikey a few months back, the company’s long-term plans to use 20 gigawatts of energy in Australia would comprise nearly two-thirds of current total national electricity consumption. Thanks to data centre industry lobbying and the government’s own fear of scaring off these companies, Anthropic can buy cheap, meaningless renewable offsets to comply with regulation. The company has no interest in restraining the actual death and destruction caused by its fossil-fuelled software products.
Short nerds with high-pitched voices insist Conversation Simulator 2000 is going to turn into a living thing and wipe out humanity, and the only safe path forward is if they are granted full power to steward AI development. The world’s media hangs off their every word.
Meanwhile, coverage of the actual life-threatening apocalypse only gets lower and lower every month. And the industry itself shows no sign of letting up in its plan to keep expanding the use of fossil fuels to feed data centre energy hunger. They’re fossil fuel cultists injecting methane gas directly into the heart of their machine god.
Whether it’s marketing, regulatory capture or sincere cultist freakout, we already know with total certainty these people have no conscious connections to the people they’re already killing with immense levels of climate pollution, let alone the widespread impacts of generative AI slop spreading through society.