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\n Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images\n <\/p>\n
Last month, OpenAI shut down Sora, its attempt at a social-media app, as part of a pivot away from a \u201cdo everything all at once\u201d strategy that the company says<\/a> left it on the \u201cdefensive\u201d against companies like Anthropic. The story made sense. Claude Code was the new ChatGPT, and the race to build more capable coding and productivity models was the big prize. Then, this week, OpenAI made another announcement: It had acquired TBPN, the business-and-tech-centric video podcast. Fidji Simo, the former Meta executive who had been messaging the firm\u2019s return-to-focus plan for weeks, tried to explain<\/a> the rationale for a strange deal that nobody in the industry had seen coming:<\/p>\n As I\u2019ve been thinking about the future of how we communicate at OpenAI, one thing that\u2019s become clear is that the standard communications playbook just doesn\u2019t apply to us. We\u2019re not a typical company. We\u2019re driving a really big technological shift. And with our mission to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity comes a responsibility to help create a space for a real, constructive conversation about the changes AI creates\u2014with builders and people using the technology at the center.<\/p>\n I wouldn\u2019t say that buying a friendly but independent outlet and immediately portraying it as an extension of your communications strategy is a sure thing, \u201cconversation\u201d-wise, but if you\u2019ve watched TBPN\u2019s fluent, chummy interviews with executives like Sam Altman<\/a>, you can at least understand why they like it (after the purchase, Altman called it his \u201cfavorite tech show\u201d). Still, the deal, valued<\/a> in the \u201clow hundreds of millions,\u201d produced a lot of confusion. OpenAI was supposed to be avoiding \u201cside-quests.\u201d Why was it investing in podcasts?<\/p>\n One answer: Maybe the AI industry had seen the recent news<\/a> about social media. Last week, Meta lost a pair of high-profile court cases centering on harms to young users, and plaintiffs, politicians, and commentators settled on a frame: It was social media\u2019s \u201cbig tobacco\u201d moment. A novel legal approach had finally panned out, potentially opening the floodgates for thousands more lawsuits and inviting new regulation. The juries, presented with the same technical arguments made in countless other courtrooms over the last decade, now seemed straightforwardly fed up with representatives of social-media companies that profess to be careful and thoughtful about dealing with young people while, in private, as jurors heard, routinely<\/a> shared messages like, \u201cIf we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.\u201d<\/p>\n They also may have noticed how the public responded with a combination of relief and celebration. By the time these verdicts came down, school phone bans had swept across the country, and state-level attempts to ban minors from using social media were following closely behind. Public sentiment had already turned, in a broad and visceral way, against social media, and not just around kids. You could sense this in Meta\u2019s narrow, helpless, and almost annoyed public-relations strategy in the week since the news. Andy Stone, its head of comms, reshared posts arguing that the California case was \u201ca victory for the plaintiffs bar \u2014 not for children or society\u201d and that it was a \u201cblow against free speech.\u201d He boosted multiple people taking issue with the whole \u201ctobacco\u201d thing: a Reason podcast lamenting social-media \u201cprohibitionism\u201d and stating the fact that tobacco is a \u201cchemical\u201d while social media is, actually, in fact, I think you\u2019ll find, a \u201cdelivery system for speech,\u201d and, yes, \u200b\u200ba TBPN post suggesting to readers that \u201cit might be worth revisiting what exactly is addictive about cigarettes.\u201d<\/p>\n “As people compare social media to the cigarette industry, it might be worth revisiting what exactly is addictive about cigarettes. Nicotine… \u2014 Andy Stone (@andymstone) March 30, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n Whatever the merits of their defenses \u2014 and, as Mike Masnick at TechDirt argues<\/a>, there are more than some online-safety advocates are comfortable admitting \u2014 they have lately been, to be blunt, losing the public debate. The legal and rhetorical framework within which Meta and others long built their businesses \u2014\u00a0the laws protecting platforms from liability aren\u2019t perfect, but without them, the internet as we know it couldn\u2019t exist \u2014 suddenly tells us less about the possible futures of social media than a single unguarded quote from a Los Angeles juror, who told reporters after the verdict, \u201cWe wanted them to feel it. We wanted them to realize this was unacceptable.\u201d No need to be too specific about what \u201cthis\u201d is \u2014\u00a0everyone gets the idea.<\/p>\n Here, for people like Altman, is a glimpse of the future: Nobody wants to hear from social-media companies, while everyone wants something to be done to them. This punishing dynamic will consume their next decade in the form of rolling public-relations crises, lawsuits, regulations, and law, which they will have to deal with in the manner of other entrenched and unpopular industries, with lobbyists and lawyers, rather than as privileged stewards of the economy\u2019s most exceptional story.<\/p>\n Today, AI leaders still command immense amounts of credulous attention, and their predictions \u2014 alongside leaks from their companies, cryptic posts from researchers, and viral<\/a> X essays galore \u2014 are largely driving the story. But what about tomorrow? In the weeks before social media\u2019s \u201ctobacco moment,\u201d there were already signs of angst surfacing in the AI industry about its loss of narrative control. Anthropic had publicly clashed with a right-wing Department of War that wanted control over its technology and for the company\u2019s founder to sit down and shut up<\/a>. Meanwhile, the most popular left-wing politicians in the country were suddenly advocating for an extreme AI \u201cpause\u201d that would halt development in its tracks, citing<\/a> AI leaders\u2019 own warnings about its risks. Something seemed to be shifting as the technology accelerated. Maybe it really is time to buy a podcast.<\/p>\n For social-media companies, the path from \u201cconnecting the world\u201d to \u201cwe wanted them to feel it\u201d was, at least as tech timelines go, pretty long \u2014\u00a0long enough that Mark Zuckerberg was blamed for the election of not one but two of the least popular presidents in modern history\u2014\u00a0and gave companies like Meta a lot of room to make a lot of money and do a lot of lobbying. For AI, however, the journey could be much, much shorter and quite a bit more brutal.<\/p>\n \ud83d\udea8 Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: \u201cWe are so close to these models reaching the level of human intelligence, and yet there doesn’t seem to be a wider recognition in society of what’s about to happen \u2026 There hasn’t been a public awareness of the risks.\u201d pic.twitter.com\/9OuiTem3ce<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) March 30, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n When, as above, Amodei expresses disappointment that \u201cthere doesn\u2019t seem to be a wider recognition in society of what\u2019s about to happen,\u201d he\u2019s referring to a diverse range of risks and worries about which he\u2019s written and spoken extensivel<\/a>y, in manifestos, at conferences, and during dinners with journalists and policymakers. But while he couldn\u2019t be much more different a character or narrator from Meta\u2019s frustrated head of comms, he\u2019s posing a (more currently sympathetic, consequential, and earnest) version of the same question: We know something about how our technology works \u2014\u00a0why aren\u2019t people listening to us?<\/p>\n For social media, the answer is intuitive: People take it for granted, feel ambivalent about their own usages, and associate the companies with scandal and their leaders with extreme wealth and politics. As a result, it has drifted into the same cursed space as \u201cAmerican health care,\u201d \u201cthe media,\u201d \u201ceducation,\u201d or even \u201cthe economy\u201d as something that\u2019s seen as broken, moving in the wrong direction, and where even users who report positive personal experiences assess the general situation<\/a> as bad and getting worse. (Political scientists call this a gap between \u201cegotropic\u201d and \u201csociotropic evaluations\u201d \u2014\u00a0an \u201cI\u2019m fine, but we\u2019re not\u201d divide \u2014 and it maps to some of America\u2019s most truly fucked governance priorities.) There are signals that AI is more or less starting out there. People basically like ChatGPT but also think that AI is going to be really bad for the economy. They enjoy using AI tools to make their lives easier but find it disconcerting when, for example, their managers mandate usage. (This dynamic is exaggerated, of course, by social media.)<\/p>\n Where social-media companies spent years reacting to outcomes and consequences they could claim were unforeseen, AI leaders have practically been forecasting their own vilification, warning that increased adoption will produce destabilizing effects, that it will cause unemployment, that society isn\u2019t ready for what\u2019s coming, and that it will all happen faster than almost anyone expects.<\/p>\n Plenty of investors are listening to people like Amodei, of course, acting on his predictions and in some sense taking his advice \u2014 but only the parts that they believe might make them money. It\u2019s when he starts talking about AI-powered bioterrorism, out-of-control mass surveillance, and white-collar job automation that the responses don\u2019t seem, to him, to match the gravity of what he\u2019s saying. Part of this is surely down to audiences: Investors move fast to seek advantage, while democratic governments take a long time to metabolize new technology and its downstream consequences. And part of it is surely because nobody in positions of power quite knows what you\u2019re supposed to do<\/a>, or where to even start, when someone says that they\u2019re worried they\u2019re about to eliminate, on the low end, a few tens of millions of jobs, perhaps on the way to summoning the apocalypse.<\/p>\n But Amodei\u2019s disappointment isn\u2019t just about what people aren\u2019t doing. It\u2019s about what they are. Last month, the company got into a fight with the Department of War over how its technology could be used in, well, war. Anthropic, claiming a unique understanding of both Claude\u2019s limitations and its future risks and potential, wanted assurances about surveillance and autonomous killing. Pete Hegseth, alongside deputies like Emil Michael, more or less told them to fuck themselves<\/a>, called them weird, and tried to designate the company a supply-chain risk.<\/p>\n DoD official Emil Michael on designating Anthropic a supply chain risk — “Their model has a soul, a ‘constitution’ — not the US Constitution. The other day their model was ‘anxious’ and they believe it has a 20% chance of being sentiment and having its own ability to make\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/D1aPSJYTaJ<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 12, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n Within a few weeks, AI companies saw some more assertive behavior on the political left in the form of proposed legislation from Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that would pause the construction of new data centers:<\/p>\n Bernie Sanders and AOC just proposed legislation to freeze AI data center construction until strong national safeguards are in place. <\/p>\n We’re all for preventing the rise of the machines, but hard not to wonder what this does to America’s shot at locking down AI dominance while\u2026 pic.twitter.com\/2SRAw0nmeE<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Lark Davis (@LarkDavis) March 26, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cWe cannot sit back and allow a handful of billionaire Big Tech oligarchs to make decisions that will reshape our economy, our democracy and the future of humanity,\u201d Sanders wrote of the bill. \u201cWe need serious public debate and democratic oversight over this enormously consequential issue. The time for action is now. We need a federal moratorium on AI data centers.\u201d<\/p>\n You can align these episodes with existing schools of thought in the AI world if you want to. We can imagine that Hegseth\u2019s advisers see AI companies as powerful and useful but not categorically different from other contractors they\u2019ve worked with, and are far more worried about military and industrial supremacy than they are runaway capabilities; likewise, we can note that Sanders\u2019s bill was influenced by, or at least rolled out alongside, his conversation<\/a> with Eliezer Yudkowsky, an AI thinker with whom Amodei, for example, is deeply familiar, who recently published a book called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and who has been calling to \u201cshut it all down<\/a>\u201d for years.<\/p>\n But the thing these substantively and theoretically opposed approaches have in common is that they mostly don\u2019t come from the AI industry, don\u2019t match the terms of debate set out and favored by people like Altman and Amodei, and represent preemptive forms of the sort of broad, intense, and conceptually slippery backlash that took years to consume social media. These are not just evolved varieties of old AI risk and alignment conversations \u2014\u00a0they\u2019re forceful responses to change from articulated by people who, until recently, weren\u2019t part of the AI conversation at all. Put another way: The window during which the world will look to people building AI for advice about how to respond to AI seems to be closing fast, even (and especially) as they make an urgent case for cooperation.<\/p>\n Google DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic have been funding and sharing anticipatory research about the societal effects of AI \u2014 and are hiring more people for the job<\/a> \u2014 since well before the general public started conceptualizing its use as a potential problem. In some cases they advocated for proactive regulation, but they also positioned themselves as partners to governments<\/a> on plans for crossing over some sort of general, society-wide AI threshold. If recent events are any guide, though, the near future might not be about collectively figuring out with Anthropic how to best amend the \u201cconstitution\u201d the company has written for Claude<\/a>, or summoning Google\u2019s \u201cpost-AGI\u201d economists<\/a> for friendly consultation with congressional committees. Instead, it could follow \u2014\u00a0driven by public opinion and, eventually, maybe, representative democracy \u2014\u00a0hyperpoliticized and reactive tracks that, to industry figures and policy experts steeped in theories of scaling and AI governance, will probably seem ill-informed, wrong-headed, unsophisticated, or vulgar.<\/p>\n I wrote that the polling on *AI* (as opposed to data centers) was pretty positive, but all the new polling that’s come out since my article has shown the public turning negative. https:\/\/t.co\/2ovkamopvO<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/mqgFWOg2Uu<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) March 30, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n You can read some of this angst in the TBPN news. And as someone building AI, or who has already been made extremely wealthy by an AI startup, you may be starting to get the feeling that you won\u2019t get much credit for telling people ahead of time, in a concerned tone, that your technology might soon interrupt or ruin their lives, especially if it actually does. You\u2019re still the guy whose plan was to do that, and it shouldn\u2019t be a surprise if politicians, rather than seeking your counsel, decide to seek some distance from you. You might worry about getting Zuckified, or worse.<\/p>\n Politicians – especially Dems – should pledge not to take AI money. <\/p>\n They are buying up influence ahead of the midterms, and Dems who take AI $ will lose authority and trust as the public bears the cost.<\/p>\n Their money will end up being toxic anyway. People are catching on.<\/p>\n \u2014 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 26, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n The American political reaction to AI is rapidly changing shape. The MAGA right is already reconsidering how its deregulatory support of the AI industry, which last year took the form of patriotic arms-race rhetoric and public events with CEOs (who, in turn, expressed support for and given money<\/a> to Trump), might look going forward. This will make them a target for politicians left and center, who are better positioned to not just oppose a hypervisible accumulation of capital against labor but, more relevantly to how American politics actually works, have a wide-open opportunity to associate the specter of AI transformation and job displacement with Republicans and to force it, at least temporarily, into a partisan frame. \u201cBut what if the effects of AI are more extreme in scope and scale than the apps that merely rerouted the world\u2019s sociality through an ad network,\u201d you ask? Too bad: Our (social-media-degraded!) political environment has limited patience for things like that. It\u2019s no wonder Amodei already sounds a bit defeated. Altman still thinks he might be able to get in front of things:<\/p>\n new funding, new model, new policy push.@OpenAI<\/a> will begin releasing a series of policy proposals next week meant to spark conversation about how to \u201crethink the social contract.” 2026 is gonna be an interesting year.https:\/\/t.co\/wOzsY43oNW<\/a><\/p>\n \u2014 Julia Black (@mjnblack) April 1, 2026<\/a><\/p>\n OpenAI\u2019s \u201cIndustrial policy for the Intelligence Age,\u201d a set of proposals<\/a> mingling plans to coordinate against AI security threats with outlines of redistributive government programs, is a sensible (if vague) document made incredibly strange by its source: Maybe we see evidence here of a different sort of AI bubble, one in which Sam Altman seems to believe that America is waiting on people like him to start a conversation about renegotiating the social contract, rather than a country spring-loaded for a tech backlash to end all tech backlashes \u2014\u00a0the same bubble where, last year, as few will recall, Zuckerberg, trying out a new identity as an AI CEO, wrote<\/a> a manifesto about how \u201csuperintelligence is now in sight.\u201d<\/p>\n But in OpenAI\u2019s substantial and much quieter lobbying efforts around, among many other things, \u201cchild safety<\/a>\u201d and data-center deregulation \u2014\u00a0and perhaps in its nascent new media strategy \u2014 there\u2019s evidence of a more paranoid and ruthless approach to managing the story. AI won\u2019t just have a \u201cbig tobacco\u201d moment, a point at which years of misleading marketing, personal angst, and visible harms gradually build to a moment of reckoning. It\u2019s likely to have something more intense, and soon, arriving ahead of, not after, its diffusion through society and the economy. The last story the AI firms will have been in control of will be the one where they said they were about to change everything. It helped them raise a lot of money to build a lot of data centers and train better models. What happens next might not be up to them at all.<\/p>\n Sign Up for John Herrman column alerts<\/p>\n Get an email alert as soon as a new article publishes.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n
…it certainly seems like what pulls people into social media is more the humans that create content on the platform.”
–@johncoogan<\/a> https:\/\/t.co\/dG9o3LYYkF<\/a><\/p>\n