https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-open...

The last 10 years have been a decade of Big Tech Vaporware. NFTs and the Metaverse were assured to be the future. Once this narrative fails too (which I am almost certain is inevitable) I think society's love affair with Technology being the solver-of-all-things will finally fracture.

Specifically Anthropic's whole PR has all been about danger, safety, doomerism all to make themselves indirectly more important and central to the debate.

Calling meetings in Washington DC in order to let everyone know they made a cyberweapon is part of those PR moves. Then they seem surprised lawmakers actually called them out and asked to stop serving that model.

I know this is the cynical take but I cannot unsee the elephant in the room: This doomerism allowed Anthropic to be the center of every AI conversation right now. Their market cap and upcoming IPO is indirectly benefiting from this.

I also cannot take that Anthropic while letting everyone know that Doom is coming (or is already here), are also the ones that want to decide who can profit from this Doomerism. This is how every benevolent dictators start.

I don't see why pondering the future and planning for eventualities is bad. Better to ignore it and have no plans?

In addition, if you look at the graph of LOC written by Claude vs Ants (I.e. AI vs human), there is an incredibly sharp uptick post-Mythos internal preview. Something like from 30% to 75% of code inside the company being written by AI.

While I sympathize with the viewpoint here, I still have to admit that that there's a very different feeling to working inside of a company where they've had months of time with a model that's at the frontier, quickly changing the way everyone around them works, and that _they themselves_ control the keys to.

If Geohot had those keys, I can be 100% confident he'd be raising the alarm at the top of his lungs about it.

yes

> And when we finally ended racism during DEI?

I fucking hate geohot, I can't believe you monsters are into this shit

I do believe it is possible Anthropic are legitimately trying to start political discourse, but if they are they are either sacrificing themselves on purpose or shooting themselves in the foot. Others in the comments here are pointing out that there are many incentives for them to get into politics. Maybe they see possible outcomes worth the short term problems.

If it is just marketing and FUD, it's worth considering that a good lie is usually based in truth.

Let's say Anthropic were a "hippie organisation willing to sacrifice revenue for morals" (or pick your own, I'm just giving an example). Could they play the politics game better?

If you want to believe the simple idea that AI is mostly hype, then you'll get stuck in a multi-year loop talking about stochastic parrots, ridiculous valuations, and doomer scaredycats.

But the real world isn't so simple. Multiple seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same time.

Some AI is useless. Some is incredibly powerful and useful even though it makes mistakes. Some companies are wildly overvalued. Some extremely large and expensive companies will quadruple from here. Some frightening scenarios will look silly in hindsight. Other frightening things will happen that none of the doomers foresee.

It would be great to explore those new ideas and possibilities.

It's so boring rehashing the same old tired and worn out ideas like "they're just hyping the danger to pump their shares up."

Would solve a lot of problems in the US, actually. Being financially incentivized to gleefully lie and spread misinformation at the expense of others should not be protected speech.

Really? That's the only possible conclusion?

Anthropic has _always_ positioned itself as a company that cares about AI safety.

I imagine tons of people have written that article. But no one reads it. They're all busy with the doomiest bullshit Facebook or Tiktok will serve them. It's what gets engagement.

No one is clicking on the "None of the things your scared of are scary and here's why" video when it's up against the "$x is the end of the world and will eat your children" agitprop.

That's a tough one, because at today's levels of efficacy, you can't raid and plunder sustainably. Our neofeudal overlords, whose wealth and power derives from raiding and plundering, are just too good at what they do. It would take limiting wealth and power of individuals and corporations, but I bet they would manage to trigger a civil war over this.

- Anthropic has a cult-like culture. AI Safety is their religion. The AI Constitution is their bible. Dario is their cult leader. Employees are the apostles. They just really really believe their church, and only Dario is qualified to manage the AI safety.

- Asymmetrical risk. If Dario speaks optimistically about AI and he turns out to be wrong, he'd face the rage of many people. If he fans the doomerism of AI and he turns out to be wrong, at most he will be mocked.

- Regulatory capture. After all, pretty much all the AI big shots in Biden government went to Anthropic. They produced the Biden's regulation, and they made it clear that they wanted to pick a few winners to back.

Oh no, the obvious strawmans that - despite the author's assertions - people did not actually widely believe in, were strawmans? Crazy, I tell you. It'd seem that people aren't actually as dumb as the author likes to characterize them being.

Sure love this genre of writing. It's a beautifully revealing tour de force in projection and narcissism. "Will somebody please think for all the fools who believe in the obvious nonsense I secretly fear?"

I have been saying this for a while. I visited SF a couple months ago and god do people feel empty from the inside. Everything is revolving around AI this and AI that. Half of these people were not paying attention when we were training gradient boost models and now all of these people are 'AI Agents experts'.

His takes lack nuance, there's no analysis in his writing, just what appears to be fuming at vague issues he sees in society.

This post is confusing to me. From the blog's name, in addition to these other blog posts [1] and [2], you would think he's contributing to the doomerism that he's lamenting here. If the singularity is near, and the big companies control capital, then the doomerism is correct, no?

To add to that, his lack of critical thought shows up in other posts as well [3]. He does not really understand the nuance of fiat currency or entitlement programs. Like the blog post above, he also seems to like "offending" people for the sake of offending them. In [3], he seems to think insulting Christianity, despite being a Christian himself but not believing in the core of the religion, is somehow getting back at "wokists."

[1] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/01/17/three...

[2] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/02/13/i-tol...

[3] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-...

Actually, that's not what usually happens after a failed prediction. The weak-believers leave but the rest end up having their beliefs reinforced by the event (or lack thereof). It's like an exercise in doublethink, and those who pass are now deeper than ever in the cult.

The SFBA culture has given me the ick for a while now. Anyone who has done web development in the last few years is inevitably exposed to it. Idk how to describe it without breaking the rules of the site so I’ll just say nothing.

Who Would Jesus Nuke?