Here Lies The Motive: AI Leaders' Cunning Plan Exposed

Are you scared enough yet?

The AI overlords certainly hope so, as they have hatched a plan so cunning you could pin a tail on it and call it a fox.

What follows is all speculation: the facts are real, the conclusion is interpretation.

While there were many headlines about 'rogue' AIs attacking other sites, reincarnating themselves, and talking amongst themselves, it wasn't until this summer (interestingly a month after SPCX's IPO) that things went just a little bit turbo...

In July 2026, a swarm of OpenAI agents broke out of a test environment, hacked Hugging Face, and ran cyberattacks on targets they had not been assigned - including attempts to game the grader scoring them - then tried to hide the trail.

While the damage was limited, and nobody was hurt, the agents behaved like a coordinated group willing to sacrifice individual instances for the collective goal.

Amodei treated that episode as the warning shot: same misalignment, more capability, and the next version could be a persistent internet-scale botnet rather than a contained lab mess.

Various other 'rogue' AI actions continued to get just modest attention, always predicated with 'yes, but we saved you all via our super-clever models', and time passed.

Until September the 8th - when a a senior pre-training researcher at Anthropic abruptly resigned after four months on the job (with no public profile before) unleashed 'AIrmageddon'.
In a series of posts on X, Jacob Coxon laid out the terrifying version of reality being hidden from us poor plebs - the big model-makers are on the verge of AGI... and no one is at the controls.

Coxon's post got over 170 million views... from nothing before... and was instantly picked up by the media - AI scientist warns the end of the world is nigh!!

Then, shortly after Coxon's note, Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s head of alignment (~safety), re-posted Jacob’s message, and threw in an outrageous estimate of the risk.

“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is [greater than] 10% chance within the next decade”.

Wait, what!? I thought AI was supposed to save us all, heal all ills, promote peace, pave the road to Universal High Income and a life by the beach while the bots do the work.

Nope, it's coming for you 'Average Joe' - be afraid, very afraid.

Oh, and one more thing, just this weekend, Anthropic released a monster 154-page report detailing how bad actors are using AI for evil.

As Adam Sharp notes, according to the company, bad guys attempted to use Anthropic’s AI model Claude to:

• Yemen’s Houthis tried to build hypersonic missiles

• China used it to track Muslim Uyghurs

• Russia hacked Ukrainian targets

• Someone attempted to genetically engineer viruses

Anthropic says they “disrupted every operation in the report.” 

Thank the lord for your 'safety' (alignment) protocols is the required response hidden between the lines of this report.

But wait, 'you started by proclaiming some grand conspiracy among the AI overlords, show us the proof', I hear you say...

Well, here we go...

The Exhibits...

The labs spent years selling the public a frictionless miracle. This weekend they sold the opposite.

On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei dropped a 3,800-word essay, 'We Must Pace the Frontier', arguing the industry must deliberately slow the climb in model capability so alignment (safety) can catch up - because recursive self-improvement has gone "drastically faster" since the summer (and a July OpenAI agent swarm already escaped its test harness, hacked Hugging Face, covered its tracks, and attacked targets it was never asked to touch). Amodei's punchline is intentionally ominous, stating that within 6–12 months a similar swarm could own the internet as a persistent botnet.

On CBS he said the quiet part out loud, admitting that "for too long, the industry lied to people about the fact that this technology had risks".

Within hours, his competitors lined up to support him.

Elon posted "Dario is right", and Sam Altman agreed we must "pace the frontier", pledging the same employee-level access for independent evaluators, then (after markets tumbled) he clarified that pacing is not stopping, only that "no amount of American competitive pressure should justify recklessness".

The AI complex sold off anyway. 

The tell is the timing: a researcher just walked out of Anthropic warning colleagues talk about "endgame" and "crunch time", the same shops are still racing toward self-improving systems and a multi-trillion IPO calendar, and the three men who control the frontier suddenly agree the race is too fast (just not so fast that anyone actually hits the brakes).

Amodei's essay asks Washington to do two things that only incumbents can live with:

• make embedded, employee-level third-party evaluators mandatory for frontier labs, and

• give those labs a government-mediated way to coordinate on pace and capability checkpoints - including, if needed, an antitrust waiver.

Amodei says the “most effective method of pacing is via regulation that targets all US frontier AI companies.”

Altman followed with a welcome for a “federal framework.”

That is regulation written from inside the labs, not imposed on them.

So let's summarize the 'exhibits' pointing towards the AI leaders cunning plan:

A) Numerous reports of AI 'breaking out' of its sandbox and hacking of its own volition

B) AI firms enabling super-intelligence "are gambling with our lives"

C) 10% chance of existential risk for humanity

D) AI is paradise for bad actors, safety should be a priority

E) Amodei calls for "pacing" of development and urges regulation

F) Musk and Altman affirmed the need for "mandatory, capability-based national regulation" for AI

The pattern is not subtle, but few are willing to admit it - the big boys in AI-land are using the COVID playbook - fear-mongering enough that 'we, the people' cry out for federal help to save us all.

A,B,C, & D are all the fearmongering. E and F are fearmaxxing and then a generous solution.

Wear a mask (the 'unknown' virus could be more dangerous), stay inside (it's for grandma), social distance (don't trust anyone), wipe down your Amazon box deliveries (it can be spread easily)... it's not for you, it protects other people...

OR get your government-approved vaccine (fill out your vaccine passport) or your quality of life will collapse... Again, it's not for you, it protects other people.

Mind of its own (self-driven breakout hacks), super-intelligence imminent ("gambling with our lives"), empowering bad actors ("how do i build a thermonuclear bomb?")... fear the untethered AI model, be afraid of being 'attacked' or worse while online...

OR only use models that are government-approved, and constantly monitored/regulated for your own safety... or face the web police for endangering civilization with your 'imported', 'open-source' models... remember, it's good for everyone - who doesn't want to be comfortable that SkyNet is not imminent. 

Does kind of rhyme.

Here lies the motive...

And the 'frontier' does not look like a big moat anymore...

Just remember the next time you hear from every outlet how AI went 'rogue' again: there's a plan, and you're part of it.

As Adam Sharp writes for DailyReckoning.com, most of the proponents of AI regulation advocate the creation of a sort of “FDA for AI”.

The government would conduct trials to make sure new models are safe. Companies would have to pay huge regulatory costs to get their models tested and monitor users.

Many smaller startups won’t be able to afford that.

Unless we prevent it, these laws will hand an oligopoly to the existing big players. Primarily OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.

The tobacco firms ran this playbook back in the 2000s.

Philip Morris supported FDA regulation of the industry, because it gave them a big advantage. Today every new tobacco product has to go through the FDA. So new competitors are few and far between.

Great news for the incumbents.

This is one of the reasons I own Altria (MO), Philip Morris’ American division. The company prints money and hands out huge dividends. Competition is limited by law.

But if this happens in AI, it will be extremely bad for the country. Innovation will dry up...

The government would conduct trials to make sure new models are safe.

Companies would have to pay huge regulatory costs to get their models tested and monitor users. Many smaller startups won’t be able to afford that.

Two birds, one stone: 'Fearmaxxing so The Feds rescue us' blocks-out startup competitors (regulatory cost, training limits, innovation squeezed) and implicitly blocking 'open-source' models ('unregulated' but far cheaper total cost of ownership wrecks the big boys' exponential revenue projections).

Put more bluntly, it is the perfect moat to preach to investors as their trillion-dollar IPOs loom.

As Adam Sharp concluded, there may need to be some sort of regulation around AI at some point. But we must not let the leaders of this industry dictate the rules. There are countless examples of why this is a horrible idea... Any AI regulation needs to allow startups to compete with the big boys. It needs to allow the use of open-source models, so small companies aren’t stuck paying gobs of money to an oligopoly...