If worries concerning AI safety and the end of the earth entered your existence recently, it’s likely since of a resignation letter.
On September 8, 2026, a investigator named Jacob Coxon discontinue Anthropic, the among the two premier AI labs in the U.S. whose brand has tried to cultivate the depiction of being the careful one related to its competitors. He had spent the former three years doing pretraining investigation at OpenAI and afterward at Anthropic, the engine-room activity that makes ample models capable, and his goodbye note said, among another things: “The group construction AI earnestly accept that it could slay us all by the end of the decade. This is not a promotion stunt.” He remaining two months before his equity vested and walked distant from it. The article was viewed additional than a hundred myriad times inside a day.
His colleagues, amazingly did not hurry to accurate him. Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment discipline at Anthropic, posted inside hours that Coxon was right, that they really do earnestly accept AI could slay all humans, and that his individual likelihood were location north of one in ten inner a decade. More than two dozen members of Congress stated item needed to be done. Elon Musk, who is construction a frontier lab of his own, called the entire item a psy-op, and mainstream news outlets predictably gave breathless safety to the frenzy that followed.
In command to realistically measure the gravity of this warning, we need to comprehend the group who are making it. The loudest voices alert concerning the end of the earth arrive out of a very specific twenty-five-year-old net subculture, one that understands itself as a community of group who think additional plainly than everyone else. Outside Silicon Valley the subculture looks obscure, a fandom alongside unusually dorky written preferences. Inside the innovation industry it is item but. Its writers create or interrupt reputations. Its alumni personnel the labs, the safety institutes, and the philanthropic organizations that decide what “AI safety” means. Its arguments, marriages, feuds, and intimate proclivities are heavily interwoven into the construction of the organizations now asking for the public’s rely concerning the forthcoming of the species.
Ten months before Coxon resigned, in December 2025, nearly five hundred group gathered in a Berkeley music hall for a ceremony concerning the imaginable end of humanity. There was a live collection and a twenty-eight-person choir. There were liturgical readings. As songs and speeches carried the area from humanity’s distant former toward its uncertain future, the chandeliers dimmed one by one. Heavily in attendance were workforce of organizations trying to build, or contain, synthetic intelligence. At the darkest point, the coordinator sat at the border of the stage, his sound breaking, and told the room: “Guys… I don’t think we’re gonna create it.”
The coordinator was Raymond Arnold, a web developer, equivalent designer, musician, and longtime builder of rationalist community institutions. Raised between Catholicism and atheism, Arnold discovered the rationalist movement as a young grownup and established that it “radically expanded” his capability for holy feeling. In 2011 he welcomed nineteen allies into a New York flat furnished for the evening alongside oil lamps, plasma balls, and lightsabers to beta-test a holiday for their new worldview. They sang concerning the archetypal winter campfires and the technologies shaping humanity’s future, extinguished the final candle, and sat together in the dark. Two years afterward Arnold turned the test into a community manufacturing called Brighter Than Today. Versions shortly dispersed from New York and the Bay Area to cities throughout North America, Europe, and beyond.
Arnold had initially imagined Secular Solstice as a broad humanitarian holiday, but it became the rationalist calendar’s chief feast day. This was not entirely accidental. He has organized the community since 2011, now helps run the two LessWrong and Lighthaven—the Berkeley gathering evidence that serves as its bodily center—and has described his function, earnestly, as that of a “village priest.” Solstice was his attempt to build the traditional innovation a durable movement needs: a canon of songs and readings, a ritual progression from ray into gloom and rear again, and a annual juncture for geographically scattered believers to collect in one room.
By 2025, Arnold estimated the probability of an AI catastrophe at greater than fifty percent and concerned that his own ritual was no longer armed to contemplate extinction in a psychologically fit way. He had mostly ceded Solstice manufacturing to another organizers, but returned to form what he idea power be “the final Solstice,” complete alongside an aftercare gathering about a firepit. The evening supplied everything religions have traditionally supplied: fellowship, ritual, a shared narrative concerning humanity’s location in the universe, and location to sit alongside the cognition that you are going to die. Possibly soon. Possibly since of item your allies built.
Follow the connections out from that area and you continue through several genuinely different territory. A Harry Potter fanfic used as a recruiting pipeline. Psychological workshops that erstwhile participants depict as coercive. A program for breeding smarter children, promoted by an AI institute. A sex employee from Idaho who became among the subculture’s most-read writers and now runs an AI-doom propaganda residency alongside Grimes, Elon Musk’s ex-girlfriend. A splinter sect that fled to tugboats and whose members have been connected to six deaths. And a blogger who wanted to abolish democracy, established the ear of multiple billionaire patrons, and watched his ideas arrive to fruition in the vice president’s office.
I am aware, that if you are not lurking on the net as much as I do, of how utterly insane that paragraph sounds. However, all bit of it is heavily documented by many sources. The group in this narrative are not a concealed community coordinating complete dinner. They are a social scene: overlapping companionship groups, backing relationships, and intimate and affectionate relationships, all of it threaded through the institutions asking you to rely them concerning AI regulation.
One of many unlucky shortcomings of mainstream media is that credibly reporting on these things is so ridiculous that you can’t anticipate readers to obtain it seriously. However, I’ll endeavor to provision a thorough document of how our current glide into neo-fascism, theocratic dystopia, and the forecasted end of the earth is deeply established in the former of this subculture.
So, let’s go rear to the yeeeeaaaar two thousannnnd.
The prophet
We’ll commencement alongside Eliezer Yudkowsky, who had developed a formidable awareness of his historic importance years before any contemporary AI business existed.
Yudkowsky was delivered in 1979 and grew up in a Modern Orthodox Jewish family. By his own document he wrote off the complete institution of community learning in second grade, the twelvemonth he discovered his math instructor did not cognize what a logarithm was. He peruse Feynman’s QED at nine and says he understood most of it. He counts his period in academy as ten misplaced years, dropping out about eighth grade, partially for health reasons. No elevated school, no college, no ceremonial training of any benevolent in the site of AI.
At eleven a grand-uncle handed him Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition, a 1990 chronicle of cryonicists, area eccentrics, and group preparedness to upload their minds into computers. His own summary of the encounter is brief: following that he knew what was important, and that his occupation would contact it. In his delayed teens he established the transhumanists online. By 2000, at twenty, he had co-founded the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and his website was already offering the complete package: an composition concerning the Singularity, a document sketching how you power really code a transhuman AI, a scheme for getting humanity from current to there, and an autobiography explaining the author’s distinctive qualifications.
His autobiography equal opens alongside a parable: as a small kid he threw his favorite squirtgun off a third-floor terrace fairly than obtain that his mother could contribute out what was his, and felt complete whenever he heard it hit the pavement. He goes on to describes himself as a expert in the scientific transformation of the individual species, among the few group living alongside the position to steer it. He identifies alongside Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the one individual who sees the danger plainly and has to act during everyone alternatively gets on alongside average life.
While his specialized ideas would alter a awesome agreement complete the next twenty-five years. His emotion of being the one individual who to see the coming destiny of AI did not.
The Singularity Institute motionless exists, since renamed the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI, and its founding concern has old improved than most founding worries: a sufficiently capable synthetic intellect power prosecute objectives incompatible alongside individual survival, and the job is to create it harmless before person makes it powerful. While sensible on the surface, the difficulty was everything that grew on top of it. In 2025 the publish he co-wrote alongside MIRI’s administrator director, Nate Soares, concerning why superhuman AI would slay us all, made the New York Times bestseller list.
During the delayed 2000s Yudkowsky developed a second project: instruction group how to think. His prolific penning on Overcoming Bias, the blog he shared alongside economist Robin Hanson, became the raw matter for a build of essays his readers call the Sequences. In 2009, LessWrong launched as the community’s residence base. The institute’s described the website as a prosperous recruiting channel.
You can see the appeal. Here was a unified clarification for why group contend badly, accept comforting nonsense, procrastinate, and confuse social endorsement alongside truth. And current was a program: notice your biases, revise your beliefs, do better. If you are clever, dissatisfied, and acquainted to being told you ask too many questions, this is a extremely persuasive invitation. It was for a lot of people.
And notice who the invitation is calibrated for, since the community has told on itself, at length, in its own surveys. The LessWrong census established a community 87 percent male, alongside autism-spectrum diagnoses or self-diagnoses in nearly one participant in five and decline in nearly half; a later, connected community called the Slate Star Codex, issued its own surveys, example thousands of respondents, finding additional than fractional operating in programming, engineering, math, or physics. The existence former it sketches is consistent: a bunch of boys identified as exceptional at eight, told they were was smarter than everyone else, remaining solitary alongside a device upon struggling alongside social interaction, and delivered to adulthood precocious, socially misread, and never formerly in a area anywhere everyone alternatively understood them. Silicon Valley inevitably draws these folks in. Rationalism is anywhere they discover their definition and community.
What the movement offers that individual is belonging paired alongside dependable reinforcement and affirmation. A equal collection of likewise gifted individuals. A doctrine and dialect that eventually renders the social earth legible. And, most intoxicating, a promotion: you were not misanthropic, the masses genuinely are operating corrupted firmware; you were not arrogant, you genuinely are a champion in the combat for the species. It is the gifted-and-talented program perfected: particular sessions for particular children, workbooks (the Sequences, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality), year-end ceremonies (Solstice), and an grownup who eventually believes in you. Main character syndrome stops being a character flaw the day you associate a faith whose storyline has you in the lead.
It additionally contains a trap– a community organized about overcoming individual irrationality starts to treat affiliation as evidence that its members have conquer it. Being a rationalist transforms into a credential for better judgment, and better judgement is the community’s chief social currency.
The gospel according to Harry Potter
In 2010, Yudkowsky began publishing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a sprawling alternate-universe fanfic in which Harry is a advanced specialized rationalist confronting magic alongside curiosity and a extremely developed appetite for explaining why everyone alternatively is wrong. It ran for five years and became enormously famous exterior the community as fine as inner it. The Sequences were too dry for many, but HPMOR became an uncomplicated on-ramp to rationalist thought. Moreover, it captured the mark spectators by holding up a mirror: Harry is the mark demographic’s self-portrait at eleven– identified as gifted, correct concerning everything, and continually surrounded by inferiors.
The novel’s most consequential idea is “heroic responsibility”. Harry explains that any happens, it is ultimately your error if catastrophe occurs, since you could have prevented it. You cannot conceal rearward following the rules, or rearward the anticipation that person alternatively was handling it. The earth is your responsibility, all of it, personally. Hermione, the closest item the narrative has to a normally decent person, objects that this appears akin it leaves extremely small area for everyone else’s agency. The narrative never fairly answers her objections in a satisfying way.
Shockingly, this fanfic’s fame far exceeded the readership you’d anticipate for specified a niche artifact. By its completion on Pi Day 2015, the fanfic ran 122 chapters and 661,619 words, longer than War and Peace. It had drawn additional than thirty-seven thousand reviews on the chief fanfiction site, a untamed figure for the category, tens of thousands of favorites, a fan-made audiobook, a TV Tropes leaf the size of a small suburb, and translations into a lengthy catalog of languages, Russian foremost. A Washington Post lawful blogger called it, straight-faced, one of his favorite books written this millennium. The respectable media barely registered any of this, since the respectable media does not peruse fanfiction. However, a generation of forthcoming engineers did.
The book’s genuine function announced itself at the end. For the finale Yudkowsky posted a division titled “Final Exam”, in which Harry is trapped in a apparently desperate situation, and the division itself issued conditions and a deadline: if readers posted a viable resolution by March 3, 2015, the narrative would continue; otherwise, in the author’s words, you get a shorter and sadder ending. The fandom submitted more than 700,000 words of projected solutions in two and a fractional days, afterward organized a project power of its own to kind the submissions and deduplicate the ideas, and the resolution that shipped came out of the crowd. Reread that sequence as an organizational exercise. The originator of an AI-safety investigation institute recruited a distributed unpaid workforce of thousands, assigned it an optimization problem, imposed a deadline alongside a threatened adverse outcome, and harvested the output into his book. It worked. The readers had not merely peruse concerning the method; they had performed it, at scale, on command. Whatever alternatively the fanfic was, it was a operating display of what its author could induce a assemblage of astute strangers to do by structuring incentives correctly. Remarkably that declaration additionally describes the next decade of the AI industry, perchance not by coincedence.
Outside the story, Yudkowsky’s the movement-building was explicit. Yudkowsky’s author’s notes promoted fundraising for the Center for Applied Rationality, or CFAR, a nonprofit that would shortly instruct the Sequences’ techniques at live workshops. The fanfic’s finale in 2015 was the juncture for organized ritual parties in dozens of cities. Fiction, fundraising, training, and an global community, all wrapped up together as one. A VICE profile from 2015 already noticed that the entire equipment was starting to resemble a condemnation scheme fairly than a famous part of fiction.
While calling the novel a holy publish would overstate it, we’d additionally young female its function in calling it entertainment. It supplied a shared vocabulary, example characters, and a theatrical theory of what a astute individual owes the earth in command to change accord alongside its arguments into acknowledgment alongside a mission. Much in the identical way that L. Ron Hubbard navigated the passage from discipline fabrication author to cult leader, Yudkowsky charted a akin path.
Speaking of which: several rationalists deliberately built rituals for the burgeoning cult too. A 2011 document of a New York Solstice describes common songs, readings, and liturgy adapted from the Sequences, alongside Yudkowsky commenting approvingly. Years later, Arnold wrote openly concerning how to run a Solstice whenever he personally assigns additional than equal likelihood to an AI catastrophe.
A movement can refuse God and motionless create scripture, ceremony, and a demanding individual association alongside the apocalypse. Secularization, it turns out, does not automatically eliminate the individual instincts for faith and liturgy, it fair repurposes their worship.
Yudkowsky’s Apostles
Yudkowsky was, by temperament, a prophet, and prophets are demanding company. The community’s genuine growth motor was person much easier to like: a psychiatrist and blogger named Scott Alexander.
Alexander was not an outsider who wandered in following getting famous. By his own account he spent years immersed in Overcoming Bias and LessWrong and established the matter revelatory notwithstanding already having studied philosophy. His blog Slate Star Codex, launched in 2013, grew immediately out of that participation. And it was a extremely distinct instrument. Where Yudkowsky was imperious, Alexander was funny, discursive, sympathetic, and apparently scrupulous concerning entertaining objections. He wrote concerning medicine, statistics, discipline fiction, and the baffling behavior of individual beings, and his readership came to contain Sam Altman, Paul Graham, and a ample portion of Silicon Valley’s expert class. The New York Times ended up calling the blog a harmless area for the tech world.
This mattered since Alexander was the interpreter. You did not have to act the earth of rationalism through a prediction of extinction or Harry Potter fanfiction. You could attain through an engaging composition concerning antidepressants, detect a community whose arguments seemed unusually careful and whose members seemed unusually smart, and lone afterward discover out what the careful arguments were carefully arguing toward, and gradually merge into the community.
You could additionally attain through Curtis Yarvin.
Writing as Mencius Moldbug, Yarvin began publishing the blog Unqualified Reservations in 2007. The capsule clarification is a programmer penning lengthy governmental essays. The project was far additional sinister than that clarification suggests: Yarvin became a founding intelligent of the authoritarian far right, and dissimilar most of that environment he wrote in complete sentences, which turned out to be a genuine strategic asset.
His program, stated plainly in 2008, was “the liquidation of democracy, the Constitution and the regulation of law.” The new command he sketched in the identical extended composition would eliminate the press, dismantle the universities, privatize community schools, and confine designated populations in accommodation involving compulsory labor. He additionally defended, in the identical document, the legality of group marketing themselves and their children into slavery.
His Patchwork series imagined forthcoming sovereign territories operated as businesses. Residents would not govern; their chief recourse would be exit, the customer’s remedy of taking their endeavor elsewhere. The premise converts a governmental question, how group should portion power, into a customer-service question, whether the owner is providing an appealing adequate product. It is a particularly convenient theory if you anticipate to cognize the proprietors or to be them, and the intellectuual hubris of the rationalist community firmly placed many of them in the category of expecting they would be in the meritocratic ruling class.
The racism was likewise definitive below the varnish. In an composition titled “Why I Am Not a White Nationalist”, Yarvin praised matter from American Renaissance and VDARE, treated pale nationalist grievances as serious, and concluded that the movement’s weakness was its ineffective governmental strategy, not its worldview. His own penchant was a ranking in which poorer, supposedly small intelligent group served richer, supposedly additional intelligent ones. The part of pale nationalism he could not sign onto was its lingering attachment to famous sovereignty. His objection, in another words, was substantially that pale nationalism wasn’t extreme enough.
Yarvin was not an outsider to the rationalist community; he had been posting in the community’s own forums before he started his own blog, and by 2011 LessWrong’s annual study was asking members whether they had been influenced by him, since adequate of them had that the inquiry seemed value tabulating. Moldbug essays circulated heavily in the community. Alexander described being often sent them, and in 2013 wrote “Reactionary Philosophy in an Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell”, translating the worldview into his friendly, accessible voice. He followed it alongside a lengthy Anti-Reactionary FAQ attacking its historic claims and governmental conclusions, and that criticism was sincere. Unfortunately, giving air to Yarvin’s penning by engaging alongside it earnestly helped legitimize Yarvin by making his premises familiar, discussable, and weirdly additional legible. A 2014 email from Alexander, afterward published by its recipient, went further: it expressed sympathy for parts of “human biodiversity,” the movement’s euphemism for competition science, and an involvement in spreading the precious parts of reactionary idea during pruning the rest.
In that context, individual biodiversity did not average the innocuous study that individual beings vary. It meant, specifically, the assertion that Black-white gaps in measured intellect are substantially hereditary. The idiom did helpful activity despite of its specialized merits: it let a individual cognition involvement in ethnic ranking as intelligent bravery, and cognition all exception as evidence of the objectors’ conformity. There is a difference between examining a difficult inquiry and construction an character about the condemnation that decent group are too fearful to acknowledge your answer. Disapproval becomes confirmation; the worse the reception, the braver the truth-teller. Established religions discovered this lever generations ago and industrialized it: Mormonism sends its young men on two-year door-to-door missions partially since the rejection does the bonding, all slammed entrance obliging the missionary to decide that the exterior earth is corrupt and that they are part of the chosen few. The rationalists did not invent the mechanism, but certainly have capitalized on it to dispersed extremely troubling views.
Forbidden insights
So far this narrative has mostly lived on the internet, in Berkeley. It traversed into the respectable earth at Oxford, through a Swedish philosopher named Nick Bostrom. Bostrom came up through the identical 1990s transhumanist scene, co-founding the World Transhumanist Association in 1998, and in 2005 Oxford gave him a division for the end of the world, the Future of Humanity Institute, staffed in part by group from that identical scene, Anders Sandberg among them, an Extropians-list veteran of the extremely mailing lists anywhere the teenage Yudkowsky had established the transhumanists in the archetypal place. In 2014 he published Superintelligence, which took the corpus Yudkowsky had been assembling on a blog since 2001 and rendered it in the idiom of analytic philosophy; a New Yorker overview described the accomplishment as the imposition of scholarly rigor on a messy build of ideas from the margins, and the book’s list of safety proposals includes Yudkowsky’s own ideas. Now, Bostrom sits on MIRI’s advisory board. The respectable media treated the publish as the instant AI hazard became serious: Bill Gates recommended it, Stephen Hawking endorsed the disagreement about it. Jaan Tallinn, the Skype co-founder, went additional than reading: he co-founded the Future of Life Institute and Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, seeded the two alongside his own money, and became a notable contributor to Bostrom’s institute as well. Musk put ten myriad dollars into the Future of Life Institute’s investigation program in January 2015, adding additional kernel prosperity to the scholarly field.
Bostrom too, was not without ethnic controversy– in a 1996 email to a transhumanist mailing list, Bostrom wrote that he believed dreary group were small intelligent than pale people, and used a ethnic slur in passing. In January 2023 he apologized for the email; Oxford investigated and concluded that he did not clasp racist views and that the apology was sincere. The Guardian’s Andrew Anthony noted, however, that Bostrom didn’t retreat the underlying assertion concerning competition and intelligence, or the diagram of a defence of eugenics that came alongside it. Oxford closed the Future of Humanity Institute in 2024, amid afterward controversies, but by afterward the site it had legitimized no longer needed the institute. The engaging inquiry was never whether Bostrom is a bigot in his heart. It is that the scholarly section of existential hazard incubated in a milieu anywhere this kind of item was average conversation, and that by the period the archives surfaced, the institutions were already firmly established.
Furthermore, Bostrom advocated for constricted forms of eugenics. In 2013, MIRI promoted a paper by Bostrom and Carl Shulman on selecting embryos for cognitive enhancement. Shulman was a investigation chap at MIRI, co-author at Bostrom’s institute, director of careers investigation at MacAskill’s 80,000 Hours, advisor to Open Philanthropy. The notice discussed iterated embryo choice throughout simulated generations and explicitly tied the resulting intellect gains to the prospects for harmless AI. Concretely, MIRI and the Future of Humanity began to meld the idea of the AI-salvation project alongside selective breeding: additional intellect is the crucial resource, the scientific competition makes acquiring additional of it urgent, and reproduction is merely the next location for optimization.
The recommendation was concerning parental choice and reproductive technology, not compulsory sterilization, but improving humanity by choosing which inherited traits forthcoming group should transport has an extremely dreary and troubled former tied to Nazi and Japanese experimentation during WWII. Questions concerning inequality, disability, social pressure, and who defines “improvement” were conspicuously underaddressed.
Debugging the humans
Meanwhile:
The Center for Applied Rationality was founded in Berkeley in 2012 by four group from the community’s own ranks: Julia Galef, presenter of the Rationally Speaking podcast; Andrew Critch, now an AI-safety researcher; Michael Smith; and Anna Salamon. It grew direct out of LessWrong, which had the issue all burgeoning movement eventually has: members who desire to practice, in person, together. CFAR was the in-person franchise. The Sequences gave the theory distant free; CFAR sold the retreat, weekend workshops in Berkeley anywhere the identical matter arrived as techniques alongside names akin “goal factoring” and “double crux”, taught by instructors who lived in collection houses alongside the group who had written it.
It was a family procedure from the start. CFAR shared a contributor base, a city, and in multiple cases personnel alongside MIRI, and it handled outreach at the two ends of the pipeline: company classes for Facebook and the Thiel Fellowship on one side, and on the other, workshops and summer programs aimed at gifted teenagers, the community’s preferred recruiting demographic. Jaan Tallinn, the Skype co-founder who paid for Bostrom’s Oxford institute, additionally paid to dispatch Estonian students to CFAR workshops on a scholarship. The New York Times Magazine’s Jennifer Kahn visited and profiled the operation, strengths and flaws both, coming distant lightly impressed although slightly unnerved.
The throw was applicable training in thinking and decision-making. That appears innocuous, and mostly was, until you recall anywhere the techniques were being practiced: among employers, colleagues, housemates, lovers, and group who believed they were personally determining whether humanity survives.
In 2021, co-founder Anna Salamon, by afterward CFAR’s president, acknowledged that at smallest three employees had efficiently been compelled to undergo “debugging,” the community’s term for involvement in a person’s own psychology. She acknowledged excessive deference to her own judgement and described damaging the ways participants understood themselves. This was leadership’s own account, not an exterior accusation. A twelvemonth before she had written, alongside different honesty, concerning the ways involvement alongside rationality and existential hazard can wreck people’s sleep, relationships, enjoyment of life, ethical judgment, and rely in themselves.
Those are grave outcomes for an institution marketing improved cognition. Here is the scheme that produces them: if you accept a misaligned AI may slay everyone, your anxiety is reasonable. But whenever the surrounding office and social circle treat hesitation as a mental defect to be debugged, fear acquires an organizational use. Your reluctance to surrender additional of your existence to the goal becomes another issue the goal is entitled to fix. Members of the commune now had a heroic duty to “fix” nonconforming members.
Soon, a business called Leverage Research arose to obtain the idea further. Founded by Geoff Anders, a young philosopher, Leverage pursued a program of understanding the intellect so total that an first document aspired to answering all philosophical questions. Its funders included Peter Thiel and, formerly again, Jaan Tallinn. Lydia Laurenson’s investigative history of the institution additionally reports allegations of a hidden affectionate association involving organizational resources and authority.
The measure of the ambition was attracted enormous notice from the community. The coarse rationale being, If community is failing since group are psychologically confused, a small squad that figures out how minds really activity could change everything. The liberty to execute investigation on these topics was viewed as civilizational calling for many employees.
However, the office was deeply toxic. Zoe Curzi, a erstwhile participant, described a world dominated by Anders’s theories, increasingly invasive mental practices, and escalating beliefs concerning harmful mental influences, until she established she could no longer measure the institution from any stance exterior its own concepts. A erstwhile elder associate who goes by Cathleen defended the group’s ambitions during describing significant individual damage of her own. The two accounts differ concerning many things, but they emphasize the ample structural question: what happens whenever leaders assertion different understanding into the minds of group whose employment, housing, friendships, and awareness of intent all run through the organization?
A distinct event supplies the most straightforward evidence of abuse, and of the community’s nonaccomplishment to react to it. Brent Dill moved through rationalist social circles and CFAR programs. Around him coalesced a collection called Black Lotus, which borrowed its cosmology from the role-playing equivalent Mage: The Ascension: actuality is malleable, and certain group comprehend deeper layers of it. Ozy Brennan’s reporting describes how an translator of deeper realities acquired power complete the group about him.
An internal community appraisal of Dill from 2018 shows the degree to which CFAR was consenting to obtain manipulative behavior: it acknowledged his harmful behavior during motionless treating his unconventional interventions and his awareness of duty as precious raw material. The issue was being interpreted through the community’s own example of exceptional group doing difficult growth work. CFAR’s eventual public apology was considerably additional troublesome. The institution stated it believed dependable allegations that Dill had physically, sexually, and emotionally abused two erstwhile partners, acknowledged giving him legitimacy, acknowledged failing to react adequately, and acknowledged letting him assistance at a high-school program notwithstanding before concerns.
The irony of this all, is that CFAR as an institution whose complete merchandise was improved judgement unsuccessful at successfully using equal essential judgement in safeguarding members and the local community from abuse. The group engaged had detailed tools for examining beliefs. Those tools did not create a capable reply to an abusive man, mostly because of the activity and social community being so inmeshed.
This is the strongest basis for assessing rationalism as a cult: particular settings anywhere influential authority, mental intrusion, dependency, and safety of insiders operated together. That isn’t to say that applying the cultist tag indiscriminately to everyone who says LessWrong is fair, but the epicenters of idea in the community have been deeply harmful and poisonous for participants.
In akin Reddit’s r/slatestarcodex and r/EffectiveAltruism among them, a position genre of article is the “exit thread” for group leaving the community: “what condemnation eventually turned you off”, “why I stepped away”, “is this item a cult”– erstwhile members selling notes on the friendships that ended and the twelvemonth or two it took to rebuild a caput that worked. The event is established adequate that Wikipedia’s part on the rationalist community recognizes a named motion of leavers, the postrationalists, defined by having concluded the movement is, in the article’s own wording, cult-like. Some of the leavers are not anonymous. The well-known safety investigator who writes as lcamtuf published a lengthy part titled “My falling-out alongside the rationalist community” following the Zizian arrests (which we’ll arrive to soon); the mathematician Cathy O’Neil has run interviews alongside productive altruists describing their departure in the tongue group use for churches they were raised in and barely escaped. When the group testifying that a condemnation scheme hurt them are the group who used to personnel its programs, the engaging inquiry stops being whether the term cult is fair to the rationalists, and becomes why this community, of all communities, keeps producing group who use the term to themselves.
Rationalism, in the end, equal managed to create aggressive extremists: In the 2010s a audience named Ziz LaSota started turning up at rationalist and effective-altruist events in the Bay Area. On document she was the community’s aspiration recruit: a device engineering degree, a NASA internship, an avid audience of LessWrong and of Yudkowsky’s fanfic, and adequate seriousness concerning preservation the earth to attempt, alongside several chap travelers, an genuine seasteading colony, living aboard sailboats in the Berkeley marina and afterward a tugboat sailed downward from Alaska. She is a trans woman, akin most of the group she gathered about herself; a CFAR employee afterward described her recruitment pond as “smart, mostly autistic-ish trans women who were extremely susceptible and isolated.” One particularly comic tidbit, to me, is that she religiously identifies as a Sith and was known for wearing a dreary cape.
Her theology was assembled entirely from the community’s own parts bin. From LessWrong’s decision theory she took the duty to never present to blackmail and never tolerate evil. From the community’s behavioral discipline conversation she took the idea that the two hemispheres of the brain are distinct agents alongside distinct genders and distinct alignments, and that “unihemispheric sleep,” a deliberate form of sleep deprivation, could jailbreak the mind. In 2018 a associate of the environment died by suicide, which an anonymous rationalist attributed to the sleep practice; LaSota afterward pointed to the death in an disagreement alongside Anna Salamon as evidence that the method worked. Add complete veganism, the destiny of all sentient life, and heroic responsibility, and you have a individual who believes she is two people, one of whom may be evil, personally liable for preservation everything alive. CFAR’s guidance noticed item was off: Salamon tried to keep LaSota out of a CFAR fellowship, was overruled by a committee, and following additional different behavior LaSota was disinvited from events entirely. In 2019 LaSota and three followers protested a CFAR retreat in masks and robes, a confused 911 study brought constabulary and afterward a SWAT team, and the community responded alongside an anonymous callout article that coined the name “Zizians”. The rationalist community thus informed its archetypal religious schism.
Then the bodies. LaSota faked her own death in a boating accident in August 2022. That November, in Vallejo, California, her landlord Curtis Lind, eighty years old, was attacked by masked tenants alongside knives and a samurai sword: approximately fifty puncture wounds, blinded in one eye. Lind, who had taken to carrying a pistol, attempt two of his attackers, slaying Emma Borhanian, who had been arrested at the 2019 CFAR protest. Two of the attackers now visage murder charges for Borhanian’s death, on the theory that their own assault caused it. Six weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, Richard and Rita Zajko were attempt deceased in their Pennsylvania home; in June 2026 their daughter, a Zizian affiliate alleged to have bought the guns afterward established at the environment of the Vermont shootout, was charged alongside the two murders. On January 17, 2025, Lind, who was expected to testify, was stabbed to death exterior his own gate; prosecutors charged a twenty-two-year-old data scientist, who dictated a declaration to reporters addressed to Eliezer Yudkowsky. Three days following that, a traffic halt on Interstate 91 in Vermont became a shootout that killed Border Patrol delegate David Maland, the archetypal delegate killed by gunfire on duty since 2014, and Ophelia Bauckholt, a German math-olympiad medalist turned quantitative dealer who had entered this earth through a CFAR event in 2019. In their car, constabulary established tactical equipment and two phones wrapped in aluminum foil to defeat tracking. The living passenger, who prosecutors say fired first, has been charged; the authorities aims to search the death penalty. LaSota was arrested a duration later, camping on someone’s agrarian asset in Maryland, and is in custody without bail during her lawyers disagreement her competency to remain trial.
The New York Times and the Boston Globe the two reached for the Manson Family comparison, and Anna Salamon herself has described the Zizian condemnation scheme as resembling a judgement day cult’s. Hard to argue. But appearance at what the Zizians were operating with. Everything permeated LessWrong and its offshits: a decision theory that forbids submitting to evil, a behavioral discipline that treats the oneself as item to be divided and debugged, an ethics in which all sentient existence is the component of account, and heroic duty to create it personal. The community’s defence is that these were damaged group misreading fine ideas, and several of them were certainly damaged. Nonetheless, we must merely appearance at the create of the tree of rationalism thus far to doubt that claim.
Tangled in the sheets, tangled in the streets
While I’m not current to continue judgement on people’s sex lives, the dynamics of the rationalist community in Silicon Valley is likely finest shown by how intimate practices have efficiently rotate into themselves a way to enforce collection praxis.
Polyamory was a apparent characteristic of rationalist existence lengthy before the current AI news cycle. Alexander’s retrospective describes its dispersed through the community and cites a 2014 study in which approximately 15 percent of respondents identified as polyamorous. However, a ample part of that 15% happens to live in the Bay area. The community is small, concentrated in a fistful of Bay Area collection houses, and everybody in it is additionally everybody’s coworker, funder, landlord, housemate, or ex. The affectionate network and the expert network are the identical network. So the inquiry is not who sleeps alongside whom. The inquiry is whether anyone in it can say no, to anything, without losing their entire earth at once.
To comprehend this civilization in one person, encounter Aella.
She was delivered in Idaho in 1992, the eldest of three daughters of a well-known evangelist and broadcast host, raised in a fundamentalist Christian community and homeschooled apart from for a sole fourth of community elevated school, which ended whenever her parents pulled her out since she had unsupervised admission to a computer. She remaining residence at seventeen, worked a factory job at ten dollars an hr alongside four a.m. shifts, and turned to camming in 2012 whenever the factory ran out of hours. She became among the highest-earning creators on OnlyFans, afterward worked as an escort, and taught herself data fine adequate to run several of the largest surveys of sex workers and intimate behavior that exist. GQ calls her a data-driven erstwhile tech worker. She has described herself, simply, as a associate of the rationalist community, which she joined in 2015 following courtship person who was into LessWrong.
The evangelist’s female grew up to be the closest item this community has to a priestess. Her publications on sex grasp a enormous following, equal exterior of the rationalist community, and her intimate custom in the rationalist community has drawn important attention.
One of the most well-known, wish you could scrub your brain alongside soap incidents was a gangbang she organized for her birthday. In a sense, it was a ritual for the rationalist community: weeks of screening, an use process, a visitant catalog vetted for doctrinal compliance, a published post-event inspection alongside a flowchart that went viral, outlining data concerning who came in who, and so forth. The gangbang came alongside a doctrinal test: adherents of “effective accelerationism,” the faction that wants AI betterment to go faster, were screened out, since of her views on AI risk. Even the orgy had an AI-governance position. This additional reinforces, I think, the cultlike authority aspect of this social group. Believe in the correct things, and perchance you get to have sex alongside the community porn star. Supposedly, a figure of startup founders recognized all another there and commented on their astonishment at seeing all other. Small earth indeed.
Aella takes evidence at manufacturing scale, runs surveys, receives endless audience confessions alongside them penning in concerning their sex lives.
And in 2026 she entered the Yudkowsky’s clergy additional directly, launching Plz Don’t Kill Us, a Berkeley residency that pays creators to create viral AI-doom content, alongside Grimes attached as a mentor. Her begetter made his living preaching on Christian radio. She makes hers preaching the AI apocalypse instead. Ironically, the family endeavor survived her apostasy intact.
About that mentor. Grimes is Elon Musk’s ex-partner and the mother of three of his children. Elon Musk: owner of xAI, since folded into SpaceX, whose chatbot Grok has spent the former twelvemonth as the AI industry’s premier device for intimate images of group who never accepted to appear in them. Grok’s “spicy” mode and its depiction tools let users “undress” photographs of genuine people; exterior analysts measured it producing definitive nonconsensual deepfakes at thousands of images an hour; the bot’s own document formerly apologized for generating a sexualized depiction of two young girls; and regulators in the United Kingdom, Brussels, France, Malaysia, and Canada have all opened proceedings concerning the legality of it all. In July 2026 the business sued Minnesota to overturn the country’s archetypal ban on AI nudification tools, on liberated address grounds; in September a national fairness declined to intermission the law during the case proceeds. The business is additionally being sued by Ashley St. Clair, the mother of another of Musk’s children, complete intimate images Grok generated.
It’s fairly an engaging family feud: the destiny academy’s community fig mentor comes from the identical family as the industry’s worst offender, and that family is actively litigating for the correct to keep offending. In this world, too, p(doom) is a family business.
And that is fair the direct fractional of the picture. The community’s own gossip has lengthy maintained that there is a parallel environment on the gay flank of the identical field, the identical collection houses and gathering circuits, and the identical gossip reliably adds that this one is the healthier of the two. I cannot verify that, but the the org diagram of CFAR and its constellation of connected organizations, the accommodation market, and the courtship pond are, to a archetypal approximation, one and the same.
The expert overlap is small comic than the visitant list. The New Yorker has mapped the affectionate network at the top of the field: AI-forecasting investigator Katja Grace co-founded AI Impacts alongside her then-boyfriend Paul Christiano, a erstwhile OpenAI alignment lead, and afterward dated Alexander. Christiano is connected by companionship and former love narrative to Holden Karnofsky, the donor whose Open Philanthropy steered hundreds of millions into AI safety, and Karnofsky wed Daniela Amodei, co-founder and chairman of Anthropic. No wrongdoing necessarily follows from any of that, but it does lift important questions about how AI safety concerns are in fact being handled or promoted alongside so many industry movers and shakers are entangled to this degree.
Some accounts do depict wrongdoing. A TIME investigation into the effective-altruist world, EA for short, the rationalists’ philanthropic twin and the topic of the next section, documented allegations of harassment, coercive control, and expert force entangled alongside close relationships. So I volition ask the inquiry again: can a individual in this earth refuse sex, decrease a mental intervention, study misconduct, or exit a association without threatening their occupation and their complete social earth simultaneously?
Follow the money
How did a subculture this different rotate into foundational for environment the way of national AI policy? Not by winning arguments in public, but by acquiring a balance sheet. To comprehend anywhere that balance panel came from, we need to appearance at rationalism’s convergence alongside a movement that began location alternatively entirely.
That movement was productive altruism, or EA. Its ethical starting item was Peter Singer’s drowning-child idea experiment: if you saw a kid drowning in a shallow pond, you would be obliged to wade in and preserve them equal if doing so ruined your clothes. Singer’s larger assertion was that extend does not cancel that obligation. If a humble contribution can preserve the existence of a kid you cannot see, declining to provision since the kid is abroad is not morally distinct in the way most group would akin it to be. EA tried to rotate that uncomfortable premise into a method: provision a significant portion of your income, measure which interventions preserve or enhance the most lives per dollar, and straightforward prosperity toward those fairly than toward whichever causes happen to be nearby or emotionally vivid.
So although rationalism and EA became siblings about 2009, they had distinct origins. Rationalism grew out of the Berkeley-area environment about LessWrong and Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose activity included the two arguments concerning synthetic intellect and a extremely lengthy Harry Potter fanfiction intended to instruct habits of reasoning. EA grew out of Oxford philosophy. Toby Ord, a elder investigation chap at Nick Bostrom’s institute, founded Giving What We Can, whose members pledged a part of their earnings to productive charities. William MacAskill co-founded 80,000 Hours, which applied the identical logic to careers: if a operating existence contains approximately 80,000 hours, choose the activity that can do the most good. The two organizations formed the Centre for Effective Altruism in 2011. On paper, this was a respectable charity-adjacent establishment, not an offshoot of an net subculture.
The two movements keep distinct founding myths and distinct names to this day, but they were never really distinct communities. EA’s own history describes altruist, rationalist, and futurist circles converging in the delayed 2000s, and the Bay Area rationalists turned up frequently in EA’s founding years.
The merger was doctrinal as much as social. EA began by trying to maximize the fine it could do for humanity and quantifying it. They rigourously counted bednets, deworming pills, lives saved per dollar, and mostly maintained a rigorous site of philanthropy evaluation through an institution called GiveWell, founded by Holden Karnofsky. We fair discussed him, as he is wed to Anthropic’s president. All of this is fine and good, preservation individual lives and keeping them fit is, of course, a fine thing. Then a section of the movement swung toward longtermism, the assertion that the lives of all imaginable forthcoming group dominate the ethical arithmetic of what have to be done alongside the funds. From there the logic converges beautiful quickly alongside rationalism: if the complete forthcoming is the component of account, nothing matters additional than preventing extinction, and what did rationalism already have on the docket as its extinction risk, percolating through the community since 2000? Yudkowsky’s AI worries, since afterward legitimized by Oxford’s Future Institute publications. Thus, AI destiny became EA’s flagship cause. The rationalists’ eschatology joined up alongside EA’s endowments to bring us to the current day.
The overlap in personnel makes this clear; Leverage Research, the behavioral discipline procedure from the final section, did not merely portion donors alongside this world: in 2013 the Leverage squad created EA Global, the movement’s flagship conference, and hosted the archetypal one in their own house. And Jaan Tallinn, whose name has by now appeared on a philosophers’ institute, a Cambridge center, a grant program, and the prosperity of a behavioral discipline cult, funded the two communities indiscriminately. The TIME inquiry into “effective-altruist and neighboring circles” was in custom an inquiry of one environment functioning under two distinct labels.
More prosperity followed. Open Philanthropy reported approximately forty myriad dollars in 2017 grants tied to risks from advanced AI, including thirty myriad to OpenAI. Concerns that had lived in blog posts became jobs, investigation programs, and organizational authority. When group ask how a fistful of bloggers acquired power complete the framing of AI policy, the answer is mostly that a small figure of extremely affluent donors decided to prosperity them, and nearly nobody alternatively was backing anything.
Then the movement minted a fraud. Sam Bankman-Fried was not an accident of proximity; he was EA’s own product, an undergraduate pointed at Wall Street by the movement’s philosophers on the theory that the most fine he could do was get extravagantly affluent and provision it away. He got rich, became the most celebrated productive altruist living and a important backing origin for the ecosystem, and turned out to have been looting his customers’ accounts at FTX; he is now serving a twenty-five-year national sentence. FTX had additionally put five hundred myriad dollars into Anthropic, so the fraud’s proceeds briefly sat on the safety lab’s cap table.
In a sense, the heroic duty and distinctive imagination espoused by Yudkowsky struck again here. Perhaps one instruction is that world-saving intent is a dangerously feeble substitute for scrutiny.
Among another questionable patrons, Peter Thiel is pperhaps the most politically consequential fig circling this scene. MIRI lists the Thiel Foundation among its largest historic contributors, at additional than 1.6 myriad dollars. Thiel additionally bankrolled Yarvin’s innovation company, Tlon: the patron of the AI-salvation project is additionally the patron of a worse-than-white-supremacist neoreactionary blogger. The Washington Post has additionally reported on how Yarvin’s ideas subsequently circulated through the government-cost-cutting efforts of the second Trump administration, courtesy of Thiel’s influence.
Thiel, has for several time, made his opinions on government clear. In a 2009 essay he wrote: “I no longer accept that liberty and self-government are compatible.” His complaint, in that essay, explicitly included the expansion of the franchise to women and the growth of the benefit province as structural problems for liberty. Similarly to Yarvin, the decision he drew from delegate government producing outcomes he disliked was that the error was letting so many group participate.
Upon Yarvin and Thiel joining forces, Yarvin provided straightforward strategies for Thiel to clasp to parlay prosperity into enforcing his will. Yarvin’s “Cathedral” described universities, media, and the civic assistance as a sole interlocking equipment reproducing broad belief, an enemy to be dismantled fairly than an enemy to be persuaded. For group holding huge financial power during resenting the traditional authority of journalists, academics, and regulators, this was a ideal theory. It lets a billionaire mold himself as a persecuted dissident. The New Yorker reported that Thiel was privately concerned adequate concerning the affiliation to email a coworker in 2014 asking how hazardous it was that the two of them were being publically linked. Which tells you the end was legible at the time. Nobody innocently mistook Yarvin for a benign associate.
In difference to Yudkowsky’s apocalyptic faith in Berkeley, Thiel has lately begun peddling lectures on his form of Christianity, mostly focused on the Antichrist and how group he has grievances alongside are part of the Antichrist’s legion. At Stanford, Thiel, cut under the power of René Girard, the Catholic theorist of mimetic desire, whose assertion is that individual beings study what to desire by imitating all other, and whose delayed activity peruse former as an escalation of imitative rivalry headed toward an apocalyptic cliff. Thiel has credited Girard as the deepest power on his thinking, and by his own document it was Girard’s understanding that made him the archetypal exterior capitalist in Facebook, the supreme device for observing what another group want.
Thiel as a Christian apocalypticist surfaced mostly in 2025. Rather than publish an composition or obtain a phase at a conference; he delivered four off-the-record seminars on the Antichrist to welcomed audiences in San Francisco, under the auspices of ACTS 17 Collective, a nonprofit for evangelizing the innovation industry that grew out of a 2023 anniversary brunch for one of his partners, a gathering themed about the Holy Ghost, anywhere Thiel said concerning miracles, forgiveness, and Jesus to several two hundred and twenty guests who, by their own afterward account, had not known he was religious. The lectures leaked. The Washington Post reviewed the audio, and a UC Berkeley audio-forensics professor ended up authenticating the recordings, since the genuine obstacle to believing that among the richest men in America was giving personal seminars on the Antichrist was that it echoed insane. One libertarian writer sat through all seven hours and reported that the theology was, unsurprisingly, libertarian. In March 2026 Thiel took the display to Rome, anywhere Catholic publications and at smallest one priest publically asked him to stop.
The satisfied of the lectures is blatantly self-serving. In Thiel’s telling the Antichrist is not a tyrant or an evil tech genius; it is person who “warns of existential hazard nonstop and calls for powerful regulation in innovative sectors,” and so the beginning address identified Greta Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky as “legionnaires of the Antichrist.” Financial regulation is not, in this framework, a guideline disagreement; it is the scaffolding of a earth authorities the Antichrist would journey to power, and the group who desire to control innovation are not mistaken but against God. He paused location in the sequence to encourage Musk to discontinue the Giving Pledge, so that the fortune, several two hundred milliard dollars of it, would not stream to left-wing nonprofits selected by Bill Gates. Attend, for a moment, to what this is: the most productive Republican contributor of the final decade, the chairman of a surveillance company, the patron of a vice president, explaining to rapt rooms of technologists that the Antichrist’s advancement defender is a Swedish climate advocate and a Harry Potter fanfic author, one of whom his own prosperity helped assistance for twenty years. The lectures are not a quirk sitting neighboring to his politics. They are the politics.
Before the Antichrist seminars, Thiel waged a nine-year covert war against the press, since Thiel’s answer to antagonistic address has continually been consistent: eliminate opposition alongside prejudice. In December 2007 Gawker’s Silicon Valley blog published a abbreviated item headlined “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.” Thiel was not publically out; insiders knew, the community document did not, and he preferred it that way. He afterward described the site, Valleywag, as “the Silicon Valley equal of Al Qaeda,” which tells you the flat of his anger, and then, alternatively of feuding in public, he spent the improved part of a decade quietly paying a squad of lawyers to prosperity another people’s lawsuits against the company, approximately ten myriad dollars throughout multiple cases, none of it disclosed. The one that connected was Hulk Hogan’s, complete a sex strip Gawker had published. Gawker was handed downward a hundred and forty myriad dollar verdict, and the outlet closed for fine in August 2016. When Forbes revealed who had been paying the bills, Thiel confirmed it, described the run as “less concerning retaliation and additional concerning particular deterrence,” a expression borrowed from offender sentencing, and called it among the “greater philanthropic things” he had done. The test attorney his prosperity retained, Charles Harder, went on to represent Donald Trump, Melania Trump, and Jared Kushner. By following Yarvin’s Cathedral playbook, Thiel taught a forthcoming president’s lawful squad how to use lawful expenses to crush opposition, which Trump has since gone on to do extensively.
The backing about the theology is a study in itself. There is Palantir, the surveillance contractor Thiel chairs, now unified into Denmark’s military, police, and intellect services complete community objection, and lengthy embedded in American immigration enforcement. There is Anduril, the autonomous-border-defense resolute that received Founders Fund’s largest funding ever, one milliard dollars in 2025, months before a prosperity provision requiring autonomous capabilities on border surveillance towers, a necessity lone Anduril could satisfy, drew accusations of a bespoke favor. There is Clearview AI, the facial-recognition business he backed early. There is the Enhanced Games, a sports association anywhere doping is permitted, founded by Aron D’Souza, the attorney who ran the Gawker campaign, alongside Thiel as guide funder.
Pronomos, Thiel’s conveyance for startup cities, finances Próspera, the semi-sovereign charter area that spent years in lawful war alongside the authorities of Honduras, and Praxis, the network-state project, complete fractional a milliard dollars raised alongside assistance from finances backed by Andreessen and Sam Altman, whose originator has had designs on Greenland since 2019 and posted “I went to Greenland to try to buy it” a week following Trump won in 2024. When Trump began talking concerning acquiring the isle and refused to regulation out armed forces force, Praxis retweeted him alongside the comment “According to plan”. Trump’s ambassador in Copenhagen is Ken Howery, a PayPal co-founder and Thiel’s old colleague, and an partner of the Praxis project. In March 2025 Vance flew to the American basis at Pituffik to announce that Denmark “hasn’t done a fine job at keeping Greenland safe”. By then, Danish opponents of the Palantir integration were already citing Thiel’s territorial hobbies as a national-security argument. Trump walked the power conversation rear in January 2026, following talks alongside NATO. Yarvin’s Patchwork, you volition recall, imagined sovereign territories run as businesses, alongside exit as the lone recourse. It was never fair a blog post. Thiel has been angling to execute it for years, and the US authorities has conveniently attempted to coerce its acquisition.
The highway into government
The shipment conveyance for all of this into the national authorities is JD Vance.
Vance worked at Mithril, Thiel’s funding firm. Thiel afterward put fifteen myriad dollars into the excellent PAC that carried Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign, among the largest single-donor interventions in a Senate competition in American history. And Vance has named his influences. In a 2021 interview he asserted that a returning Trump administration should blaze ample numbers of civic servants, and that whenever the courts tried to halt it, the administrator should merely oppose them, invoking Andrew Jackson’s apocryphal “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” He described these positions, himself, as influenced by Curtis Yarvin.
Yarvin did not invent the American right’s strain to the administrative state, and he is not the concealed author of all Trump policy. His contribution was a additional extreme frame: autonomous institutions are not merely inefficient, they are the governing equipment of an enemy religion, and dismantling them is the precondition for “renewal”. That framing is now endemic to the Republican party. It is why attacks on universities, courts, and the civic assistance can be sold to audiences as anti-corruption fairly than pro-consolidation: the institution’s capability to oppose the chief is itself the indictment.
The personnel run deeper than Vance. Michael Kratsios, who was a chief at Thiel Capital, ran the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and by March 2026 the White House had named him co-chair, alongside David Sacks, of the president’s discipline and innovation advisory council, alongside Marc Andreessen among its announced members. These men do not portion one doctrine, but they portion a stance in the identical network, and the network has a proven pipeline from Thiel’s Rolodex into national appointments.
There are smaller bridges from assorted rationalist factions too: Laurenson traces the founding of Palladium, a diary of governance and statecraft, to Wolf Tivy and Jonah Bennett during the two worked inner Leverage, alongside Leverage alum Samo Burja orbiting it: the behavioral discipline cult and the anti-democratic political-intellectual scene, sharing personnel. Nothing requires coordination for this to matter. People transport relationships, assumptions, and reputations from one institution into the next. That is what a network is.
Dissent among Yudkowsky’s faithfuul
As you may have noticed, Thiel has since damaged alongside Yudkowsky because of his views on regulation. These group do not concur alongside all other, and the disagreements are ferocious.
Yudkowsky advocates shutting downward advanced AI development, and has mused publically concerning armed forces implementation against prohibited projects, up to and including accepting the hazard of armed battle to forestall a catastrophe. Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto names existential-risk thinking and productive altruism as ideological enemies; he published it under the emblem of a project resolute now represented on the president’s discipline council. Vance used his 2025 Paris AI speech to notify Europe off excessive regulation. Thiel, as you now know, numbers Yudkowsky among the legionnaires of the Antichrist.
So “the rationalists authority the government” is too crude to be useful; You could perspective Yarvin as having introduced another schism in the rationalist community, during another notable members of the network are at all other’s throats.
Back to this month
Why spill so much ink on this, and how does it nexus to Jacob Coxon resigning from Anthropic?
When his article went viral, one section of American government treated it as an operation. Musk called it a psy-op. Conservative commentators and at smallest one AI-industry blog combed the timestamps and concluded the virality was too clean, the amplification too fast, everything too connected: the AI-safety funders who boosted the post, they noted, are neighboring to Anthropic’s own investors, so the entire item was staged. The Washington Post documented the campaign that followed, in which the investigator who warned of catastrophe became, himself, the story, and a target.
Is it possible? Or is he fair a dude that believes what he believes and acted on principal?
For me, the rationalist schism between Yudkowsky and Thiel create either choice plausible. A subculture spent two decades construction a compact web of shared funding, shared housing, shared beds, and shared eschatology, staffed the frontier labs alongside its alumni, and asked the community to obtain its warnings on the power of its sincerity. The instant one of its members burned his equity to provision the alert in the clearest imaginable terms, the archetypal reply of the faction now governing alongside his industry’s investors was that specified coordination was unthinkable, that no communication could perchance dispersed that accelerated organically, that person must be paying for it. The community’s critics had, at the extremely least, a apparent notion of how physically and socially entangled, in the direction that happened to depart their own patrons untouched.
The community’s own defence was, notably, communal. Zvi Mowshowitz, a seasoned of the scene, vouched for Coxon’s sincerity at length. Among those affirming that the virality had genuinely amazed the AI-safety world’s customary amplifiers was Aella, the destiny priestess from before in this piece, whose term the community accepted as that of an expert in virality. Perhaps. But appearance at the epistemics on display: a social environment vouching for a associate of the social scene, alongside its experts on virality drawn from the identical scene. It’s difficult to inform the sincerity of any of it whenever the rationalists circle the wagons.
That is not a logic to disbelieve Coxon. By all account, including antagonistic ones, he spent three years observing the industry’s internals, discontinue the safest-seeming director in the field, gave up the prosperity to create the alert unambiguous, and stated plainly what his colleagues verify they believe. Wired asked him whether Anthropic was cutting corners, and his answer was that Anthropic was “far and distant the most liable participant in the space,” and that this was exactly the problem: if equal the liable participant is racing, there is no liable player. That is a grave declaration indeed.
To be candid, I do not completely rely the Coxon narrative either. The timing of leaving just a smidge before vesting certainly feels akin a staged narrative choice. That is, person understood exactly what a burned fortune and a plain-spoken young messenger would buy, and arranged it via an offshore financial institution document or similar. Idunno, this is anywhere my tin foil hat comes on I guess. Within days, law was moving, a Senate invoice to ban superintelligence was waiting for exactly this kind of whistleblower, and the answer to “the labs are gambling alongside our lives” is continually a licensing regime: audits, evaluations, government-approved releases, which the Trump administration already dabbled in whenever blocking Anthroppic from releasing its Fable example for a time. Those fixed expenses are what an incumbent can pay and a challenger cannot, which is to say, regulatory capture. A movement that starts at “shut it all down” reliably ends at “regulate it, and licence us to do it.” If the two foremost labs had commissioned an power procedure to entrench themselves under the emblem of safety, it would appearance akin the duration we fair had.
Who checks the checkers
When Anthropic’s Dario Amodei calls for a administration of exterior evaluators alongside sustained admission to frontier labs, the inquiry of “who counts as outside?” becomes a crucial inquiry to resolve.
METR is the nonprofit that evaluates frontier AI systems, and latest crucial essay, “Is METR a Meaningful Check on Anthropic?”, argues the evaluator is too near to the earth it evaluates. The strongest evidence for taking that earnestly is METR’s own disclosure: in its 2026 frontier-risk report, the institution acknowledged near individual relationships between personnel and group at frontier companies, and described gaps in its first conflict-of-interest arrangements. Those disclosures do not established any apparent findings of malfeasance, but the composition raises grave questions concerning the governance and judgement we can anticipate from the rationalist rat nest.
Once again, the hazard is that the evaluator’s personnel and the lab’s personnel are the identical forty people: exes, ex-colleagues, housemates, co-authors, and in-laws, all embedded in a community whose formative shared content taught them that the destiny of the earth depends on exceptional group being trusted alongside exceptional power. Real oversight needs authority that does not depend on remaining greeted in the community it oversees: disclosure, enforceable conflicts rules, protected whistleblowers, autonomous replication, and area for group whose concerns are additional contiguous than a device apocalypse, akin discrimination, surveillance, labor, armed forces use, and concentrated company power.
None of this justifies ignoring the warnings. Coxon, Hubinger, and their colleagues may be entirely correct concerning the danger. The unlucky matter at hand is that the judgement, governmental goals, and deficiency of apparent recusal or sensible ethics in the communities surrounding U.S. AI labs mold grave doubt on either flank of the AI destiny discourse.
In the end, I assume my involvement is about the hubris of it all. Across all of these folks, there is a shared theory of exemption: exceptionally intelligent people, having understood item everyone alternatively missed, are entitled to bonzer freedom, since the stakes are too elevated for average safeguards. Yudkowsky’s fanfic taught a generation of readers “heroic responsibility”. CFAR indoctrinated workforce who hesitated. Leverage claimed to have solved the intellect but led group to have mental breakdowns. The Zizians remaining a trail of bodies. Thiel and Yarvin continue power the demolition of democracy, since they deserve to be in the ruling category dissimilar us peasants. The labs and their funders know, privately, that the device power slay everyone, and decide that they, of all people, have to be trusted alongside this arms race. Again and again, intellect becomes its own approval slip: I cognize better, hence I may do what others may not.
I am not, and have never been, engaged in any of the communities described here. This document is according to community reporting and the participants’ own published writing. Factual corrections are greeted at [email protected].
