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In Ayn Rand’s 1938 novella Anthem, a young man rediscovers electricity. He has spent years working in secret, alone in a forgotten tunnel beneath a dystopian collectivist city, where all forms of once common knowledge have disappeared. Equality 7-2521, a young man in the collectivist future society, possesses great intelligence and curiosity, but he lives in a society that punishes such attributes, and he's been assigned by the Council of Vocations to be a Street Sweeper despite longing to be a Scholar.

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Nonetheless, he builds this miraculous glass box that turns darkness into light. He believes he has given his society a gift unlike any in living memory. So he carries it to the World Council of Scholars, the body that governs all knowledge. He assumes that certainly, they will rejoice.

Not the case. Instead, they want to crush his discovery.

It’s not because of any kind of functional issue. Rather, because he made it alone, without their permission, and because his light threatens the Department of Candles. What is not done collectively cannot be good, they tell him. It took fifty years and the agreement of every council just to approve the candle. A single man with a better idea isn’t progress in their eyes. He is a danger to not just the plan, but society as a whole, they’ve determined.

That scene is a cautionary tale for a future ruling class that fully centralizes control. And today, we are at a crossroads when it comes to the future of artificial intelligence. We hear a lot these days about “responsible deployment,” and this notion that such powerful tools need to be managed by an elite hierarchy that knows what’s best for us. The question in AI was never really about capability. Instead, it is about access. Who gets to determine access to innovation?

One vision says the answer is a small, credentialed priesthood. They’ve determined that we need a hand-picked set of “trusted parties” granted something close to moral authority by a cluster of Effective Altruist and liberal internationalist Davos class-aligned ideologues on the West Coast, who have appointed themselves the stewards of what the rest of us are permitted to use. The other vision says the answer is the whole of American society. On AI, this means literally everyone with an internet connection. The kid in rural Appalachia, the suburban shopkeeper running a small business on main street, and the eighteen-year-old urbanite who can’t afford college but can now summon, in his pocket, the world’s best tutor, coder, and strategist on demand.

Such easy access to knowledge and capability has never existed before in human history. We are watching the cost of expertise collapse toward zero, and with it the oldest barrier is being torn down. This is not a job-killer, though the professional doomer class insists otherwise. It is the opposite, as the most powerful distributor of knowledge, leverage, and opportunity ever invented. AI is bringing us the fairest and freest playing field in American history.

So why the alarm? Why the urgent push for licensing regimes, “safety” bureaucracies, and deployment gatekeeping?

Anthem answers that, too, and it is worth remembering that Rand was not writing fantasy. She was born in St. Petersburg, watched the Bolsheviks seize her father’s pharmacy in the name of the people, and escaped to America in 1926 with a firsthand education in what centralized control of everything actually produces. The society in her novella is the logical end of that experience. It is a world where knowledge has been captured, catalogued, and rationed by committee, and the result is not a glittering scientific utopia by any means. It is a place lit by candles, one that has forgotten electricity, that recoils from the new because the new was not authorized by the trusted moral authorities. When you put bureaucrats or some kind of public-private fusion committee in charge of who may know what, you do not get safety. You get stagnation, impoverishment, and authoritarianism. Technology doesn’t advance under that arrangement. Innovation stalls out (which is the overt goal of “pause/stop AI” groups), gets gatekept, and remains inaccessible to the masses.

The AI gatekeepers speak as if the danger is too much capability in too many hands, when history’s far more reliable catastrophe is the reverse: capability concentrated in too few.

There is a name for an AI architecture built around central control, mandatory permission, and a managed hierarchy of who counts as trustworthy. We see it in China, and it’s called the CCP model. It is surveillance and compliance and a populace kept on the receiving end of tools that some will never be able to wield in order to try to make something of themselves. We should want no part of it, and we should be honest that some of the loudest voices calling for the centralization of AI are, intentionally or not, building the American version of exactly that.

There is no legitimate ethical or security reason to gatekeep this technology indefinitely. The case for doing so always seems to arrive wrapped in the language of caution, but the structure underneath it has so many historical examples that results poorly. We end up with a small group deciding it alone can be trusted with things as simple as a candle, and everyone else should be grateful for the candle.

America does not win by managing AI into an elite ladder of privilege. America wins by leaning into the thing that made it exceptional in the first place: distributed power, open access, faith in ordinary people to do the right thing when you stop standing between them and the tools they need to succeed.

America wins when we distribute knowledge and unleash innovation.

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There is a familiar rhythm to the way the corporate media and liberal politicians in D.C. talk about AI, and if you lived through two decades of climate narrative politics, you already know the beat. First comes the prophecy of imminent catastrophe. Then comes the insistence that only sweeping government action can save us. Then comes the curious detail that the catastrophe keeps failing to arrive on schedule, even as the demands for control grow louder. We have seen this movie before, and the only thing that has changed is the main character in the script.

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Consider Bernie Sanders, who has become the loudest political voice on AI’s supposed jobs apocalypse. In October, the senator’s HELP Committee released a report carrying the subtle title warning that AI and automation “could destroy nearly 100 million U.S. jobs in a decade.” He has since called for breaking up OpenAI, told an interviewer the technology is “like a meteor coming,” and alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), introduced legislation for a federal moratorium on new AI data centers until the government can install the proper “safeguards.” The policy wishlist arrived fully formed with demands such as a robot tax and a moratorium on technological innovation all citing a potential crisis, but no actual data-backed causes.

AI doomerism is the climate template, reproduced almost line for line. Even decades before I was born, Americans were told that catastrophe was always ten years out, that the science was settled, that the only debate left was how much state power to hand over, and how quickly. The predictions, like ice-free Arctics, drowned coastal cities, climate refugees by the hundreds of millions—came with confident dates attached. Notably, the dates passed, but the demands did not recede. The alarmists simply found more nonsensical narratives and more new deadlines.

Consider Bill McKibben, who wrote The End of Nature in 1989, arguably the founding text of modern climate alarm, and who in 2023 signed the Center for AI Safety’s statement declaring that “mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority.” McKibben didn’t so much change subjects as expand his catalog of apocalypses, explicitly citing climate as the precedent: “Given our failure to heed the early warnings about climate change 35 years ago, it feels to me as if it would be smart to actually think this one through,” he said of AI. Yuval Noah Harari, the Davos circuit’s favorite prophet, has likewise spent years warning of ecological collapse and now insists AI is as threatening as climate change and nuclear war, an “alien species” that could end us.

The institutional overlap is not exactly subtle. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, keeper of the Doomsday Clock, spent years citing climate change as a primary reason humanity was creeping toward midnight. In January it set the clock at 85 seconds to midnight, its closest ever, and folded artificial intelligence directly into the same basket of “existential threats” alongside nuclear war and climate change. The same body, the same apocalyptic framing, the same call for “international guidelines” and “multilateral agreements.” The Bulletin’s own writers have made the connection explicit, arguing that the world’s “collective failure to heed climate warnings” is a lesson that must now be applied to AI. The threat is interchangeable and the remedy is always centralized control over society.

What makes the AI version especially worth scrutinizing is that, unlike long-range climate modeling, the central claim is testable right now. Sanders says AI is throwing millions onto the street. So is it? The data says no.

The Yale Budget Lab, hardly a den of right-wing skeptics, has been tracking AI’s labor-market footprint since the first version of ChatGPT’s release. Its current conclusion: while anxiety is widespread, the effect on today’s labor market “remains largely speculative.” The picture that emerges, the researchers wrote, “is one that largely reflects stability, not major disruption at an economy-wide level.” They found no clear rise in AI-task exposure among the unemployed and no lengthening of joblessness in the most exposed occupations.

Anthropic, which nobody in their right mind can claim as a hyper accelerationist outfit, published research in March finding “no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022.” Goldman Sachs projects that any AI unemployment effect will be transitory and no larger than half a percentage point above trend. Every major institutional forecast, from the IMF, to McKinsey, to the BLS shows net positive job creation at the macro level over the medium term. When Amazon cut tens of thousands of corporate roles, even Amazon attributed the move to slashing bureaucracy, not robots or AI. The Yale researchers raised the pointed question of “AI-washing,” which amounts to companies blaming innovation to justify necessary cost-cutting from overhiring in the post covid era.

None of this means AI and the sweeping technological innovation that will come with it is consequence-free. Entry-level hiring in some fields, like junior software roles, has clearly softened. But the most plausible explanation is not that the machines have already replaced those workers; it is that hiring managers are making decisions based on the very narrative that politicians like Bernie Sanders are selling. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found 71 percent of Americans fear permanent job loss to AI, and firms are responding to that expectation rather than to a measured productivity reality. Goldman Sachs describes employers “integrating AI to avoid adding headcount” rather than firing anyone. The AI doomer prophecy is self-fulfilling: the alarm itself, like the climate narrative, creates a certain corporate standard even if it’s vidence free, and it results in the cooling of the hiring pipeline. The scale back then gets cited as proof the alarm was warranted.

AI doomerism is a powerful narrative, and pursuing some kind of sweeping federal moratorium based on a narrative, and not evidence, would entrench that narrative and make the prophecy come to life.

The alarmist method does not actually require evidence, because the prophecy is structured to be unfalsifiable. If layoffs come, that proves the danger. If they don’t, that proves we caught it just in time, or that the catastrophe is merely delayed, lurking past the next horizon. The climate narrative skirmishes taught the activist class that a sufficiently frightening and sufficiently distant prediction can power an entire political program indefinitely, immune to the inconvenience of being checked against reality.

AI may well reshape the economy. But “take it seriously” and “grant the government emergency powers over a multi trillion-dollar industry on the strength of predictions data already contradict” are two very separate paths forward.

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And it is generous indeed. By its own public accounting, the Tarbell Center is paying working journalists an average of better than $7,600 for every single article it bankrolls, with individual grants running as high as twenty thousand dollars a story. That kind of money buys the sort of artificial intelligence coverage that treats the most promising technology of our lifetimes as a slow-motion apocalypse. If you have ever wondered why so much of the corporate press covers AI like a horror film rather than an industrial revolution, the Tarbell-media stenographer pipeline makes sense of that dilemma.

This is no one-off arrangement. Tarbell runs an ongoing fellowship that embeds its hand-picked, salary-funded reporters directly inside the nation's most influential newsrooms, where they work the AI beat from the inside for up to two years. Its fellows have been placed at the Los Angeles Times, NBC News, Bloomberg, TIME, The Guardian, The Verge, MIT Technology Review, The Information, the South China Morning Post, among others.

So who is signing those checks? Follow the money up the chain and you arrive at a left-wing tech billionaire. Surprise! Tarbell’s funding flows in significant part from Open Philanthropy, the sprawling Effective Altruist-aligned grantmaking machine recently rebranded as Coefficient Giving, which exists to deploy the fortune of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna. Moskovitz is no quiet, apolitical philanthropist tinkering at the margins of public life. He is one of the largest Democratic megadonors in the entire country, a man who poured around twenty million dollars into electing Hillary Clinton, tens of millions more into defeating Donald Trump and installing Joe Biden, and who by 2022 had routed better than seventy million dollars into Democrat-aligned political machinery. In 2024 he was reported to be the single biggest tech-founder donor to Kamala Harris. This is the man whose philanthropic empire quietly underwrites a meaningful share of what your morning paper tells you about artificial intelligence.

The worldview that empire is buying is not the neutral, public-spirited “AI safety” that Tarbell advertises. Strip away the language about supposedly helping society “navigate advanced AI” and what you are left with is pure doomerism. We are left with the conviction that AI is less an engine of prosperity than an existential menace that must be slowed, regulated to death, and consumed by the state, with a policy emphasis on the latter two objectives, given that Moskowitz is a major shareholder in Anthropic, which seeks an impenetrable regulatory moat in D.C. This is a degrowth and anti-competitive ideology aimed squarely at a single industry, the insistence that AI is a thing to be feared and contained rather than unleashed broadly and fairly for the benefit of ordinary Americans.

Moskovitz related entitites bankroll several of the think tanks that draft the regulations and the policy shops that lobby for control, and it now helps fund the journalists who cover the whole apparatus.

Tarbell insists that none of this money touches the journalism itself. Its favorite phrase on its website is editorial independence. The donors have no involvement, it assures us. An independent panel of judges scores the applications. Staff never see or shape a story before publication, and every funded piece carries a tidy little disclosure line buried at the bottom.

But notice what that very defense quietly concedes. There is a committee. Tarbell says so itself, in plain language: applications are judged by a panel, and when the judges disagree, Tarbell’s own staff make the final call on who gets paid and who walks away empty-handed. An organization that decides which pitches are worth thousands of dollars and which are worth nothing is exercising editorial power of the most consequential sort, and it is doing so before a single word has been published. You never have to editorialize a reporter’s copy when you get to choose which reporters are funded to file in the first place. The selection bias and the selection criteria sit in plain view on Tarbell’s own website, nudging applicants toward the safety pledges, the “dangerous capabilities,” and the corporate villainy that the doomer movement is most eager to see splashed across the internet.

This is how narrative engineering operates in the current era.. There is no public online memo that sleuths can dig up to show specific orders to the reporters Tarbell supports. Yet there is a grant program, a prestigious fellowship, a generous stipend, and an assignment desk with charity window dressing. All of it is purposed with steering some of the nation’s most influential newsrooms in a direction chosen by a handful of ideologically committed individuals. The reader who sees an LA Times, NBC News, Bloomberg, Guardian or WIRED byline has no way of knowing that the story exists at all because a Democratic megadonor’s foundation decided it was worth paying for.

None of this involves a smoke-filled room or a secret handshake. It requires only money, groups of deployed ideologues, and a firm editorial sense of which stories advance the cause. He who pays for the beat will, given enough time, shape the beat. This is not an act of charity. It’s an influence operation designed to achieve the objectives of the AI panic camp.

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The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) has quietly become one of the most visible forces in the rapidly escalating war on American AI infrastructure. By a conservative count, PSL chapters have led or organized anti-data center protests in at least nine to ten distinct campaigns since late 2025. The Dossier found a significant presence in Prince George’s County, Maryland; East Charlotte, North Carolina; Tucson; Springfield, Illinois; Madison and Milwaukee; St. Louis; the Puente Hills; Atlanta’s DeKalb County; and northern Minnesota, among others.

In Landover, Maryland, PSL helped force a temporary moratorium after a string of rallies and press conferences. In Springfield, Illinois, the party turned out hundreds for a county board meeting that ultimately paused a major project. In Wisconsin, PSL co-led a “Beating the Data Centers Statewide Day of Action” that hit the Capitol and Milwaukee on the same day. The chants are nearly identical from one coast to the other: “Hey hey, ho ho, these data centers have got to go.”

This is the kind of grassroots-looking, professionally coordinated activism that gets results. It’s also worth asking who is paying for all of this.

Let’s follow the money to Shanghai.

PSL’s largest documented benefactor is Neville Roy Singham, a billionaire American-born far-left tech magnate who sold his consulting firm and now lives in Shanghai. The New York Times has reported that Singham operates from a shared workspace with a Chinese Communist Party propaganda outfit and has funneled enormous sums into a global network of nonprofits and media properties that consistently echo Beijing’s foreign policy line, from discrediting China’s cultural genocide against the Uyghurs, to anti-Taiwan talking points to anti-American framings of nearly every geopolitical contest.

PSL isn't exactly hiding the ball. In an April 28 manifesto on its flagship outlet Liberation News, the Singham-funded group demands what it calls "popular control of AI" (a euphemism for state control) and warns that the window to act is closing because once a technology gets entrenched under capitalism, the chance to dismantle it is gone. The piece declares America is captured by tech billionaires and casts data centers themselves as instruments of surveillance and extraction against working-class communities. The policy goal is straightforward: freeze, dismantle, or nationalize American compute infrastructure.

The Singham network has poured money into the People’s Forum in New York, BreakThrough News, Code Pink, and Tricontinental, organizations whose orbits substantially overlap with PSL’s leadership and messaging. PSL itself does not publish detailed donor disclosures, but congressional investigators have flagged the Singham network for possible Foreign Agents Registration Act violations, and House committees have been examining whether the relationship constitutes undisclosed foreign influence. House Ways and Means Chairman Jason Smith has set a May 18, 2026 deadline for the People’s Forum, BreakThrough News, and Tricontinental to turn over records on their funding sources, or face subpoenas.

Efforts to thwart American innovation are being pursued via a funding pipeline through a billionaire who now spends his days in Shanghai spearheading CCP propagandist efforts, and unsurprisingly, the organizations that he funds have positions on issues that perfectly align with the Chinese government. On Taiwan, AI competition, semiconductor policy, and now American data infrastructure, the Singham network converges perfectly with Beijing’s foreign policy. The House Oversight Committee has recently named PSL among the organizations it is examining in connection with Singham’s network.

Data centers are not just warehouses full of servers. They are the physical substrate of American technological development. In the view of both U.S. and Chinese policymakers, this buildout will help determine which superpower wins the next decade. The Chinese government has made AI dominance an explicit national priority. American hyperscalers (albeit imperfect vessels of American power) spending hundreds of billions on domestic data centers are an essential component of that competition.

Slowing these infrastructure projects down, through moratoriums, zoning fights, environmental challenges, and community pressure campaigns, has obvious strategic value to a geopolitical rival. The far-left’s framing wraps that delay in the language of anti-capitalism, anti-tech-billionaire populism (ironic, given their funding), and conservationist environmentalism. It is a flexible message that picks up genuine local concerns and channels them toward an outcome that would advantage the country where the party’s biggest funder lives.

None of this means homeowners worried about a substation in their backyard are foreign agents. Many of those concerns are entirely legitimate and they deserve a fair hearing. But the people who show up with the megaphones are quite often entirely disinterested in local priorities, and Americans have a right to know whose dollars are advancing those campaigns.

Congress has already opened the door. The FARA inquiries into the Singham network should proceed on the merits, with the same seriousness applied to any other foreign-influence investigation. Local journalists covering data center fights need to start asking tougher questions about who is organizing the rallies, and state legislatures considering moratoriums spurred by these campaigns should understand whose strategic interests they may be inadvertently serving.

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This is being marketed as compassionate foresight. It’s not. A UBI social welfare program would be the most costly and most destructive economic and societal initiative in American history, and one we should refuse on principle long before Congress could potentially entertain this path of ruin.

Let’s start with the foundational claim, that AI will produce permanent mass unemployment requiring permanent income replacement. There is no serious evidence this is happening. Anthropic’s own labor-market research has found no increase in unemployment in the occupations most exposed to AI. National unemployment sits at 4.3 percent. Software engineering job listings recently hit a three-year high. The Doomer narrative is rhetorical, not empirical, and notably, it is being pushed hardest by the people who stand to gain most from convincing the public that they need a massive regulatory and competitive moat to protect their technology.

History demolishes the displacement thesis. In 1900, roughly 40 percent of American workers were employed on farms. By 1980, that figure was 3.4 percent. Tractors, fertilizers, and irrigation collapsed agricultural labor demand by an order of magnitude. The result was not mass destitution. There was a rise of entire industries that the visionaries of 1900 could not have named: aviation, electronics, software, telecommunications, biotech. Each new wave of automation freed human capital to flow toward problems we had not previously had the bandwidth to solve. The Luddite fallacy is baed on a left wing assumption that the quantity of labor demanded is fixed, and it has been refuted in every generation. Somehow, every generation of central planners forgets this lesson.

Even granting the Doomers and Effective Altruists their worst-case scenario, a rough transitional decade in which displaced workers struggle to reskill, UBI is the worst available answer. It is not, as its boosters claim, a clever technocratic patch. It is straightforward socialist redistribution scheme. I know, UBI advocates get really upset when you properly label this idea as socialism. But yes, it’s socialism.

A mere $1,000 monthly payment to every American carries a price tag of roughly $4 trillion per year, equivalent to half the entire federal budget. There is no honest path to that revenue that does not involve a permanent and dramatic expansion of state power, federal taxation, and central economic planning. Once established, no such program has ever shrunk. UBI is not a bridge; it is a foundation, and the building that gets erected on top of it is bigger government in perpetuity. And it’s not like other government programs will be shut down to make up for the budget hole that UBI creates. It just never works that way.

The pilot data is incredibly damning. Trials in the United States have found that recipients work less and enjoy more leisure, but show little evidence of better entrepreneurship or lasting mental-health improvement. The promised burst of small-business creation and creative renaissance does not materialize. What materializes instead is that people consume the subsidy and reduce their economic output.

That last point should worry us most, and here is where Anthropic cofounder Olah’s framing should be turned back on him. The strongest case against UBI is not fiscal but moral. Work is not merely how people pay rent. It is so critical to how they build identity, structure time, form community, and compose a meaningful life. Of course, this doesn’t mean that people should engage in work for the sake of working. There needs to be a purpose to that work.

The Doomers’ UBI proposal takes the worst pathology of post-industrial America and offers it to everyone as policy, and it is being pushed by the very firms whose products will allegedly necessitate it. It is not a moral imperative, but a moral inversion of historic proportions.

Also, UBI lets frontier AI companies socialize the costs of their disruption while continuing to privatize the upside. The American taxpayer would be forced to absorb the workforce displacement. It is a remarkably tidy and economically beneficial arrangement for the people proposing it.

The honest response to AI’s potential labor-market effects is the opposite of what is being proposed. Instead of a UBI regime that fundamentally transforms America into a socialist nanny state, cut the regulations that block new industries from forming and get the federal boot off countless American industries. Free people and market forces will always adapt to change better than some massive, society immolating UBI program.

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We’re going to get into Sam’s new white paper, which traces a pretty alarming web of Chinese state media, CCP-aligned nonprofits like the Singham Network, and foreign billionaires who are pouring money into the campaign to slow down American AI and block data center build-out across the country. We’ll talk about how that influence is making its way into legislation (including the Bernie–AOC data center moratorium) what’s really at stake in the US-China AI race, and why Sam describes data centers as the “enriched uranium” of this generation’s defining technological competition.

Follow Sam Lyman on X: https://x.com/SamLyman33

The Bitcoin Policy Institute whitepaper: https://www.btcpolicy.org/articles/foreign-influence-in-the-campaign-against-american-ai

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In 2022, the Biden administration unveiled its signature tech policy: a sweeping set of export controls designed to choke off China’s access to advanced AI chips. The goal, at least on paper, was to preserve America’s qualitative advantage in Artificial Intelligence specifically by keeping the most powerful processors engineered by Nvidia, the indispensable flagship American AI company, out of Chinese data centers.

Four years later, the results are in.

Huawei, a key instrument for the Chinese Communist Party’s global tech ambitions, expects $12 billion in AI chip revenue this year, up from $7.5 billion in 2025. That’s a whopping 60-plus percent year-over-year growth, with orders already locked in from Chinese tech giants Alibaba, ByteDance, and Tencent. Nvidia’s market share in China? Its founder and longtime CEO Jensen Huang told an interviewer last month that it has fallen to zero. Yes, zero. “Nvidia had … 90-some odd percent of the world’s market share,” Huang said in the interview. “Today, in China, we have now dropped to zero.”

Another major American AI hardware and software company finds itself facing similar issues with global competitiveness. AMD makes a performance-capped chip designed specifically for the Chinese market because the chip is deliberately neutered to fall under export thresholds. AMD has been allowed to keep shipping into China, but the structure of the deal is itself is a mess. AMD is being permitted to occupy a small piece of the market that Beijing has not yet decided to close. It’s the same tier Nvidia briefly held with similar chips before Chinese regulators began pressuring buyers to refuse it.

And some members of Congress are making all of this worse. In April, a group of House lawmakers introduced the MATCH Act, which would follow the same aforementioned path to tightly control the export of chipmaking machines made by the Dutch firm ASML. The bill goes a step further than past rules: it would also stop ASML and big time American firms like Lam Research and Applied Materials from servicing the machines already installed in factories abroad. Some voices in Congress are not just trying to block new sales, but hoping to break down the supply chain entirely. Like its peers, ASML's China revenue has already collapsed from more than a third of its quarterly sales late last year to under a fifth this spring, and the MATCH Act would push it lower still. The MATCH Act, ostensibly written to slow China’s ambitions, will instead pay for it, and the bill will be paid by mostly American companies whose grip on Asia acted as a major piece of leverage against our adversaries.

So is America winning?

Unfortunately, the policies that are being promoted to handicap China’s AI ambitions instead handed Huawei the largest captive market in the world and forced some of the world’s most talented engineers to do exactly what Washington wanted to avoid most: China is building a credible domestic alternative to the American AI stack.

To understand why this matters, you have to understand how AI ecosystems work.

When a frontier AI model is built (think ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc), its developers don’t just write code that runs on whatever hardware happens to be lying around. They optimize for a very specific, non swappable chip architecture. That optimization extends to the surrounding software, which involves the “stack” that turns metalloids into an entire AI system.

Nvidia’s edge over the past decade has not been chips alone. It has been CUDA, the software platform that hundreds of thousands of engineers know how to use and have built atop. Once your AI model is tuned for CUDA, every downstream piece of infrastructure comes with it. You cannot simply unplug any Nvidia GPU and replace it with a Huawei processor. The whole model has to be rebuilt and recalibrated for its engine. A switch would mean that the whole team has to be retrained and the whole ecosystem has to be migrated.

This is precisely what just happened in China, but in the wrong direction.

In April, the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek released its V4 model, an advanced system optimized not for CUDA but for Huawei’s CANN system. Their engineers worked directly with Huawei before launch, and reportedly, did not extend the same early access to Nvidia or AMD. Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent deployed V4 services within hours of release.

Once Chinese cloud providers built their infrastructure around Huawei’s hardware and software, the cost of switching back to Nvidia became prohibitive. Huawei now reports more than four million developers on its CANN platform. Three years ago, that number was effectively zero.

Nvidia’s latest annual filing concedes what its founder has publicly stated, that the company is “effectively foreclosed from competing in China’s data center computing/compute market” and is booking no revenue from the broader region in its current outlook. Analysts project Nvidia’s share of China’s AI GPU market will settle around 8 percent or less in the coming years, down from 66 percent in 2024.

The AI race is a global contest. Every country is now trying to build serious AI capacity in some form. These countries now face a choice that did not meaningfully exist only two years ago. Huawei has been actively pitching Ascend chips and remote access to its CloudMatrix systems to Gulf states and Southeast Asia, while Washington’s tiered framework, which placed even close allies like Israel and India behind chip caps, pushed those governments to take the calls from our foremost adversary. If Riyadh’s national AI infrastructure or Jakarta’s data centers get built on Ascend silicon and CANN software, they will not be migrated back to American hardware in the next decade. Network territory generally works the same way everywhere: the tech stack that arrives first is usually the only one that stays, because swapping out and retraining is both cost prohibitive and burdensome on governments, bureaucracies, and private customers.

The strategic logic of America’s chip war assumed that China could not build its own alternative quickly enough to matter. That assumption is now being proven as incorrect. Huawei has rolled out its own high-bandwidth memory chips and Beijing is pushing for 70 percent domestic silicon wafer use. A fully integrated Chinese AI stack is no longer a hypothetical, but a very clear reality that we confront in our geopolitical decisionmaking today.

There is a lesson here that goes beyond one White House administration. America’s technological dominance is fueled by a system that leans into free enterprise and our founding ideals. It has never rested on what it forbids others from doing. It has rested on what its ecosystem makes irresistible to use. When the world’s developers build on American platforms, American influence compounds, not just commercially, but strategically. Of course, our most prestigious technology companies do not perfectly represent American domestic and national security interests, but they do so far more accurately than a Chinese counterpart ever will.

The Biden Administration’s export controls did the opposite of their intended effect. It spawned a domestic powerhouse industry within our adversary that will now seek to deploy its technology globally.

The Trump administration has signaled a willingness to revisit elements of Biden-era chip policy. It should. The question is no longer whether to slow China. Winning the AI race means allowing American companies, as mighty but imperfect extensions of American power, to be given the freedom to compete and win globally.

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Their headline policy ask, parked unobtrusively near the end of the piece, is the giveaway. “Congress should mandate audits of A.I. developers’ safety claims and processes,” they write, “requiring that they be conducted by independent expert bodies overseen by the government.”

That single sentence is the whole game.

Halfway through the column, a parenthetical notes that “Dr. Buchanan is an outside adviser to Anthropic,” which pretty much reveals that this “op-ed” is a corporate memo from Anthropic itself, given that Ball too has deployed rhetoric that is indistinguishable from the company’s policy posture (and works for the Foundation for American Innovation, which has become Anthropic’s chief defender in its battle with the Pentagon). The articles central piece of evidence (the case study the authors use to argue AI now threatens the homeland) is a product announcement from Anthropic itself. Claude Mythos, we are told, found “thousands of critical vulnerabilities” in foundational software, and “in the wrong hands” could be turned against power grids, hospitals, and banks. So one of the authors is paid by the company whose marketing material he is using as a national-security threat assessment to justify federal regulation that, conveniently, his client is already structured to comply with.

You don’t have to be cynical to notice that The New York Times published what amounts to paid advertising in op-ed form.

Ball and Buchanan would have you believe their proposed audit regime is a modest, common-sense guardrail. It is not. Mandatory third-party safety audits of AI developers, conducted by government-blessed “expert” bodies of political animals, are a textbook regulatory moat. They impose fixed compliance costs that scale beautifully for incumbents and crush everyone else. Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google can absorb a compliance bureaucracy without breaking a sweat. A team of seven engineers in Miami or Austin building a startup competitor cannot.

I’ve spend enough time in D.C. to know that this is how it always works. In finance, in tech, in pharmaceuticals, in energy, etc, the firms that lobby loudest for “responsible regulation” are the ones already sitting on top of the hill. Once you are the incumbent, the most valuable thing the government can sell you is a fence. This op-ed is a polite request for that fence, and the “national security” rhetoric is an attempt to scare the holdouts into submission.

And who, precisely, would staff these “independent expert bodies overseen by the government”? AI is still a small field. The pool of credentialed and somehow unaffiliated experts capable of evaluating frontier model safety lives almost entirely inside the same handful of companies the audits would govern, or in the academic and think-tank ecosystem those organizations underwrite. The revolving door would be in big time play here, similar to how pharmaceutical regulatory bodies are always staffed with individuals who were placed there to protect specific corporate interests. Anthropic in particular has spent years branding itself as the “safety-first” AI company, marketing its researchers as the responsible adults in the room. A federal audit regime would formalize that positioning into law. It would take the company’s existing internal practices, declaring them the federal standard, and forcing every competitor to either adopt them or exit the American market.

Notice also the asymmetry baked into the piece. Bioweapon risk and cyber catastrophe are described in vivid, urgent prose. They talk about power grids going down, hospitals breached, virologists outclassed by new LLMs. The threats (though they remain entirely hypothetical) that justify expanding the federal role are said to be concrete and imminent.

The “bipartisan” framing is the ultimate tell in Washington. Ball and Buchanan note, as if it were profound, that they served different presidents and still agree. Yet both have an overwhelming personal and professional interest in expanded federal involvement, because they ultimately answer to the same stakeholders. When two former White House staffers from opposing administrations converge on a policy, that is not some kind of automatic sign the policy is correct. Far from it.

Innovation does not happen because Congress mandates audits. It happens because builders are free to build, fail, iterate, and try again, without first having to be approved by a government-credentialed compliance body funded, staffed, and culturally captured by the firms it is supposedly overseeing. This domestic audit regime they recommend is a moat, dressed in safety language, written by men with a financial and professional interest in the moat being built.

Anthropic wants its AI moat, and I don’t blame them for playing the D.C. game of making their case through an endless series of Matryoshka doll cutouts. This is a company that could very well IPO at a valuation of well over a trillion dollars. Nonetheless, when it comes to probably the most important technological innovation category of today and the coming decades, allowing for competition and an open playing field in AI will be far more beneficial to the American people as a whole.

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It is one of the strangest political alignments of the decade: a Socialist senator, an Effective Altruist-aligned chameleon warning of digital extinction, a former White House strategist who repeatedly tried to rehabilitate Jeffrey Epstein on camera, and officials tied directly to the Chinese Communist Party’s AI governance apparatus. They’re all converging on the same demand: Slow American technological progress down to a grinding halt.

On Wednesday, Bernie Sanders livestreamed a 75-minute discussion on “AI existential risk and international cooperation” featuring prominent AI doomsday advocate Max Tegmark, the University of Montreal’s David Krueger, and — beamed in from across the Pacific — Xue Lan of Tsinghua University and Zeng Yi of the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance.

A somehwat important detail: Mr Xue happens to chair China’s national AI governance expert committee under the Ministry of Science and Technology. Zeng leads an institute woven directly into Beijing’s AI policy apparatus. These are not independent academics offering disinterested wisdom (though they sure tried to convince viewers othewise), they are state-aligned figures whose presence on a U.S. Senate panel marks a remarkable moment. Nothing really surprises me these days when it comes to D.C. world, but it is quite something that a sitting American senator invited officials of a hostile authoritarian power to help shape how the United States should regulate what has become its most strategically important technology.

The substantive ask is just as troubling. Sanders, alongside Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has introduced the Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act, which would impose a federal ban on the construction or expansion of AI data centers until Congress passes a sweeping new regulatory regime. Sanders’ own office described the legislation as designed to “slow down” AI development.

There is exactly one country on earth that benefits from an American AI slowdown, and it isn’t any free ones. Beijing is not pausing. The CCP is racing ahead, while blocking American companies from recruiting its frontier talent.

What unites these voices is the doctrine of “existential risk,” which is most popular in pockets of the far-left Effective Altruist-aligned ideas space, and it has been laundered into the political right through astroturf groups spawned by its donor class. They claim that AI is so dangerous it must be paused, throttled, or subjected to international “cooperation.” It is a worldview that promotes unilateral disarmament. And its top advocates have been calling for such policies since very primitive iterations of AI frontier models were released to the public.

One of the chief evangelists of this doctrine in the West is Max Tegmark, the founder of the Future of Life Institute.

In March, Tegmark unveiled his “Pro-Human AI Declaration,” touting the breadth of his coalition. Among the signatories he proudly trumpeted on social media: Steve Bannon — yes, that Steve Bannon, who according to records released by the House Oversight Committee conducted more than 15 hours of recorded interviews with Jeffrey Epstein in 2019, advised the convicted sex offender on how to “rebuild your image,” and was producing a documentary intended to rehabilitate Epstein’s public reputation in the months before his final arrest.

Oh but the irony deepens. Humans First, the astroturf group promoted by Bannon [isn’t it odd how Bannon, who has a long history of sketchy financial patrons, suddenly found himself perfectly aligned with the niche efforts of leftist San Francisco billionaires?] and co-founded by Bannon War Room commentator Joe Allen, has been promoting a slick “Digital Epstein” video, a cautionary parable about predatory AI grooming the next generation.

So the man who coached the actual Epstein for the cameras is now in the same coalition warning you about a digital one. You cannot make this up.

This is the horseshoe in plain sight. On one end, a self-described democratic socialist senator who has spent decades insisting the American economic system is irredeemable. On the other, a former White House strategist who tried to script the rehabilitation of a convicted child trafficker. In the proverbial middle, an Effective Altruist-aligned Swedish-born Luddite who keeps assuring everyone that “Skynet” is coming and that the only way to stop it is a “global prohibition” on AI advancement. Of course, such a framework cannot be enforced on China but most certainly can be enforced on America. And beamed in over Zoom: actual representatives of the Chinese state, smiling and nodding along.

The ideology that knits this coalition together is not neatly identified within the American political framework. It is, at its core, a counsel of despair toward American technological civilization. It treats the most consequential technology of the century not as an opportunity to extend free societies’ lead but as a problem to be paused, internationalized to a global governing body, and ultimately surrendered. Whether that surrender is dressed in Sanders’ rhetoric of corporate accountability, Max Tegmark’s doomsday hollering, or Bannon’s populist civilizational dread, the destination is the same: everything gets shut down indefinitely, and the standards get written in rooms where Beijing has the “responsible party” seat at the table.

This is what the Bernie panel actually advertised. It’s not so much “international cooperation” between equals as it is a Western intellectual class so enamored of its own apocalyptic framing that it is willfully blinding itself to promote the ultimate luxury belief. Yet the people whose work, wages, and military edge depend on staying ahead are nowhere in the room.

There is a serious debate to be had about AI and how it will change the world, along with temporary labor displacement and accountability. But it cannot be had in good faith in a coalition that includes Epstein’s documentary collaborator and Xi Jinping’s policy committee chair. The Americans whose jobs and futures are actually on the line deserve better than a horseshoe of doomers handing the future of technology to the Chinese Communist Party.

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Halting American AI development, particularly on the data center front, is the visible face of the movement right now, and it’s being represented across the nation and in D.C. across the political spectrum. The Artificial Intelligence Data Center Moratorium Act, introduced this spring by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, sits atop a dense and well-funded activist infrastructure, which often comes in the form of Effective Altruist (EA)-aligned advocacy shops. Dozens of local moratoriums have already passed in counties across the country, and filed statewide bills in twelve legislatures. The billionaire donor-funded machinery behind this movement has produced endless rallies, press conferences, and media coverage about water usage and electricity bills. It’s even infecting the considerably conservative state of Florida through astroturf EA-adjacent groups like Humans First, An AI doomer-funded outfit that falsley portrays itself as a right wing outfit.

The second objective is more direct, but it promises to be “safe and effective.”

In Section 3 of the Sanders-AOC bill is the real policy ambition for the coalition. The provision explains why many of the same activist groups that spent the last decade advancing the climate narrative have now taken an urgent interest in server racks. The conditions for lifting the proposed moratorium is premised on ensuring that “the Federal Government shall review and approve artificial intelligence products before those products are released, for the purpose of ensuring that those products are safe and effective and do not threaten the health and well-being of working families, privacy and civil rights, and the future of humanity.”

This is not a safety standard or a regulatory disclosure rule. It marks an ambition for federal pre-approval for software, which, taking a page out of the covid playbook, must come with a “safe and effective” stamp of approval.

Every AI product (every model, every feature, every release) would have to pass through a government licensing office before reaching a user. Of course, this would both cripple innovation and ruin the AI software entirely, making it subject to the whims of political bureaucrats. The bill does not specify which agency. It does not define “safe and effective.” It does not bound what constitutes a threat to “the future of humanity,” a standard so elastic it can mean whatever the presiding administration wants it to mean that day.

Once a licensing apparatus exists, the politics of who gets approved and who doesn’t does the rest of the work. An AI producing text Washington D.C. finds “harmful” becomes an AI that threatens “privacy and civil rights” or “working families.” A language learning model giving non-approved answers on the climate narrative, on elections, or on countless social issues does not have to be banned. It simply never gets approved. It amounts to pre-publication review by the executive branch. It is the architecture of a censorship regime. It’s also anti-competitive by design, which is why AI heavyweights like Antrhopic tend to link up with the “pause AI” groups so frequently

.Pre-approval is only one veto point among several. The same section demands laws empowering “communities” to reject data centers, banning all federal, state, and local subsidies for their construction, and mandating union labor under prevailing wage rules at every facility. The bill is not trying to make AI infrastructure safer or beneficial to locals. It is instead trying to make every piece of it permitted, akin to the notoriously doomed California high speed rail project.

Should these efforts succeed, America would adopt a pre-approval regime, then uses hardware export controls to pressure allies and competitors to adopt comparable censorship and regulatory regimes. The result is an anti-human authoritarian system, one that conveniently resembles the system the Chinese Communist Party already operates domestically.

The optics of an upcoming bill-promotion event at the Capitol fit this logic perfectly. Of the four panelists Sen. Sanders has assembled to warn of AI “existential risk,” two — Zeng Yi of the Beijing Institute of AI Safety and Governance and Xue Lan of Tsinghua University — hold senior positions in the Chinese government’s AI policy apparatus. Zeng sits on the National Governance Committee of Next Generation Artificial Intelligence under Beijing’s Ministry of Science and Technology. They are joined by the Future of Life Institute’s Max Tegmark, a longtime advocate of shutting down AI indefinitely and America surrendering it’s sovereignty to a “global governance” regime. Despite being a scorched earth leftist, Tegmark’s ideas have made inroads in the state of Florida under the guise of protecting children from harm. This is the political and intellectual coalition driving the legislation and the broader movement nationwide. And they are barely hiding the real agenda.

The data center moratorium is a cudgel to set up the censorship and wrongthink regime.It is a plan to halt American AI progress and install a federal content licensing system in the wreckage. Of course, none of this is really about safety. It is a speech control proposal both in the state houses and in Washington, D.C., and one of the worst we’ve encountered since the previously attempted Biden-era covid censorship regime. So it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that the narratives and the language are such a striking resemblance.

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One month after The Dossier reported that Humans First — the self-styled “nonpartisan social movement” lobbying for heavy handed AI regulation — was an Effective Altruist (EA) front operation built to launder a progressive censorship agenda through conservative voices, the group has responded in the most revealing way possible: by ditching the bipartisan pretense entirely.

On Thursday, Humans First announced that Amy Kremer will serve as its new chair. Kremer, a longtime Republican activist, is a MAGA world-aligned figure who has been placed atop the org chart as window dressing to pursue the organization’s Doomer-aligned agenda.

The announcement itself was startlingly candid about the strategic shift.

Humans First, the release says, is moving away from bipartisan coalition-building to focus exclusively on conservative activists. The progressive-aligned staffers, it adds, will “spin out into their own organization” to be announced shortly.

Read that again. This supposed bipartisan coalition, the one that was apparently representing everyday Americans across the political spectrum, is being dissolved, and its progressive elements are being quietly reconstituted as a separate vehicle.

The Effective Altruist-aligned figures who actually built this operation aren’t walking away. They’re simply rebranding into two organizations where one stood before: one to carry the conservative water, one to carry the progressive water. It’s the same donor ecosystem with the same agenda, but the hydra is merely regenerating into two parts.

It remains precisely the architecture I described in March, when we reported on not just Humans First, but the massive, multi billion dollar network that is attempting to sway lawmakers into action that benefits these heavily ideological interests.

Kremer’s launch statement, delivered through the customary populist-grievance idiom, is something to behold. She warns that the “same Big Tech billionaires who deplatformed President Trump and silenced covid dissent now seek unfettered power to develop dangerous AI technology.”

It is a stirring line. It is also incoherent, because the organization Kremer is now chairing was built and funded by precisely the kind of Big Tech billionaires she claims to oppose. The Center for AI Safety (CAIS), where Humans First’s original incorporators held their day jobs, has received more than $12 million from Dustin Moskovitz’s Coefficient Giving. Moskovitz is a billionaire Facebook co-founder and one of the largest donors in Democratic Party politics. He was bankrolling the deplatforming industry before deplatforming was a household word. For longtime readers of The Dossier, you may also recall that Moskovitz bankrolled Event 201 (through their Open Philanthropy organization, which has rebranded to Coefficient Giving), the high profile coronavirus simulation that took place mere months before the reported outbreak began, so it’s pretty entertaining that Kremer mentioned covid censorship in her statement.

Humans First staff is now being paid, in effect, to deliver a message drafted by those leftist donors, one that comes wrapped in MAGA window dressing. Of course, this does not change its origin, it only confirms that the architects of Humans First picked out a networked conservative face to carry a regulatory agenda that the grassroots right, if fully briefed, would run from.

What Humans First is now attempting is the second stage of a familiar play. Stage one was the bipartisan launch, in which high profile Pro-Human AI Declaration signatories were recruited to give the project its bipartisan legitimacy. Stage two, now underway, is the shedding of that pretense once it has outlived its usefulness

.The progressive sister organization, as the press release telegraphs, will reemerge under its own banner in the coming weeks. Both will claim to speak for “the people.” Both will continue pushing for AI content governance standards that would be written, interpreted, and enforced by the same EA-adjacent institutions that have been working on imposing their agenda for years. The funding ecosystem and the policy goals will remain unchanged.

In March, Humans First called itself a nonpartisan grassroots movement. In April, it now claims, in a new press release, that it is a conservative operation with a progressive twin spinning out next door.

Consider what this rebrand requires us to accept. A genuine political organization, one built on conviction and a coherent worldview, cannot simply flip from bipartisan to conservative over a weekend. Real movements don't work that way. Their members would revolt. You cannot simply repaint an ideological movement on command, like a shoe company pivoting to AI . That Humans First can execute this pivot without any internal backlash is itself the final piece of evidence. You cannot change the ideology of an authentic movement, but you can change the wrapper on a product.

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President Trump is turning the tables on Iran’s economic warfare via its thievery racket in the Strait of Hormuz.

U.S. naval forces have officially begun enforcing a blockade on all maritime traffic entering and exiting Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz. The move follows the collapse of marathon peace talks in Islamabad, where Vice President JD Vance reported that the Iranians “chose not to accept our terms.” Iran’s response, for those who follow the regime closely, was rather predictable: bluster, threats, and a parliamentary spokesman posting a map of American gas prices near the White House with the taunt: “Enjoy the current pump figures.”

The critics are already out in force. They’ll cite $100+-a-barrel oil, rising inflation, pain at the pump. They’re not entirely wrong. There will be temporary pain. But the question about this strategy’s success comes down to who breaks first. And on that question, the answer is rather certain: Iran will.

The numbers tell the story.

Geopolitical Analyst Miad Maleki, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, laid out the arithmetic this weekend: a U.S. naval blockade imposes approximately $435 million per day in combined economic damage on Iran — $276 million in lost exports, $159 million in choked imports. That’s $13 billion a month, drawn from a regime already struggling to make payroll.

As Maleki points out, over 90 percent of Iran’s $109.7 billion in annual trade transits the Persian Gulf. Oil and gas account for 80 percent of government export earnings and nearly a quarter of GDP. Kharg Island alone — which handles 92 percent of Iran’s crude exports — generates approximately $78 billion a year in energy revenue. All of it sits inside the blockade zone.

Iran’s much-touted bypass, the Jask terminal, is largely a paper facility. Only ten of its twenty planned storage tanks were built, leaving effective throughput at around 70,000 barrels per day against a design capacity of one million. There is no meaningful escape route. Iran holds roughly 50-55 million barrels of onshore storage, and at a production surplus of 1.5 million barrels per day, available storage fills in approximately 13 days. After that, Iran must begin shutting in wells, which will cause permanent reservoir damage that cannot be quickly reversed even if a deal is struck.

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Iran’s rial has collapsed from roughly 42,000 per dollar to over 1.5 million — wiping out the savings and purchasing power of ordinary Iranians. The central bank recently resorted to printing a 10 million rial note just weeks after introducing the 5 million rial note. Official inflation runs at 47.5 percent. Food inflation hit 105 percent by February. Rice prices are reportedly up sevenfold.

As Fortune reported Sunday, an insider close to the Iranian establishment described the economy as the regime’s “Achilles heel,” with authorities now worried about their basic ability to make payroll. Without sanctions relief, the money simply isn’t there. That fear is not hypothetical, as the recent protests in Iran were largely sparked by the rial’s collapse, and it spread to more than 200 cities.

Yes, the blockade of Hormuz may hurt us too. Oil topped $100 a barrel again on Sunday. American consumers will feel this. But the United States was already absorbing damage from Iran’s blockade, which has bottled up roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil supply since February, while Iranian tankers transited freely and Tehran extracted $2 million tolls from vessels seeking passage, funneling that revenue to the IRGC.

The blockade flips the asymmetry. Instead of Iran collecting rent while the global economy bleeds, Iran becomes the most negatively impacted party immediately.

The liberal Brookings Institution’s Robin Brooks made the strategic case as far back as March: “The U.S. can implode Iran’s economy by shutting down its oil exports. That might open up the Strait of Hormuz a lot faster than anything else.” He also argued that crude prices might actually fall if the blockade is seen as ending the war quickly, because China, which buys most of Iran’s oil, would have every incentive to lobby Tehran into accepting terms.

Iranian officials are already calling the blockade an act of piracy. But consider what Iran has been doing for the past six weeks: mining international shipping lanes, launching 21 confirmed attacks on merchant vessels, and holding a fifth of the world’s energy supply hostage to extract a better nuclear deal. The United States is not escalating. Rather, we are evening the ledger.

Both sides will feel this. But the Trump Administration has the massive balance sheet and the strategic wherewithal to outlast a regime running 47 percent inflation, no meaningful foreign exchange reserves, an oil storage clock ticking toward zero, and a population that was already in the streets fiercely protesting the extremist Islamic government that rules over them.

The blockade removes Tehran’s primary bargaining chip while accelerating an economic emergency that was already in motion.

Iran will almost certainly break first. We don’t have all the time in the world, but the United States is infinitely better positioned to play chicken with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz.

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The most important question isn’t who threw the bottle, but what kind of ideas convinced someone it was a reasonable thing to do.

For years, a well-funded and pedigreed coalition of Effective Altruist-aligned intellectuals in Silicon Valley (we can call them “AI Doomers”) have prosecuted a very specific argument. Their claim is not that AI is annoying, or economically disruptive, or bad for teenagers on social media. Their claim is existential. Extinction-level. The Doomer-funded Center for AI Studies’s (CAIS) now-famous 2023 statement, signed by hundreds of AI researchers and executives, placed AI risk alongside *nuclear weapons* as a “priority risk.” Ideological leaders in the movement like Eliezer Yudkowsky have argued with genuine desperation that a misaligned superintelligence could end the human species. He is best known for his Doomer treatise, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All, and another op-ed in Time titled "Pausing AI Developments Isn't Enough. We Need to Shut It All Down."

Max Tegmark, another core element of the Doomer coalition, has weaponized his leftist billionaire funded Future of Life Institute to bankroll advocacy, films, and research all pointing toward one conclusion: the people building frontier AI are sleepwalking us toward oblivion. Tegmark has described AI innovation as a “cancer which can kill all of humanity.” In a 2023 Time piece, he wrote that “If unaligned superintelligence causes human extinction in coming decades, all other risks will stop mattering.”

Here is the paradox those thinkers have never adequately resolved: if the threat is truly existential, then what moral framework permits you to only write strongly worded op-eds and conference circuit speeches?

It is a serious philosophical problem baked into the utilitarian ethics that most EAs and AI “safety” advocates openly embrace. The larger the harm, the more extreme the justified response. If their “probability estimate” for AI-caused extinction is even modestly non-trivial, and they are a consistent utilitarian, the math starts generating conclusions that civilization-minded people should find alarming. Petitions and policy advocacy are preferred, sure. But when those institutions are deemed to have failed, when the compute keeps scaling and the AI companies keep shipping, at what point does democratic incrementalism become a moral abdication?

None of the prominent AI Doomer figures have answered this question. They have, commendably, condemned the violence. PauseAI, whose public Discord the Friday suspect had been a member of, issued a statement insisting that “violence against anyone is antithetical to everything we stand for.” Stop AI similarly rushed to the microphones, denying any involvement and declaring that it “seeks to protect human life.” These disavowals come off as sincere, and they matter in the sense that they are speaking out against their own comrades. But they don’t close the logical trap these movements have set for themselves, and for anyone listening closely to their arguments. And these ideas will almost certainly continue to indoctrinate and radicalize likeminded individuals into criminal action.

The suspect arrested Friday, 20-year-old Daniel Alejandro Moreno-Gama, was booked on suspicion of attempted murder, arson, and possession or manufacture of an incendiary device. Investigators have not confirmed a motive. But the ideological ecosystem he inhabited offers strong clues. According to PauseAI, an organization that protests innovation in AI and demands an indefinite “pause” to AI technologies, Moreno-Gama had joined their public Discord server roughly two years prior and posted some 34 messages. The narratives he had been consuming, brick by brick, were authored by some of the most credentialed minds in Silicon Valley. The irony is potent: the same people who warned that a superintelligent AI might pursue its goals autonomously through any means necessary have built a social movement with a structural incentive to commit political violence. They have told a generation of anxious, hyper online young people that the most powerful companies in human history are building a machine that could end civilization. And now, when their followers are beginning to act on their incendiary rhetoric, they expressed shock and horror when some of those people don’t stop at signing an open letter.

The people who believe that AI will end civilization have built an ideology with no logical ceiling on justified action. They owe their followers and the public a direct answer to a simple question: if coalition building fails, if democracy proves too slow, if the companies keep shipping and the extinction clock keeps ticking, what then? Until they answer it honestly, the disavowals will ring hollow, and the Molotov cocktails from San Francisco’s newest class of political extremists will keep on coming.

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The Effective Altruist machine has a new congregation to recruit: American religious communities. And it’s paying handsomely for access to their pews, as long as faith communities adopt the publicly unpopular AI Doomer agenda.

The Future of Life Institute — the EA-aligned leftist nonprofit best known for its ruthless insistence that America must force industry to “pause AI” indefinitely — has launched a formal grant program targeting religious organizations across every major faith tradition. The program, titled “Request for Proposals on religious projects tackling the challenges posed by the AGI race,” offers individual grants of $30,000 to $300,000, with a stated mission to recruit faith communities into “the fight for a positive AI future.” Of course, this involves aligning with the group’s preferred framing for its longstanding campaign to slow innovation in AI through crushing regulation and attempts at creating institutional paralysis.

That the Future of Life Institute is writing checks to clergy deserves a moment of reflection. The EA movement that bankrolls FLI is not known for its religiosity, to put it mildly. It is a community built around utilitarians and secular technocrats who have more in common with Code Pink organizers than with any churchgoer. Some of its most prominent figures have been associated with the polyamorous “rationalist” subculture of the Bay Area. It’s fair to say that it’s a social scene not typically found in the front pews of evangelical megachurches or LDS wards. The EA ecosystem produced Sam Bankman-Fried, not Billy Graham. That these same networks are now presenting themselves as natural partners to faith communities should raise an obvious question: is any of this genuine, or is it simply the most politically useful audience left to capture?

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Utah has been a primary target for AI Doomer infiltration, as this publication has previously reported, though the “faith” campaign extends far beyond the state.

FLI’s religions initiative spans every major denomination and multiple continents.

On the Catholic front, FLI president Max Tegmark appeared at the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Science in October 2024, arguing the Church should draw a moral line against “the hubristic pursuit of a digital god AGI.”

In the LDS church, Elder Gerrit W. Gong partnered with EA-linked groups and delivered a speech in October of 2025 invoking “effective altruism” as the height of morality.

“Profit-driven technology companies should not be determining society’s AI moral compass,” Gong said. “We still need effective altruism. We need care and caution to forestall unforeseen and unintended AI consequences.”

On the evangelical front, the May 2025 open letter to President Trump signed by Reverends Johnnie Moore and Samuel Rodriguez — framed as an organic expression of Christian concern about AI — was noticeably distributed to journalists by Future of Life Institute representatives. Days later, FLI founder and president Max Tegmark shared a panel with Moore at Catholic University of America, with FLI listed as a Platinum Sponsor of the conference.

Beyond Christianity, FLI has funded the Buddhism & AI Initiative, the Nigerian Religious Coalition on AI, a Muslim-Christian coalition framed around resisting the “harms” of rapid AI development, and has even published Islamic perspectives on AI arguing that a positive future is one where individuals can “say no” to AI integration at every level of society. The theological packaging varies entirely by audience, but it all serves the Doomer agenda.

The infrastructure layer is particularly revealing. In October 2025, The Institute for Security and Technology and a group called AI and Faith, with direct FLI funding, launched a “Religious Voices and Responsible AI” initiative explicitly designed to develop curricula and resources equipping pastors, imams, and religious educators to engage AI governance.

In addition to their well funded machine in D.C., EA-aligned groups have spread funding and resources far and wide to distribute seminary-level indoctrination, now rapidly building the institutional capacity to sustain AI Doomerism to faith groups.

As The Dossier has previously reported, the same funding stack runs beneath nearly all of the astroturf. Americans for Responsible Innovation, a group bankrolled by Coefficient Giving (Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz’s giving vehicle), has acknowledged its mission has been directly boosted by the escalating outspokenness of faith leaders. ARI’s vice president of communications said so on record. In November 2025, a coalition of 43 faith leaders sent a letter to Congress opposing AI law preemption in the NDAA, a precisely targeted legislative priority of the EA-aligned governance apparatus. The National Association of Evangelicals separately urged the House to restrict AI chatbots. These letters present as grassroots moral witness, but they arrive at Capitol Hill coordinated with the same organizations, funded by the same donors, and hitting the same policy targets.

The sum of money being deployed here is not trivial. EA-aligned entities are spending hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, to deliver political results and cultural change. The faith outreach is another powerful means to pursue EA’s anti-innovation degrowth agenda through America’s institutions.

There is a remarkable paradox at the center of the enterprise. The same ideological community that produced effective altruism’s most notorious scandals is now presenting itself as a defender of religious communities against concentrated technological power. These are the leftist utilitarian hardline ideas that justified fraud, spawned Bay Area social arrangements that would scandalize any traditional congregation, and comes with an explicit goal of using concentrated wealth to impose preferred outcomes on the rest of humanity. For faith leaders, before they take the money for the next renovation, they might first want to ask their new AI policy “partners” what they actually believe in.

Some won’t notice the disconnect. Institutional prestige and grant funding have a way of smoothing over inconvenient questions about alignment and shared ideas. But the pattern is legible for anyone willing to look. EA-linked organizations are not partnering with faith groups because they share their values. They are partnering with faith groups because they have moral credibility with large swaths of the American public, and the EA-aligned actors hope it will help to launder their agenda through the pulpit.

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The foreign policy establishment has spent years trying to fit President Donald Trump into a familiar ideological box. Is he a hawk? A dove? A realist? An isolationist? The answer is simpler than any of those labels, and more coherent than his critics will admit: Trump is a pragmatic dealmaker who believes that America will be best positioned to win its global competition with China by recruiting more friendlies and having fewer foes.

The clearest expression of this worldview is in his leadership change doctrine. President Trump is not pursuing regime change in the traditional sense, which consists of the wholesale dismantling of a government and its replacement with something ideologically friendly to the current government in Washington. As Americans are all too familiar with those gambits, democracy projects are expensive, bloody, and reliably counterproductive. President Trump, a longtime pragmatist, has little to no interest in it. What he is pursuing is narrower and considerably more achievable: removing or isolating specific leaders who have aligned themselves with America’s top adversaries and replacing them, or creating conditions for their replacement, with figures who are at minimum willing to collaborate with the United States.

Venezuela is the clearest current example. Nicolás Maduro spent years building Caracas into a node in Beijing’s hemispheric influence network, offering oil flows, political cover, and geographic positioning in exchange for economic lifelines that have allowed his government to survive decades of sanctions and internal pressure. Trump’s approach has not been to call for revolution or democratic transformation (which has long been the standard interventionist script) but to methodically chip away at what Maduro left behind in Caracas. This includes tightening the economic vice, and backing governmental and opposition figures who signal a willingness to reorient Venezuela’s foreign relationships. The goal is not a Venezuela that looks like a Jeffersonian democracy. The goal is a Venezuela that is no longer a reliable asset for Beijing, Moscow, Tehran, and Havana.

Iran follows the same logic. The Islamic Republic under the late Ali Khamenei positioned itself as a strategic partner of China, Russia, and North Korea, offering a sanctions-busting energy relationship and a permanent pressure point on U.S. interests from the Levant to the Gulf. The president’s maximum pressure campaign was primarily about the nuclear file. And as the ongoing military operation against Tehran shows, it was also about the question of who leads Iran and whether that leadership’s survival depends on America’s adversaries or on coming to terms with Washington.

Critics from both the left and the right will find something to dislike in this approach. Liberal internationalists will object that the human rights situations in target countries are being subordinated to realpolitik. They are correct, and Trump probably would not dispute it. Interventionists will argue that full regime change is being left off the table, which also seems correct in the case of Iran today. But that is precisely the point. Regime change is expensive and risky. Leadership change is surgical, deniable, and reversible if the incoming leadership proves unreliable. It also allows for the Trump Administration to not consume the baggage of their predecessors. Sure, the upside of an Iran with the regime still in place is considerably lower than without the mullahs, but ultimately, those long term plans must be guided by the Iranian people and not foreign armies.

What Trump understands, and what the foreign policy establishment has repeatedly failed to internalize, is that the United States does not only need to prioritize ideological allies. It also needs to increase its pool of reliable economic and trading partners. A Venezuela that trades oil on open markets instead of routing it through Beijing’s shadow networks serves American interests regardless of what political system governs Caracas. A neutered Iran that dismantles its regional proxies serves American interests regardless of whether the mullahs remain nominally in some ceremonial position atop the leadership ranks.

The game is not to build a coalition of on-paper, like-minded democracies (see: our grossly incompetent European partners for how well that’s working right now). The game is to build a coalition of American trading and security partners, and to ensure that China’s coalition shrinks. Every government that moves from Beijing’s orbit into even a neutral posture is a partial win. Every leader who depends on Chinese economic patronage for survival is a problem to be managed or, where possible, replaced.

President Trump is not a hardened ideologue, though he is a fierce competitor, and he understands what’s at stake in our competition with China. And judging by the actions of his second term in office, his uniquely Trumpian foreign policy doctrine is making progress in adding more players to America’s team, while simultaneously isolating and weakening antagonists. This pragmatic POTUS is not letting perfect become the enemy of good.

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I’ll admit it. Not long ago, I was the person in the room sighing at the very mention of “artificial intelligence,” which I considered a fancy but somewhat indistinguishable replacement for the word technology.

Every breathless headline about AI felt like a tech industry sales hype pitch dressed up as valuable information. The demos were impressive in a parlor-trick kind of way, but the outputs were hollow. I perceived the first iterations of an emerging technology as confident-sounding nonsense that had clearly never been stress-tested against reality. The word “revolutionary” got thrown around so freely it lost all meaning. I filed AI alongside the metaverse, “crypto,” and NFTs: another Silicon Valley fever dream burning through billions in venture capital before quietly disappearing.

I was wrong. And I think a lot of people who share my former skepticism are going to have to reckon with that same conclusion sooner than they expect. The techno-optimists are right.

Techno-optimism is the view that technological progress, allowed to develop and scale freely, is a net positive force for human civilization. In a sense, it is a defense of capitalism. It is the belief that innovation solves more problems than it creates and that the right response to a powerful new tool like AI is to master it, not fear it. It is a distinctly American disposition, and for a while, I had talked myself out of it. The term has roots in the post World War II world, but in its modern, prominent form is most associated with venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. In October 2023, Andreessen posted an essay called "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto," which argued that technological advancement is the primary driver of human progress and well-being. I highly recommend reading Andreessen’s take on the subjective matter with an open mind.

What kept me (and keeps many critics) in the skeptic camp was a poor mindset, one that is best captured by a word that has become something of a cultural shorthand: slop. The term refers to the low-quality, derivative content that AI systems can generate at infinite, industrial scale. You’ve seen the generic blog posts, the low quality robotic copy, and the AI generated imagery and videos. The criticism isn’t entirely wrong. Slop exists. It is genuinely a problem for certain corners of the internet.

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But “slop” has become a rhetorical bludgeon. It’s become a way to dismiss an entire technological revolution by pointing at its worst outputs. It’s something of a mind trick to blackpill the public, and it serves as a smokescreen for the countless applications that are changing the world with AI. It’s the equivalent of judging the automobile by the first car accidents. Or judging a company like SpaceX merely by its early rocket failures. Every transformative technology frequently produces lackluster outputs in its emerging stages. The question worth asking isn’t whether AI can be used badly, but whether it can be used well. And increasingly, the answer is an unambiguous yes.

The turning point for me wasn’t a single moment. As an entrepreneur, I started incorporating AI into my actual workflow, not as a “slop” novelty, but as a serious instrument. I learned how to prompt more and more effectively. I read the books and took the time to piece together an understanding of how the technology works. Research that once took hours, or even days, began taking minutes. Design work that required thousand of dollars, dozens of human contract hours, and countless iterations came back sharper and infinitely faster. Strategic problems I’d normally think about in isolation became collaborative exercises with AI copilots. AI hasn’t replaced my judgment, and using it in any kind of fashion would be a tremendously detrimental exercise. Instead, it has acted as a tool to amplify by output. And as I continue to learn more about the fundamental principles of these instruments, along with the technological progress they are making, they will become more and more useful over time.

That distinction matters enormously and gets lost in the public debate. AI is not a replacement for human intelligence. Instead, it is a force multiplier for it. The thoughtful entrepreneur who adopts it doesn’t become redundant. AI becomes something of his superpower, and he becomes dramatically more capable than the competitor who refuses to put the work in to master a novel technology. The same logic extends to lawyers, doctors, analysts, researchers, and virtually every knowledge worker in between. We are not watching machines displace human ambition. As Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang explained at a recent conference: “You won’t lose your job to AI. You will lose your job to somebody who uses AI” better than you do.

The upheavel is real, but so is the opportunity.

None of this means the transition from 0 to 1 when integrating a revolutionary technology will be painless. It won’t be. AI is going to restructure entire industries, and some of that restructuring will be genuinely disruptive for the people caught in its path. Certain jobs will shrink. Certain business models built on labor-intensive processes will be exposed as obsolete. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest. I’m sure it sucked when automobiles took market share from the horse carriage business, and when machine computers took over from people who manually computed calculations.

But disruption and destruction are not synonyms. The industrial revolution, after all, did not impoverish humanity, it built the modern world. The internet did not hollow out commerce, it reinvented it on a scale no one anticipated. In every comparable technological wave, the people who bet against the technology eventually lost, and the people who learned to use it eventually won. There is no reason to believe AI will be any different. History tells us that the AI Doomers — those who believe AI will destroy the job market and pose an existential threat to humanity — are wrong.

AI skepticism is a first world luxury that America cannot afford. China is not debating whether artificial intelligence is overhyped. Beijing is not writing think pieces about slop (unless as a means to empower leftist degrowthers in the United States). It is pouring massive state resources into AI development with a strategic clarity and urgency. The country that dominates AI will dominate our 21st century geopolitical competition, which extend to the economy, our military, intelligence apparatus, and capacity to project influence globally. American leadership in this technology is not guaranteed. It has to be built, defended, and reinforced by a culture that takes the tools seriously rather than sneering at them.

Let me be direct about something that I suspect resonates with a lot of conservatives and libertarians who share my journey: many of the people who built this technology hold worldviews I find deeply troubling. Much of the AI industry's leadership class is a peculiar ideological cocktail, full of progressive politics and transhumanist philosophy. Some of its most prominent figures speak openly with reckless abandon about accelerating toward a future that nobody elected them to engineer. But consider another historical parallel. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, wanted to hand nuclear technology over to the United Nations. He believed the weapon he helped build should be governed by an internationalist body with the power to constrain American sovereignty. His politics were, to put it charitably, not conservative. And yet the bomb he built, under the direction of a government that ultimately rejected his internationalist vision, deterred Soviet aggression and underwrote seven decades of American strategic dominance. The lesson is straightforward: you do not have to share an inventor's ideology to recognize the value of his invention.

Skepticism and suspicion is primarily useful when it remains open to evidence, and the evidence on AI’s productive potential is mounting fast. The choice in front of us isn’t between AI and some better, safer alternative. It’s between embracing a tool that rewards human initiative and ceding that advantage to those with fewer hesitations. The AI genie isn’t going back into the bottle. For entrepreneurs, for workers, for America as a whole, the path forward isn’t to complain about the slop. It’s to find the good and build something better with what we now have.

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When The Dossier published its initial investigations into the far-left Effective Altruism (EA) machine behind the so-called “AI safety” movement — first exposing how EA operatives built a fake grassroots organization called Humans First to infiltrate the right, and then tracing how that same dark money network used child safety as a Trojan horse to push California-model regulation into red state legislatures — the response was swift and significant.

White House AI czar David Sacks shared our investigation on X, calling Humans First “a censorship power play” — a post that was viewed over 21 million times. Within hours, Elon Musk amplified the post, calling the information gathered from the piece “troubling.” The stories were no longer contained to Substack. They quickly became center of the national conversation about AI governance.

Marc Andreessen, whose views on AI regulation have been consistent and unambiguous (he has called a 50-state patchwork “a startup killer” and argued that federal AI legislation is “the biggest issue for Little Tech”) has been among the most visible voices aligned with the concerns our reporting raised. Some of the nation’s top AI policy minds and operators had now formally identified the network The Dossier exposed as a significant issue for the American people.

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NBC News, which has never been accused of sympathy toward this publication, was forced to write about our work. Their piece acknowledged the core of what we reported: that Humans First was founded by staffers at the Center for AI Safety, an EA organization that has received more than $12 million from leftist billionaire Dustin Moskovitz’s Coefficient Giving, and that the group was constructed to make EA-aligned AI safety priorities more palatable to conservative audiences.

That NBC, a network institutionally hostile to the Trump administration and skeptical of any reporting that complicates the left’s preferred narratives, felt compelled to engage with our investigation is itself a data point. When reporting is too well-sourced to ignore, even the legacy press has to acknowledge it exists.

Their framing, predictably, was sympathetic to Humans First. In part, it’s because the reporter on the byline has his salary paid for by an EA-adjacent institution, called the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.

Our reporting was accurate and precise. The documents, the funding trails, the incorporation records, the organizational genealogies, all of it holds up to scrutiny, which is why the facts went unchallenged by NBC. None of it has been disputed on the merits.

The reaction to our reporting confirms the central premise of both pieces. The Effective Altruism network built Humans First precisely because they understood that the EA brand is politically toxic in MAGA America. The moment Sacks and Musk identified Humans First as an influence operation, the group’s architects retreated further into the background.

The federal and state-level EA shadow campaigns continue. The dark money keeps flowing. The architecture we described is only ramping up further.

So of course, our investigation is not finished. The two-part series we published last week was a foundation for more. There are more funding connections to trace, more organizational relationships to map, and more legislators and influencers who have been recruited into this network without understanding who is behind it. We will keep pulling on these threads.

Reporting of this kind takes time and resources. If you want The Dossier to keep doing this work, the most direct way to support it is with a paid subscription. Independent journalism that can’t be pressured by outside forces or institutional donors is only possible because of readers who invest in it directly. We are grateful to everyone who already has, and we ask those who haven’t to consider it now.

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Today’s article is sponsored by Ground News:

Joe Kent, who was serving as the Trump Administration’s counterterrorism director before abruptly resigning this week, sprinted to Tucker Carlson’s show the day after he left his post to argue that Iran was never really weeks away from a nuclear weapon. His key evidence? A “longstanding religious fatwa” prohibiting the Islamic Republic from developing one.

You can watch the clip here some 30 mins into the show:

There’s one small problem with Kent’s analysis: that fatwa doesn’t exist, and it never did. What does exist is one of the most cynically effective pieces of Iranian propaganda ever deployed against the West, and the fact that American officials and media figures are still citing it in 2026 is a testament to just how badly our foreign policy establishment has failed at basic due diligence on Iran.

Let’s start with the fundamental issue. There is no formal text of the fatwa that has ever been made publicly available. What eventually became something of a fraudulent diplomatic staple, cited by everyone from Barack Obama to European negotiators during the JCPOA talks, was in reality a mere paragraph of the late Ayatollah Khamenei’s message to the first International Conference on Nuclear Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, which Tehran hosted in 2010.

The segment of the message marketed by the Iranian diplomatic missions as a “fatwa” reads: “We believe that adding to nuclear weapons and other types of weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical weapons and biological weapons, are a serious threat to humanity. The Iranian nation, which itself is a victim of the use of chemical weapons, feels more than other nations the danger of the production and accumulation of such weapons and is ready to put all its resources in the way of dealing with it. We consider the use of these weapons to be haram (forbidden), and the effort to protect mankind from this great disaster is everyone’s duty.”

Today’s roundup is sponsored by Ground News, which is basically “show your work” for the news. Instead of doomscrolling one outlet at a time, Ground News lets you pull up a story and instantly see who’s covering it across the spectrum, how the coverage breaks left/center/right, and what the blind spots are.

That’s why I use Ground News. It’s an independent media literacy tool — not a publisher, not a news source — that aggregates stories from over 50,000 outlets worldwide and shows you who owns each one. When you can see that an outlet pushing a particular narrative is bankrolled by a major government contractor, a pharmaceutical giant, or a billionaire with a political agenda, you start reading very differently.

Ground News doesn’t tell you what to think. It shows you who’s funding the people trying to. Today they’re offering readers of the Dossier to get 40% off the Vantage plan so you can start seeing what’s behind the headlines.

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That’s it. A conference statement. Typically, heads of state issue statements or messages to conferences, not fatwas. Yet this single paragraph, in which Khamenei expressed a general opinion that weapons of mass destruction were “haram,” was packaged, branded, and sold to Western governments as a binding religious prohibition. Framing this opinion as a fatwa aimed to alleviate international pressure by invoking religious beliefs that would persuade a global audience of its credibility.

The timing alone is revealing. Between 2006 and 2010, six UN Security Council sanctions resolutions targeting Tehran’s nuclear program were enacted, and Khamenei’s purported fatwa was released squarely amid this backdrop. It wasn’t a sincere religious ruling, but a strategic maneuver.

Even some Tehran officials have admitted as much. Perhaps the clearest proof that the “fatwa” was always a political instrument rather than a genuine religious constraint is how openly Iranian officials have discussed discarding it whenever convenient.

In a January 2024 interview, former Iranian diplomat and IRGC brigadier-general Amir Mousavi stated flatly that “a fatwa is not permanent, according to Jaafari Shia jurisprudence” and that “if the Americans and Zionists act in a dangerous manner, the fatwa might be changed.” This wasn’t some rogue statement. His comment confirms that Tehran’s national security decisionmaking is dictated by the principle of “regime expediency.”

And as recently as February 2025, IRGC commanders were actively declaring that Khamenei could at any moment rescind the supposed fatwa on nuclear weapons altogether.

Even if it were real, it wouldn’t matter.

There is one final consideration that renders the entire debate essentially moot, and it is a point that Kent and others who traffic in this narrative studiously avoid. Even assuming, against all evidence, that a genuine and binding fatwa existed, it would provide cold comfort against a regime whose Shia theological framework explicitly permits the practice of taqiyya, or the use of deliberate deception to protect and advance Islamic interests against enemies. When your adversary’s own doctrinal tradition enshrines strategic deception as a legitimate tool of statecraft, citing their public religious statements as a reliable constraint on behavior is not strategic analysis, to put it mildly.

The nuclear fatwa narrative was a sophisticated information operation executed by Tehran and its allies, and it was absorbed wholesale by Western governments and analysts desperate to believe that diplomacy was working. It provided cover for Iran to advance its nuclear capabilities while maintaining the appearance of religious restraint. Tracking Khamenei’s statements over two decades demonstrates he never formally issued a fatwa against building a nuclear weapon, and only tentatively and revocably spoke against the use of weapons of mass destruction.

Joe Kent went on one of the most-watched political programs in America and repeated Iranian regime talking points as if they were established fact. The country may indeed be lucky he resigned. It is considerably less lucky that the foreign policy worldview he represents remains alive and well in the discourse.

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The playbook is demonstrating a consistent pattern in states across America: find Republican officials and legislators who are skeptical of AI, frame the regulation around children, commission polling, hire local Republican credibility, and move fast before the funding sources become the story.

The network running this strategy was built with dark money, staffed by leftist ideologue operatives who had previously been connected to the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, and has been executing across red states simultaneously, with the explicit goal of creating a regulatory patchwork that entrenches these censors at the top of the AI governance framework.

Effective Altruism has always been, at its core, a power acquisition strategy dressed in utilitarian language. These forces have spent years identifying the institutions and regulatory levers that control the most consequential decisions, and systematically placing EA-aligned personnel, funding, and ideas inside them before anyone notices the ideological uniformity. The movement doesn't announce itself as a political faction. Instead, it announces itself as a moral framework, which is a far more effective entry credential into government offices, university fellowships, and political coalitions than any party affiliation could ever be.

On January 14, a organization called Encode AI cut a $10,000 check to the campaign of Doug Fiefia, a freshman Republican state representative from Herriman, Utah. Five days later, Fiefia introduced HB 286, the Artificial Intelligence Transparency Act. The timing was not a coincidence.

What followed was a textbook influence operation, bipartisan in appearance, but nonetheless, nearly a carbon copy of California-style hyper regulatory activism into one of the reddest legislatures in America. It only failed because the White House pushed back forcefully, but this dark money network continues to infiltrate statehouses across America with seemingly infinite funding, with the mission to produce AI regulatory bills that deliver power and influence back to their network.

HB 286 looked, on its face, like exactly what its sponsors said it was: a child safety measure. It would require large AI developers to publish safety plans, protect child users, and provide whistleblower protections for employees who report safety concerns. Actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt flew to Salt Lake City to testify in favor of it. Parents testified about chatbots that had groomed and psychologically damaged their children. The polling was overwhelming, and it garnered 91% Republican support, according to numbers commissioned and released by the Secure AI Project, one of HB 286’s primary backers.

Gordon-Levitt is not merely a sympathetic celebrity who wandered into a Utah hearing. He has been an active EA movement participant since at least 2017, when he spoke at EA Global in San Francisco alongside EA co-founder Will MacAskill. His wife, Tasha McCauley, has sat on the board of Effective Ventures, the organization that directly funds the Center for Effective Altruism. The actor testifying on behalf of children in Salt Lake City was, in other words, part of the same network that funded the operation that put him there.

Look closer at the bill’s language, however, and the child safety framing starts to look like mere window dressing. HB 286 went well beyond merely “protecting children,” as it explicitly targeted “frontier developers,” which are companies with over $500 million in annual revenue training AI models above a specific computational threshold. That is not a child safety statute. It is a compliance framework aimed at a narrow class of large AI companies. And it was modeled almost word-for-word on a controversial piece of legislation called California’s SB 53, which AI heavyweight Anthropic supported while simultaneously lobbying against the Trump administration’s federal preemption effort. The bill’s architecture served Anthropic’s competitive and regulatory interests. The child safety framing served Encode AI’s lobbying interests in Utah.

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Encode AI is not a neutral advocacy group. It receives funding from the Future of Life Institute, which is itself funded through the Effective Altruism (EA) donor network anchored by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to Democrats, and reportedly the single largest funder of the Biden-Harris Super PAC apparatus.

Speaking of “child safety,” Moskovitz, like many prominent EAs, has no children, according to reports. In EA circles, children are often considered a utilitarian calculation and nothing more. Does Dustin Moskovitz really love children so much that he’s spending his fortune to “protect” them from AI? Or perhaps, are the EAs and their offshoot ideologues bamboozling legislators by speaking to their values systems, while propagandizing the public to secure power because they believe that the ends justify the means?

This operation did not begin in Salt Lake City. As The Dossier reported this week, the same EA-funded machine is running a parallel influence campaign at the national level through an organization called Humans First, which was incorporated by two staffers at the Center for AI Safety, an organization that has received more than $12 million from Moskovitz’s Coefficient Giving, and engineered to look like a populist uprising. Its architects recruited Joe Allen, a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein publicist Steve Bannon, as a co-founder, built a clean website, a town hall tour, and a tagline: “a nonpartisan social movement that puts the future of AI in the hands of everyday people,” with no mention of who was funding any of it. The Utah operation is the state-level version of the same playbook: different faces, different framing, identical architecture. At the national level, the target was Bannon. In Utah, it was a freshman Republican legislator and a former House Speaker. The child safety framing in HB 286 and the populist branding of Humans First serve the same function, and that is to make a Moskovitz-funded regulatory agenda look like something it isn’t.

The Secure AI Project (SAIP), which co-sponsored the lobbying effort in Utah, is even more directly connected. Its CEO and cofounder, Nick Beckstead, spent seven years at Open Philanthropy, which is Moskovitz’s primary activist vehicle. It was recently rebranded as Coefficient Giving, likely given that the group was connected to FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried, and it needed a fresh paint job.

To provide Republican cover, SAIP hired Greg Curtis, the politically significant former Utah Republican House Speaker, to lobby on the bill’s behalf. It also commissioned favorable polling and handed the data to Encode, which then ran a massive campaign presenting opposition to HB 286 as an “attack on children.” By the time anyone asked who was funding the operation, the bill was already through committee.

The Trump Administration, which seeks to have the federal government in charge of regulating AI policy, weighed in on the matter.

On February 12, the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs sent a letter to Utah Senate Majority Leader Kirk Cullimore Jr. that was blunt to the point of remarkable: “We are categorically opposed to Utah HB 286 and view it as an unfixable bill that goes against the Administration’s AI Agenda.” Behind the scenes, White House officials held multiple conversations with Fiefia directly, urging him to stand down. The legislative session closed March 6. HB 286 died without a floor vote.

The significance of that sequence deserves emphasis. The first state the Trump administration had to fight to protect its AI agenda was not California, New York, or Colorado. It was Utah, which possesses a legislature where Republicans hold a supermajority, where Donald Trump won by 20 points in 2024, and where a Moskovitz-funded network had successfully recruited a Republican freshman, hired a former Republican House Speaker, mobilized parents, and moved a California-model AI bill to the edge of passage before federal intervention stopped it.

Utah was not an isolated operation. Nebraska’s LB 1083, nearly identical to HB 286, had both Encode AI and the Secure AI Project registered to lobby. Texas’s TRAIGA was signed by Governor Abbott with sixteen Republican senators defending it against White House preemption pressure. Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee have parallel legislation in various stages. This week, Sen Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) unveiled a new AI framework that has eerily similar language to the state efforts. However, The Dossier’s sources on Capitol Hill say it has little to no chance of passing.

The White House stopped the ideologues’ AI takeover gambit in Utah, yet this is quickly turning into independent state skirmishes on dozens of fronts. How many states will the dark money network get to before the public even realizes the true motives of the individuals and groups behind these AI bills?

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If you want to regulate what AI systems can say and do, don't send a progressive to make the case while President Trump is in power. Build a "bipartisan movement," recruit a War Room correspondent as co-founder, get Steve Bannon and Glenn Beck to sign the founding document, and let the bipartisan optics do the work.

But Humans First, the very vehicle for this shadow campaign, is not a grassroots uprising against the AI behemoth. It is a censorship vehicle, constructed by the Effective Altruist (EA) left and disguised as something liberty loving Americans could believe in.

When Oliver Zhang and Arunim Agarwal incorporated Humans First in California several months ago, they did not announce it as the latest project of the Effective Altruist “AI safety” ecosystem, even though that is precisely what it was, The Dossier has found.

They did not advertise their day jobs at the Center for AI Safety, an EA organization that has received more than $12 million from leftist billionaire and Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz’s Coefficient Giving and exists to advance the proposition that artificial intelligence poses existential risks requiring urgent government intervention (and political censorship). They did not mention that two months later they would incorporate a companion lobbying entity to push those same priorities through legislative channels. What they built instead was a clean website, a town hall tour, and a tagline: a “nonpartisan social movement that puts the future of AI in the hands of everyday people.”

Unfortunately, all of it is astroturf.

The Effective Altruist movement has a structural problem when it comes to conservative America. Its donor class is all Bay Area progressives. Its flagship organizations are institutionally associated with the Big Tech left. Its policy agenda, which calls for sweeping AI regulation and content governance, reads to most conservatives as exactly what it is: a censorship power play dressed up in safety language. To move that agenda through a political environment where one half of the electorate regards EA institutions with deep suspicion, the movement needed a vehicle that didn’t look like it came from them.

Humans First is that vehicle. Its genius lies not in its ideas, but in its packaging. Populist aesthetics. Grassroots framing. A social media presence carefully cultivated to project civic energy rather than institutional backing. Before the current rebrand, Humans First’s Instagram account was almost entirely comprised of staffers at EA-aligned organizations. The everyday people the movement claims to represent were largely absent. At the beginning, the architects of the movement were very much present. Now they operate in the shadows as they seek to impose their will in D.C. and in statehouses across America.

Humans First claims a mission to give everyday Americans a voice in AI policy, push for “human-first” AI legislation (e.g., state-level AI Bill of Rights bills), hold town halls, and counter Big AI/corporate influence. It’s structured as a coalition with bipartisan elements.

Though notably absent on the Human First webpage are the EAs who actually founded the organization.

The recruitment of Joe Allen, a close associate of War Room host Steve Bannon, as a cofounder of the group, was where the operation revealed its sophistication.

Allen is not merely a conservative validator slapped onto an existing organization for optics. He is a co-founder (though Humans First has now rebranded him as a senior fellow), a status he arrived at in collaboration with the Future of Life Institute, another EA-funded entity. According to reporting in The Verge, Max Tegmark, a prominent EA leader, invited Allen to a private confab in Manhattan, then to a January 2026 conference at a New Orleans Marriott where roughly 90 political and civic leaders were convened to produce what would become the “Pro-Human AI Declaration.” The document that emerged from those carefully engineered gatherings carried signatures from Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck, the AFL-CIO, and the Progressive Democrats of America.

Unlike Allen, Beck and Bannon were not publicly recruited into an organizational role. They are signatories, not co-founders. Their AI skepticism might be fairly perceived as genuine, rooted in years of commentary on transhumanism and civilizational risk involving Silicon Valley elites having power over the average American. Yet they arrived at doomer-adjacent conclusions through a distinctly conservative and biblical lens. The coalition’s architects didn’t build these views. They harvested them. And Bannon, unlike Beck, is boosting Humans First through his socials, which leads to questions about shadowy and undisclosed influence operations.

Strip away the populist branding and the cross-partisan spectacle, and what remains is a regulatory agenda that the EA ecosystem has been advancing for years: constrain AI development (and lose the AI race to China), impose content governance standards, and entrench the assumption that AI outputs require institutional oversight to “prevent harm.” When EA-aligned organizations describe “harmful” AI content, the definition has historically tracked in one direction. The safety standards they are now pushing, through Humans First’s ongoing advocacy, would be written, interpreted, and enforced by institutions with no meaningful conservative or even libertarian representation.

Now, conservative legislators and audiences are being asked to support a regulatory framework whose implementation will be controlled entirely by the people who designed the operation that recruited them.

When the EAs wants to regulate speech, they have learned not to call it censorship. They call it safety. And in the AI era, “safety” has become the most elastic word in Washington. It’s spacious enough to mean child protection one moment and the suppression of politically inconvenient outputs the next. Yet the Effective Altruism (EA)-funded machine now building a cross-partisan AI governance coalition in D.C. isn’t primarily concerned with keeping children safe online. It is concerned with controlling what AI systems are permitted to say, think, and produce. For that effort, the EAs have recruited some of the right’s most recognizable voices to help make that agenda look like common sense.

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