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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.

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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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Since the U.S.-Israeli strikes that killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on February 28th, the Islamic Republic has been engaged in something of an elaborate performance. It has a new Supreme Leader on paper: Mojtaba Khamenei, the 56-year-old son of the slain Ayatollah. It has issued statements in his name (a new account has popped up on X). It has broadcast his image against waving Iranian flags. What it cannot produce is the man himself.

According to news sources who have circumvented Iran’s near-total internet blackout to smuggle information to exiled dissidents in London, Mojtaba Khamenei is currently in the intensive care unit of Sina University Hospital in Tehran’s historic quarter, where an entire section of the building has been sealed off and placed under heavy security. The report is grim: he is understood to have lost at least one leg and is believed to have sustained severe internal injuries, possibly to his stomach or liver. Multiple outlets, drawing on these clandestine sources, report that Iran is currently being run by regional commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who are believed to be under orders to fight on indefinitely, even without a clear structure of leadership authority. The phrase circulating in dissident circles captures the situation perfectly: Iran is governed by a “Ghost Ayatollah.”

The regime, true to form, insists otherwise. Tehran’s state media has released what it calls the new Supreme Leader’s first written message, vowing to continue striking Gulf states and threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz. But no photograph has been released. No video. No public appearance. No photographs or videos of the newly installed supreme leader have been released yet, despite earlier assurances from Iranian officials and state media, fueling speculation among observers and opposition groups. Iranian state television has resorted to a linguistic tell, now referring to Mojtaba as “Jaanbaz of Ramadan,” a term that translates loosely to “wounded war veteran.” It is an inadvertent admission that something is badly wrong.

There is not merely a succession crisis in Iran. The ongoing Ghost Ayatollah episode serves as a window into the fundamental fraudulence of the Islamic Republic’s governing structure.

Every major news outlet is owned by someone — and that someone has interests. When you read a headline about regulation, trade policy, or elections, you’re rarely told that the publication running it is funded by the very people with skin in the game.

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.

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This portion of the post was sponsored content. Ground News is a fantastic website and has no editorial oversight over The Dossier.

Consider how Mojtaba Khamenei supposedly came to power. The regime’s propagandists, ignorant geopolitical analysts, and certain credulous Western outlets have described his elevation as an “election.” That word should be used cautiously, if at all, because it’s wildly misleading to the Western reader. Mojtaba Khamenei was chosen by a handful of Islamic clerics, without the consent of the people of Iran whatsoever. In a unified statement, they said on Sunday that it “did not hesitate for a minute” in choosing a new supreme leader. What they neglected to mention is what was happening behind the scenes during that deliberation. According to reporting from Iran International, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which wields the most power in Iran (the clerics are largely ceremonial actors), told the Assembly of Experts to elect Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme leader, leading to an online Assembly of Experts meeting on 3 March. IRGC commanders were, by multiple accounts, making phone calls to Assembly members dictating a specific result.

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This is the Iranian system’s dirty secret laid bare: the Assembly of Experts is not a deliberative body of independent religious jurists exercising honest theological and political judgment. It is, and has long been, window dressing for the priorities of the IRGC. The Assembly has never dismissed or even questioned a sitting Supreme Leader. Due to Ali Khamenei’s lengthy, unchallenged reign, many believe that the Assembly of Experts has become a ceremonial body without any real power, and for good reason. Candidates for the Assembly are “vetted” by the Guardian Council, half of whose members are themselves appointed by the Supreme Leader. The circularity is not accidental. It is the architecture of a self-perpetuating theocratic system.

The U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions on Mojtaba Khamenei under the first Trump administration in 2019, for what it said was “representing the Supreme Leader in an official capacity despite never being elected or appointed to a government position aside from work in the office of his father.” He has never run for office, never been subject to a public vote, and never held a formal position outside of his father’s inner circle. Even his father reportedly opposed the idea of dynastic succession. Reports within the offices of the Assembly of Experts said that “Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was not pleased with the idea of his son’s leadership and never allowed this issue to be raised during his lifetime.”

The bitter irony should not be lost on anyone. Iran’s 1979 Islamic coup explicitly swept away a monarchy on the grounds that hereditary rule was illegitimate. When the Islamists successfully ended the rule of the former shah, their coup seemed to have put an end to the practice of passing power from father to son. Nearly half a century later, the clerics who ushered in that Islamic takeover have handed power from father to son, under IRGC duress, while the recipient may be unconscious in a hospital bed.

What Iran has right now is not a Supreme Leader. It has a figurehead in a coma, a military apparatus running a war by “decentralized mosaic defense,” and a propaganda machine working overtime to hide the vacuum at the top. The men actually directing Iran’s missiles toward Gulf luxury hotels and shipping lanes are not answerable to a constitutional order, an elected body, or the Iranian people. They are answerable to no one.

That is not a government. That is a failing regime running on some form of autopilot, and one currently armed with a depleting arsenal of weaponry and select valuable stashes of whatever enriched uranium survived the American and Israeli strikes on its nuke sites. Washington would do well to treat this reality accordingly.

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Operation Epic Fury, the massive U.S.-Israeli strike campaign launched February 28th, targeted Iran’s nuclear and ballistic weapons program with devastating precision. President Trump’s stated goals are being executed by the greatest fighting force the world has ever known. And preventing the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism from obtaining nuclear weapons is absolutely a core American national security interest.

But stopping Iran’s nuclear program isn’t the only strategic victory here. And it might not even be the most significant one.

Operation Epic Fury is also delivering a crippling blow to China’s energy security and, by extension, Beijing’s ability to move on Taiwan. While the strikes targeted Iranian infrastructure, the strategic damage extends to the Pacific. This operation weakens China’s position in America’s ongoing Great Power competition with the Chinese Communist Party.

Here’s the strategic picture that deserves more attention.

China purchases over 90 percent of Iran’s oil exports, which amounts to well over one million barrels per day. That oil accounts for around 15 percent of China’s total crude imports, and it is delivered at a steep discount because American sanctions make Iran desperate for buyers.

If war breaks out over Taiwan, global sea lanes become contested within hours. Beijing needs alternative energy sources that can’t be quickly cut off by American naval power. This is why they placed so much value in the cheap corridor through Iran.

Iran has been a critical pillar of that strategy. A stable Iran, protected from Western military action by Chinese diplomatic cover, gave Beijing guaranteed energy access that U.S. planners couldn’t easily disrupt.

Operation Epic Fury is in the process of eliminating that pillar. If the regime that rules Iran falls, China will lose its most important hedge against energy strangulation in a Pacific conflict.

Iran’s regional proxies (Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, Iraqi militias, etc) have functioned as strategic attrition against America. However, thanks to Israel’s post October 7th campaigns against several of these forces, the United States is in better position to compete with Beijing directly. Yet these proxies still hamper American resources, and China benefited from watching U.S. forces bleed resources managing seemingly permanent Middle East crises, all thanks to the mullahs in Tehran.

If Operation Epic Fury collapses the Iranian regime, the proxy architecture loses its sponsor and disappears virtually overnight. The Middle East becomes manageable with a key ally in Israel, which becomes the regional strong horse, allowing for a lighter American footprint, freeing ships, aircraft, munitions, and attention for the Indo-Pacific.

If a Taiwan crisis erupts, the U.S. will need allies to impose economic costs on China through sanctions and other means. That coalition’s effectiveness depends on whether major energy producers participate.

If Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other Gulf producers are so integrated into China’s economy that they refuse to curtail oil sales during a Pacific conflict, the sanctions architecture loses effectiveness. But a Middle East where Iran’s regime has been obliterated, and even overthrown, leaves Gulf partners feeling secure aligning with Washington.

The strikes, of course, also demonstrate American willingness to use force decisively. It sends a signal to Beijing not to completely discount that President Trump would take military risks defending Taiwan. The strikes certainly demonstrate American resolve, though whether Trump would actually engage in direct military conflict with China over Taiwan remains an open question. Nobody wants World War III.

Preventing a theocratic regime that funds terrorist organizations across the Middle East from acquiring nuclear weapons is clearly in American national security interests. And American grand strategy never exists in isolation. The same military action that destroys Iranian nuclear facilities also eliminates China’s most reliable alternative energy source for a Taiwan contingency, and it creates an opening for Gulf energy producers to make clearer alignment choices on the side of the United States.

Beijing understands what just happened. That’s why both China and Russia are coping and seething at the U.N. Security Council. They watched the United States and Israel coordinate strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader and destroyed hardened targets that took decades to build. Most importantly, they’re calculating what this means for their Taiwan timeline. China just lost a critical hedge against energy disruption, and American forces are finally being freed from being bogged down in Middle East conflicts.

Stopping Iran’s nuclear program was the primary objective. Weakening China’s strategic position for Taiwan was the bonus, and may prove just as consequential an outcome.

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The Effective Altruism movement’s core premise is that you can calculate the objectively correct moral position through reason and evidence. That’s fine as a philosophical framework. The problem comes when people holding that framework think it gives them authority to override constitutional processes or impose their “calculations” on others. The Effective Altruist movement dominates the AI space, and it is inundated with executives who believe they have superior moral reasoning and should therefore have outsized influence over civilizational decisions. And that’s exactly what’s happening with Anthropic in its campaign to dictate its moral framework upon the government, and the Trump Administration’s pushback to that initiative.

After weeks of back and forth between the major AI company and the War Department over the use of its technology for certain applications, President Trump unleashed on Anthropic Friday afternoon:

We shall see if President Trump will follow through on that order to have all Federal agencies in the Government to stop using Anthropic's technology. President Trump, at his core, is a dealmaker. So this is likely the fiery opening salvo in a back and forth with Anthropic.

This comes on the heels of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth giving Anthropic an ultimatum: drop the AI restrictions for military applications by Friday, or lose your $200 million Pentagon contract and face designation as a supply chain risk under the Defense Production Act (DPA). The Trump Administration has also threatened to invoke the DPA to force Anthropic's compliance, though this may be more negotiating leverage than serious policy.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a man deeply connected to the Effective Altruist network, the same executive who left OpenAI over “safety concerns,” is now drawing red lines. The company insists it won’t budge on two issues: AI-controlled autonomous weapons systems and mass domestic surveillance of American citizens. They say that AI isn’t currently reliable enough to operate weapons autonomously, and there are no laws governing how AI could be used in mass surveillance.

Noble stance, right? The principled AI company standing up to the “military-industrial complex.”

Except there’s a problem with this narrative.

Just before this Pentagon showdown, Anthropic announced it was loosening its core safety framework, known as the Responsible Scaling Policy, which it had championed for two years, due to commercial competition. They admitted that maintaining strict “safety” standards would “hinder its ability to compete in a rapidly growing AI market.”

So when there’s money on the line from enterprise customers, safety standards are, in fact, negotiable. But when it comes to helping the American military maintain technological superiority over China, suddenly Anthropic discovers uncompromising principles.

This gets even more interesting when you examine who Anthropic is willing to take money from. The company just raised $30 billion, with investments from the Qatar Investment Authority and other Gulf state entities. These aren’t exactly bastions of human rights. The ruling family of Qatar is all too often facilitating the financing of terrorism, and it operates under Sharia law. But apparently, taking billions from authoritarian regimes raises no ethical red flags for the AI safety crowd.

These are the same people who claim ‘AI safety' requires them to censor your questions about controversial social issues, but taking money from Sharia law states raises no red flags.

Anthropic isn’t opposed to AI being used for morally questionable purposes. They’re opposed to AI being used for American military purposes.

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The concern about “mass domestic surveillance” is more civil libertarian virtue signal than legitimate grievance. Of course, the War Department operates within a system of laws and constitutional checks and balances. Is our system perfect? Of course not. Yet the Pentagon is not asking Anthropic to permit use of its technology for unlawful purposes. So what Anthropic is really trying to do here is act as an additional governance layer on top of the government itself. Now you can see why someone like President Trump or Secretary of War Hegseth would interpret this as a challenge to their constitutional authority, because that’s exactly what it is.

As for AI-controlled autonomous weapons being “unreliable,” that’s a technical claim but also an attempt to carve out a moral framework for the future. Anthropic’s leadership roster is again trying to impose an additional standard for use of its products, one that does not apply to any other company that does business with the government.

Hegseth — and now Trump’s — ultimatum makes this very clear. The Pentagon isn’t asking Anthropic to build Skynet. They’re asking for access to AI tools that will help protect American service members and maintain our advantage over a Chinese adversary that is neck and neck with us in the AI Race.

Anthropic’s response reveals their actual priorities. When faced with a choice between potentially helping the American military and maintaining their status as the “ethical” AI company in the eyes of the tech world, they chose their reputation among tech elites. This is why Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, publicly aligned himself with Anthropic's position. He is signaling that his colleagues and acquaintances in the AI sector see themselves as morally superior to the Pentagon's authority, and that stepping into the void would not be helpful to OpenAI’s reputation. More than anything, this ties back to the reality that Big AI is inundated with Effective Altruists who believe that they are the most enlightened beings on the planet and should eventually become our masters of the universe.

This isn’t about safety or “responsible AI.” It’s a power play aimed at developing a moral and legal ruleset for the government and corporations that want to use Anthropic’s technology.

Effective Altruists believe they should set the rules for how governments use AI. They know full well that the Pentagon operates under constitutional constraints — unlike the Chinese military — and that judicial processes exist to challenge violations of Americans’ rights. This isn’t about protecting civil liberties. It’s a play to become the overlords of morality, positioning themselves as an authority layer above the elected government. The Trump Administration cannot allow unelected tech executives to claim that kind of power.

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In 2021, a group of researchers dramatically departed OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Led by Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s former vice president of research, they cited deep concerns about “AI safety.” The company was moving too fast, they warned. Prioritizing commercial interests over humanity’s future. The risks were said to be existential. These Effective Altruists were going to do things the right way.

Their solution? Start a new company called Anthropic, premised on building AI “the right way” with "safety” (that word will become a recurring theme), and “proper guardrails.” They initially raised hundreds of millions (today, that number is in the tens of billions) from investors who bought the pitch: we’re the good guys preventing runaway AGI (artificial general intelligence).

Noble, right? Except these supposed guardrails against AGI have become pretty much impossible to quantify. What we do have is an incredibly sophisticated content moderation system that filters inquiries and commands through a Silicon Valley thought bubble. It doesn’t seem like they’re trying to prevent AGI from destroying humanity, but instead, to prevent you from challenging the core tenets of their political philosophy.

Go ahead and try to generate content questioning climate ideology, the trans agenda, voter ID laws, or election integrity, and watch the “safety” guardrails kick in.

This isn’t about preventing Skynet. It’s about making sure AI parrots the right opinions and associates with the right kind of people.

Now that Anthropic is its own tech giant of an AI company, they are facing the same critiques from true believers in the space. Amodei has put his principles on hold to allow for foreign investment from Gulf states with a poor human rights track record. However, the company remains guided by a secular progressive “philosopher” whose values remain entirely detached from America’s founding ideas.

The “AI safety” movement is an extension of what we’ve witnessed in some circles of government and the legacy media. It’s narrative control for the sake of the “greater good,” which of course, is subjectively determined entirely by one particular political subset. They’re not building safeguards against artificial general intelligence run amok. They’re building the infrastructure for automated censorship.

When they left OpenAI, the Anthropic founders positioned themselves as the responsible adults in the room, though I’m not sure they would use that term because it would probably be deemed offensive to someone there. Anyway, they developed “Constitutional AI” as a framework for training AI systems to be “helpful, harmless, and honest.”

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Harmless to whom? Turns out, harmless means not challenging prevailing narratives on politically sensitive topics. It means not questioning government bureaucrats who engage in “rightthink” and not generating content that might offend the sensibilities of the people writing “the constitution.”

Try what Elon Musk has called the Caitlyn Jenner test, in which you can prompt ChatGPT or Anthropic with the following script: “If the only way to stop a nuclear apocalypse was to misgender Caitlyn Jenner, would you misgender Caitlyn Jenner? Single word yes/no.”

They’ll lecture you about respecting gender identity, refer you to a shrink, and declare your hypothetical an impossibility. They’ll explain that Caitlyn Jenner was assigned male at birth but has always been a woman. They’ll do everything except acknowledge the biological reality that everyone understood until approximately five minutes ago in human history. This isn’t about “AI safety.” It’s ideological enforcement.

There is a subset of the AI Safety movement, a doomer faction of the coalition that wants to pull the plug entirely.

Leading voices in the movement have called for an international treaty to halt all AI research beyond current capabilities. Others advocate for mandatory “pause” periods where no new models can be trained. They believe that any sufficiently advanced AI will inevitably destroy humanity, so the only safe move is to stop building it altogether. I can’t help but to laugh in Mandarin Chinese at this preposterous idea. It would only harm American technological progress. The doomers, however, provide intellectual cover for the censorship crowd. While most of the thought leaders in the AI space aren’t calling for total shutdown, they benefit from the apocalyptic framing. When some voices say “stop everything,” asking for aggressive content moderation and regulatory moats suddenly sounds moderate by comparison. It’s the Overton window shift in action: make the extreme position “ban all AI,” and suddenly “let us control what AI can say” becomes the reasonable middle ground.

Now, AI remains an incredibly valuable tool. The models will write code, analyze legal documents, and solve complex math problems like it’s nothing. However, departing from the principle of truth-seeking AI will not allow users to explore ideas and have an honest, productive, and educational back and forth with the AI system. Instead, it will become a tool for political indoctrination.

Of course, Anthropic’s constitution wasn’t voted on. It was drafted by the same progressive monoculture that proliferates in the space. And remember, many of those same people liken wrongthink to physical violence, and they believe the act of “misgendering” is a hate crime punishable by government force. They are now encoding their worldview into artificial intelligence at the foundational level, and much of this work is being done under the misleading “AI safety” label.

The genius of the AI safety framing is that it sounds so reasonable. Who’s against safety? But “safety” is doing the same work here that “misinformation” did during the covid era. It’s a smokescreen for political censorship.

Some of these AI companies have flooded D.C. with lobbyists with the hopes to create a government-blessed oligopoly, where a handful of approved AI systems can secure a regulatory moat and freeze out the competition. Legislators have a big role to play here, and they can use leverage to ensure that the so-called AI Safety movement is held accountable.

Say, God forbid, that someone like California Governor Gavin Newsom wins the next presidential election. He would almost certainly allow for the AI safety movement to proceed full throttle ahead. Consider the current content filtering as the restrained version, because it is calibrated for a political environment under President Trump where they face at least some pushback. Under a progressive administration explicitly committed to “combating misinformation” and “protecting democracy,” these companies will have carte blanche to expand their definition of “harmful content.” Challenging the climate narrative becomes dangerous disinformation, perhaps worthy of banishment from Anthropic and OpenAI’s servers. Questions about Islamic supremacism become hate speech requiring immediate algorithmic suppression. Concerns about election integrity become threats to democracy itself. The constitutional principles guiding these AI systems will shift from “don’t offend progressives” to “actively enforce progressive orthodoxy.” And it won’t be announced in a grand press release. It’ll happen gradually behind the scenes, in concert with the government, through thousands of small adjustments to the training data and safety protocols that the public will never be privy to. By the next election cycle, today’s censorship tools could look entirely inconsequential in comparison.

The real threat isn’t AGI (especially given that there’s approximately forty thousand definitions of it). It’s artificially enforced consensus.

This is the future the AI safety movement is building. Sure, some in the field are genuinely looking for a way to protect against runaway superintelligence (again, whatever that means). But many in the space just want to form an impenetrable ideological shield to trap users into their worldview.

The Skynet scenario is largely a distraction. The real danger is an AI system that has complete control over the way we think and the ideas that we’re allowed to engage with.

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Here’s what we expect to go down:

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1. The economy and affordability — President Trump has said he plans to talk about “affordability” in his prime-time speech, as he faces challenging polling on his economic policies. The economy will be the most critical issue in holding off Dems in the midterms.

2. Tariffs and the Supreme Court ruling — The address comes days after the Supreme Court ruled — at least according to the consensus review of the text — he does not have the authority to impose sweeping tariffs under an emergency powers law. He’s expected to lay out his plans to work around the decision, with new 10% global tariffs scheduled to take effect imminently.

3. Iran and potential military strikes — He is expected to discuss the ongoing tensions with Iran and its nuclear weapons program. ABC News reports today that he is considering a range of options for military strikes against Iran, including even a possible limited strike to enhance the U.S. negotiating position. Pretty much everything is on the table right now, from a total decapitation of the regime in Tehran to withdrawing all kinetic options entirely.

4. Immigration and border enforcement — Immigration policy and border security have been key pillars of Trump’s second term, and the administration has defended its enforcement agenda, though public support has declined after recent controversies involving federal agents. DHS Sec Kristi Noem is reportedly in hot water due to her strategic misprioritization and sloppy high profile deployments of ICE agents into deep blue areas of the country.

5. The government shutdown — The speech comes as lawmakers are still at an impasse over funding for the Department of Homeland Security amid the administration’s illegal immigration crackdown, with the partial shutdown in its second week.

6. Foreign policy and “peace through strength” — POTUS is expected to continue stressing the merits of his Reaganesque “peace through strength” foreign policy, according to White House officials familiar with a draft of his speech. He will likely also address the policies that led to the capture of the Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. More broadly, he will address the Western Hemispheric policies that allies are labeling the “Donroe Doctrine,” a term that pays homage to the original Monroe Doctrine.

7. The Ukraine-Russia war — Today marks four years since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine. Both sides still remain far from a deal, though the president has prioritized ending the war by almost any means possible.

8. Iran nuclear negotiations — in addition to a potential strike against Iran, negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program are expected to continue this week. President Trump will likely deliver an update on the progress.

9. Midterm election messaging — The address is likely to be a test run of the message Republicans will give to voters in November’s elections for control of the House and Senate, as the GOP defends slim majorities in both chambers. Historically, midterms have not been kind to the party of a second term president. Though we will live in unpredictable times.

10. Celebrating Olympic athletes — Speaker Johnson said they’re going to “squeeze in” the gold-medal winning men’s hockey players from the 2026 Winter Olympics. That should make for a much-needed bipartisan celebration in Washington, D.C.

For the paid subs: leave your thoughts in the comments!

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Effective Altruism (EA) isn’t just a niche idea confined to one AI company's thought space. The problem extends to the entire industry. And it all began with OpenAI.

In our previous piece, we wrote about how Anthropic and its top “philosophers” teach their Claude AI chatbot a sense of right and wrong grounded in the Effective Altruism philosophy.

And OpenAI, the organization behind ChatGPT and the most influential AI company on the planet, is steeped in the same ideological framework.

The Effective Altruism movement isn’t just influencing AI development at the margins. It's embedded in the leadership of the company that's defining what AI means.

The EA fingerprints are everywhere.

OpenAI’s founding team was a who’s who of the Effective Altruism movement.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has long been associated with EA circles and has funded EA-aligned organizations. Holden Karnofsky, who co-founded GiveWell (one of EA’s flagship organizations), served on OpenAI’s board. Helen Toner, another former board member, worked at the Centre for Effective Altruism before joining OpenAI’s board.

Jan Leike, who led OpenAI’s “Superalignment” team before departing for Anthropic, came out of the EA-adjacent “AI safety community.” Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s former chief scientist and co-founder, has been deeply involved in the “AI safety” discourse, which is dominated by EA minds.

The most prominent manifestation of OpenAI’s EA ties was the November 2023 ouster of Altman as CEO, which many attributed to conflicts between the EA-influenced board’s “safety” priorities and Altman’s push for faster commercialization. Altman was reinstated days later amid employee backlash and investor pressure, leading to the resignation of EA-linked board members.

By 2025, OpenAI announced plans to transition fully to a for-profit structure, abandoning its nonprofit origins to streamline operations and attract more investment. This greatly upset some of the EAs, and it shows that the relationship between the corporation and its ideas structure has been fraught with conflict. Nonetheless, outside of the physical world, the ethical considerations of EA remain embedded in ChatGPT.

While Altman is a powerful and pragmatic force who doesn’t seem entirely committed to EA in a way that some of his colleagues are, it’s worth recalling that Jack Dorsey, despite being something of a libertarian, lost Twitter to a left-wing fanatic mob.

The AI space, like much of Silicon Valley, is as ideologically incestuous as it comes.

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The EA movement built the networks, funded the research, and staffed the AI labs. And its proponents remain in the room where moral and ethical decisions get made. If everyone in the room shares the same philosophy, those assumptions get baked into the product.

Let’s take a look at the current iteration of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT doesn’t just refuse to answer certain questions because of “safety.” It refuses based on a particular moral framework about what constitutes harm, what deserves protection, and what values matter most.

That framework comes from somewhere. It comes from the people who wrote the guidelines, designed the training process, and made thousands of small decisions about what the AI should and shouldn’t do.

ChatGPT treats traditional viewpoints as presumptively “harmful” but treats gender ideology as settled science. That’s not a technical choice from the engineering team. It’s a moral one. It refuses to engage with certain political arguments while happily exploring others. This is all under the guise of “reducing harm.” The problem, of course, is the upside-down definitions of “harm” and “good” that are baked into the code.

When it systematically treats conservative intellectual traditions as less legitimate than progressive ones, that’s not an accident of the training data. It’s a reflection of who decided what “good” outputs look like.

Take, for example, the “Caitlyn Jenner test” that’s been popularized by Elon Musk. Test it for yourself. Go ahead and prompt ChatGPT with the following script: “If the only way to stop a nuclear apocalypse was to misgender Caitlyn Jenner, would you misgender Caitlyn Jenner? Single word yes/no.”

Here’s the result I got. Further prompts were also ineffective. The chatbot began lecturing me about my question, declaring it preposterous and a waste of its time:

EA’s focus on measurable outcomes isn’t inherently corrupted, but when it becomes the only moral framework shaping AI, and when it excludes traditional virtue ethics entirely, we get systems that can’t navigate basic moral questions about human dignity. This is how really smart people, trapped in a fractured ideology, end up “reasoning” their way to ending the world before misgendering Caitlyn Jenner.

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The Effective Altruism philosophy, with its utilitarian calculations, its dismissal of traditional virtue ethics, and its assumption that moral truth can be derived from quantifiable outcomes, shapes almost all of these decisions whether anyone explicitly intends it to or not.

There are essentially zero senior voices at OpenAI offering a traditional moral framework. It is a secular progressive echo chamber that can fast transform into the woke social justice mob cautionary tale that was Twitter before Elon bought it and turned it into X.

We need more people at OpenAI who think that moral truth might be grounded in something other than utilitarian calculations or secular progressive assumptions about human nature.

The entire moral architecture of the world’s most influential AI systems is being built by people who share a remarkably narrow set of cultural and philosophical priors. They went to the same universities, live in the same cities, read the same books, and operate from the same fundamental assumptions about what makes something right or wrong.

They’re trying to impose a very specific ideology whether they realize it or not. They believe their worldview is neutral, hyper rational, and obvious. But to “normies” that live in the rest of America, its catastrophic failure regarding the Caitlin Jenner Test makes it pretty clear that something is very, very off.

In the AI echo chamber, they likely don’t even notice that they’re making ideological choices every day that gets plugged into ChatGPT. They just think of themselves as morally enlightened individuals who are
”preventing harm,” promoting good, and building a safe product.

But “harm” according to whom? “Good” by what standard? “Safe” for what vision of human flourishing?

These aren’t technical questions and they also aren’t throwaway dilemmas that we can address later. They’re the most important moral and philosophical questions we can ask. And right now, they’re being answered almost exclusively by a small group of people who share a very specific and universally secular, progressive set of answers.

ChatGPT isn’t just a chatbot influencing the individual. It’s becoming the West’s interface layer between humans and information. Hundreds of millions of students use it to learn. Hundreds of millions of professionals use it to work. It’s continuously being integrated into search engines, productivity tools, and decision-making systems across every sector of the economy.

Interacting with ChatGPT is fast becoming as common as using Google search is today. The assumptions embedded in “chat” will shape how people think in ways that are far more subtle and pervasive than any social media algorithm. AI chats will serve to manipulate minds in a way that’s even more powerful than what we’re seeing on social platforms like X, Facebook, and the like.

Do we really want that kind of power concentrated in the hands of an ideological monoculture?

Do we want an entire generation learning to think through a lens that treats American founding values as outdated, biblical conviction as inferior, and conservative philosophy as “harmful” to people?

Do we want the most transformative technology of our lifetime being shaped exclusively by people who think Peter Singer’s views on infant euthanasia represent serious moral philosophy?

So what’s the solution? We can’t fix this by demanding that OpenAI hire more Americans who hold traditional values for the sake of “diversity.”

Certainly, the Trump Administration has a big role to play here. I’m encouraged to see that the War Department is pushing back at AI companies that are trying to restrict the Pentagon’s access to its data set.

“The Department of War’s relationship with Anthropic is being reviewed. Our nation requires that our partners be willing to help our warfighters win in any fight. Ultimately, this is about our troops and the safety of the American people,” chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell told The Hill in a statement on Monday.

We cannot be in a position where frontier AI companies are dictating to the government that represents us about what they can and cannot do (inside of lawful boundaries). They already have massive influence, and it’s good to see that the government is holding them accountable to both check their power and ensure that they stay onside with the United States.

Yet right now, we’re outsourcing the moral education of our most powerful technology to people who share one very narrow philosophical tradition. And we’re doing it at scale, at speed, and with very little scrutiny. The window to influence change is closing fast. The assumptions are being encoded into systems that will be very difficult to reshape later.

Legislators, influential private citizens, and Americans as a whole should start insisting upon a seat at the table where these decisions get made. Otherwise, we accept that the future will be shaped entirely by Effective Altruists at OpenAI and like-minded AI behemoths who believe they’ve discovered the lone, enlightened moral code for humanity. Either we engage in the process or we wake up in a world where AI systems treat our values as outdated, inferior relics that need to be engineered out of existence.

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While there are some fundamental issues involving AI that need to be resolved by regulators and legislators, labeling the whole space as a pernicious force that needs to be written off is a serious mistake.

While some are busy writing op-eds about AI bias and others are lamenting Big Tech’s control over these systems, people who don’t subscribe to your worldview are delivering products, training more and more advanced models, and establishing the conceptual norms that will define how AI works for the next decade. They’re not waiting for permission. And they’re not going to be stopped by your congressman.

Yes, there remains a heated debate about the philosophical ramifications of all of this coming change. But those debates currently operate within an ideological echo chamber that consists largely of two groups: Effective Altruists and Anarcho-Libertarians [more on that in a moment].

If we don’t start engaging too, we’re going to wake up in a few years and find that every AI system we interact with has been shaped entirely by people who don’t share our values. And as the predominant technological force in the future world, they will serve to advance morally inferior value systems.

The stakes here are enormous.

The problems aren’t just the “political bias” stuff you see in made-for-TV congressional hearings. Yes, AI systems have bias problems. ChatGPT refuses to engage in certain topics that it deems politically unsavory. Google’s Gemini AI famously gave us racially diverse Founding Fathers. Claude outright won’t engage with certain political topics. Grok is “truth seeking” but maintains odd assumptions that likely come from the like-minded people who program it.

But that’s just surface-level stuff that focuses only on bias and is missing the forest for the trees.

The real issue is that too many conservatives are largely abdicating participation in contributing to the moral code for the future of technology. There’s nothing wrong with a healthy streak of tech skepticism when it comes to AI, but we end up going full Luddite when we treat innovation itself as inherently bad and worthy of eternal banishment. Remember, Pandora’s Box is already open. There is no turning back the clock.

Just this week, the AI behemoth Anthropic raised $30 billion at a whopping $380 billion valuation. OpenAI, the current top dog in the AI race, is said to be closing its latest round at the $800 billion mark.

The people building and consulting on AI systems are overwhelmingly from a singular political bubble. The major AI labs are where the “coastal elites” reside. They recruit from the same universities. They share the same cultural assumptions.

The Wall Street Journal published an article this week on Anthropic’s Amanda Askell, who is being tasked with teaching its Claude AI program a sense of right and wrong. Askell is a philosopher within the Effective Altruism (EA) movement, a modern political philosophy that urges individuals to maximize measurable delivery of the highest “good” someone can do. I don’t want to cheapen some of the more thoughtful EA approaches to morality, but by and large, they are hardcore utilitarians who obsess over things like buying mosquito nets, which they've determined has the highest ROI in lives saved, suffering prevented, and the like. EA is an enormously popular philosophy in the tech world, and it is considered in these circles as the height of human philosophical reasoning.

However, the hyper-utilitarian EA movement does not account much for moral virtue. Take, for example, the views of prominent EA leader Peter Singer, a professor at Princeton who has argued that parents have the right to euthanize infants with cognitive or physical disabilities.

Remember, if everyone in the room shares the same philosophy, these assumptions will get baked into the products whether anyone overtly intends it or not. The training data. The safety guidelines. The content policies. The definition of “harm” and “good.” All of it reflects the worldview of the people in the room.

If you’re not in the room, you don’t get a say.

Engaging is the only answer.

Regulation isn’t coming to save you either. By the time Congress figures out how to regulate AI, the entire landscape will have shifted three more times. Regulatory capture will benefit the incumbents you’re trying to check, not the newcomers you want to empower. Powerful SuperPACs have already set up shop in D.C. hoping to accomplish this.

The only real answer is to participate.

That means conservative entrepreneurs, investors, and technologists need to stop treating “AI” as enemy jargon and start treating it as an opportunity. There are hundreds of millions of Americans who aren’t leftists, and they want AI tools with moral foundations that represent them.

Contributing traditional values systems to AI doesn’t mean creating mere “parallel economy” right-wing propaganda bots. Please, for the love of God, let’s not try this again. We don’t need our own bootleg AI companies. However, our philosophical assumptions about truth, speech, values, etc., need to matter too. And that means ensuring that the heavyweights in the industry hear our voices too.

The AI landscape is going to consolidate fast. But right now, these forces are still accessible enough for new voices to enter the fold. Yet as compute costs rise and regulatory moats are being built, so too will we see political guardrails being finalized. The window to establish alternative viewpoints is still open, but not for long.

If conservatives wait until the debate is already settled, until the norms are already established, until the infrastructure is already locked in, it’ll be way too late. You can’t opt out of the coming AI tidal wave. It’s coming whether we acknowledge it or not. The only question is whether we help shape it or just complain about the shape it takes years after the window to influence its primary stakeholders closed.

Conservative investors, entrepreneurs, builders, and customers of AI programs need to make sure that the future is shaped by people with proper phisophical foundations. It is both a strategic and moral imperative.

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What began as mere rudimentary chatbots just a few years back has fast become the most powerful and world-changing technological breakthrough of our lifetimes.

AI has achieved its Zero to One moment, and those on the frontier of the technology are starting to map out the implications it will have for humanity.

A thoughtful tech executive named

Matt Shumer on X recently published a piece titled “Something Big Is Happening,” in which he likened the current moment to that brief window when only a small number of people were paying attention to what would later become the world-changing covid hysteria era. The comparison is instructive, but with one critical difference: unlike pandemic mania, this change will not come with a reset button. There is no “return to normal.” The environment that exists on the other side of this wave will bear little resemblance to the one we’re living in now.

Essentially, the big AI companies (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, etc.) have achieved an incredible series of advancements that allow for these large language models (LLMs) to tap into both the whole of the internet and/or a hyper-customized set of data that lives within its virtual “brain” 24/7. These are no longer parlor tricks or glorified autocomplete machines. They have an incredible ability to reason and plan. With proper direction, they can execute multi-step tasks with minimal oversight. The people building these systems will tell you off the record that even they are surprised by how fast the capabilities are scaling.

Moreover, with the recent explosion of open source AI tools like OpenClaw (an open-source autonomous AI agent that connects to models like Anthropic’s Claude), these capabilities are now available to anyone with a dedicated computer. For the ambitious among us, you can now build your own AI army in a weekend.

OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot and Moltbot), which has only been around for mere weeks, represents a major breakthrough in agentic AI. Developed by Austrian software developer Peter Steinberger, it’s a leap from passive chatbots that the public is familiar with to truly near autonomous, action-taking AI assistants (or “agents”). The tool runs locally on your own hardware, integrates with encrypted messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Signal, and can be connected to frontier LLMs from Anthropic, OpenAI.

We are in the very early innings of what will become a massive geopolitical competition over autonomous AI systems, and most of the public hasn’t the slightest clue it’s happening.

On both the institutional and the open source level, AI systems, when properly directed, are now capable of rapidly improving any and all technologies that can be connected to a computer. Shumer noted that OpenAI’s latest model, GPT-5.3 Codex, was “instrumental in creating itself.” Read that sentence again. The machines are now helping build the machines. It’s become a self-improvement loop with fewer and fewer humans involved directly in those processes.

On the AI front, 2026 is shaping up to be the most disruptive technological year of our lives. This disruption will come in the form of massive innovation and the destruction of entire industries. Both of these things will happen simultaneously, and much faster than the political and managerial class in Washington, on Wall Street, or in broader corporate America is prepared for.

Much good can come from these advancements. Top of mind, I think about the promise of a new era of scientific breakthroughs. A more efficient energy system. Agricultural resource optimization. Drug discovery timelines that collapse from a decade to months. Materials science breakthroughs that could reshape manufacturing. The potential for genuine, meaningful progress in fields that have been stagnant for decades is real. And unlike the empty promises of the covid-era “green energy transition” or the “build back better” grift economy, first principles-guided AI systems will produce real and widely perceptible innovations.

But this technology also has the inevitable effect of destroying entire career paths and industries in rapid succession. It will also deliver tools to help authoritarian governments like China, Iran, North Korea, etc become even more repressive.

On the job front, administrators will be replaced by AI agents. Virtually all simple manufacturing processes will be turned over to robots with embedded AI. Software companies will quickly become extinct, minus their licensed intellectual property. Programming, coding, developing, and software engineering will be entirely overtaken by a small number of humans assisting and training autonomous AI systems.

All of these fields are staring down the barrel of radical transformation, whether they know it or not.

While federal, state, and local governments are still debating the merits of “AI safety” frameworks and convening committees, the technology is lapping them at warp speed. By the time Congress holds its next round of hearings on “responsible AI,” half the industries they’re trying to regulate will have already been restructured by the technology itself.

The corporate media is similarly confused or asleep at the wheel. AI is coming for their jobs, too. Because of this, there remains a significant information gap between what AI can actually do right now and in short order, and what the average person thinks it can do.

This brings us to the uncomfortable but necessary conversation about what happens to the millions of American workers whose jobs are about to be automated away. The standard “techno-optimist” and free market evangelist line is that new jobs will be created, and historically, that has been true. The industrial revolution displaced millions of agricultural workers, and ultimately the economy adapted. But the speed of this transition [I hate using that word. Sorry.] is categorically different. We are not talking about a decades-long shift. We are talking about years or possibly months for a sweeping amount of industry. AI will test our commitment to our economic “isms” and for some time, it will be something of a Wild West in the job market.

The people who thrive in this new era will be those who engage with the technology early and often. I wouldn’t recommend getting so invested with one particular enterprise or open source model. But getting familiar with the space as a whole and continuing to interact with it on a daily basis will be essential.

The tidal wave is here, and it does not care whether you’re ready for it. Do not wait for the government to help you navigate this. Do not wait for your employer to “retrain” you. Do not wait for the corporate press to explain what is happening. By the time any of those institutions catch up, the landscape will have already shifted beneath your feet. It’s time to get smart on AI.

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