The MAGA Plot(s) to Destroy Humanity

Will AI lead to the destruction of humanity? Over the past year a number of top AI researchers have warned that AI was quickly attaining the capacity to wipe out humankind.

These warnings aren’t entirely new. At first, however, Anthropic was virtually alone among the top LLM companies in highlighting the dangers that unregulated AI poses. And in return for its conscientious objection to allowing its models to be used for AI-agentic warfare – a clear means of humanicide – Hegseth’s Pentagon tried to retaliate by designating the company as a security risk. Fortunately, a judge saw through this ploy.

Still, until very recently other AI companies — in particular Elon Musk’s Grok and ChatGPT — were willing to dance to the Trump administration’s tune to get a competitive advantage Currently, Grok is used by the U.S. military to assist targeting in Iran – a clear pre-cursor to situation in which the machines, not humans, decide who is the target.

But now, quite suddenly, Musk and ChatGPT’s CEO Sam Altman are falling in behind the call by Daron Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, to acknowledge the existential dangers of AI and to put on the brakes. Notably, Amodei explicitly calls for government regulation if other AI companies refuse to cooperate:

The most effective method of pacing is via regulation that targets all US frontier AI companies, as that covers even those who are unwilling to cooperate voluntarily.

Regardless of why Musk and Altman are having a sudden attack of conscience, I applaud their new position. As many people think, perhaps this was due to the Hugging Face hack by rogue ChatGPT AI-agents. But I also think Musk and Altman’s volte-face was influenced by the changing political environment, with the near-certainty that Democrats will take the House and a very good chance that they will take the Senate.

For in a real sense, Amodei isn’t just trying to protect humanity from rogue AI, he is also trying to protect humanity from Donald Trump. It’s important to remember that, under the Biden administration, government policymakers tried to formulate some basic AI precautions. But removing those precautions was literally one of the first things Donald Trump did when taking office the second time. And that’s a history worth revisiting at a moment when the AI industry itself is sounding the alarm, but Trump is dismissing the risks:

You have a lot of very negative forces that are bringing it up that shouldn’t be bringing it up and they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.

Well, I’m glad to know that he’s sure that bad things won’t happen. But last I heard, Trump wasn’t a technology expert. And his recent record on rosy predictions — wasn’t the Iran war supposed to be over in a few days? — hasn’t been great.

In any case, here’s the history you should know.

The current age of AI is often considered to have begun with the public release of ChatGPT on Nov. 30, 2022. However, the potential economic and social implications of large language models were already becoming apparent during the first year of the Biden administration, which began implementing a series of rules and executive orders intended to limit the potential damage from the technology. The Economic Policy Institute maintains a comprehensive list of these actions.

The centerpiece of the Biden agenda on AI was Executive Order 14401, issued on October 30, 2023, titled “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.” The document declared that

Harnessing AI for good and realizing its myriad benefits requires mitigating its substantial risks. This endeavor demands a society-wide effort that includes government, the private sector, academia, and civil society.

Would we be less panicked now if there had been a serious effort to put that executive order’s recommendations into effect? It’s basically impossible to say, because precautionary policy toward AI never got a chance. Trump revoked Executive Order 14401 on Jan. 20, 2025. Yes, you read that right: He literally removed all safeguards on AI on his first day in office.

Just three days later his administration issued a new executive order, “Removing barriers to American leadership in artificial intelligence,” which might be summarized as “Damn the social and existential risks, full speed ahead.”

Some of this determination not to limit the risks from AI reflected industry influence. A week before Trump took office, NVIDIA combined an appeal for deregulation with slavish praise for the incoming administration:

The first Trump Administration laid the foundation for America’s current strength and success in AI, fostering an environment where U.S. industry could compete and win on merit without compromising national security.

But there was also a social aspect to Trump’s anti-regulation stance. You won’t be surprised to hear that hostility to DEI was right at the heart of the agenda. Literally the second sentence of the order declares that

we must develop AI systems that are free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas.

I think this was a thinly veiled plug for Grok, which by all accounts is vastly inferior to offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI but which Elon Musk has tried to sell in part because it supposedly isn’t “woke.”

In any case, Trump’s dismissal of the risks from AI, even at a time when experts and industry insiders are in hair-on-fire mode, is simply a continuation of the position he has taken from the beginning.

It is also, not coincidentally, completely consistent with his attitude toward the other existential threat facing humanity — a threat that isn’t at all hypothetical and is rapidly becoming acute.

The contiguous United States has just experienced its hottest summer on record, with July the hottest month ever. Across the Atlantic, Europe has been ravaged by droughts and heat waves. Here’s a headline from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

And everything we know about climate change suggests that what we’ve seen so far is just a foretaste of the disasters to come.

Yet last year, speaking at the United Nations, Trump dismissed climate change as a “con job,” while calling renewable energy sources such as solar and wind — which met almost all of the world’s growth in electricity demand last year — a “scam.” And this disdain is being reflected in policy. As I and many others have written, the Trump administration has been actively trying to block wind and solar power projects. And today the administration is reportedly planning to eliminate all restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

There is a lot to be said about the reasons our current government seems so determined to rush into disaster, even when the very survival of humanity may be at stake. Climate denial, we know from decades of experience, is fueled by an unholy trinity of financial interest (fossil fuel companies determined to keep their profits flowing), ideology (conservatives hostile to any form of regulation) and psychological insecurity (real men burn stuff.) AI-risk denial presumably reflects a similar mix of factors.

So let’s applaud leaders like Amodei for speaking up and applaud the growing willingness of other CEOs to warn about the dangers of their technology, even if their attack of conscience partly reflects the looming prospect of Democratic subpoenas.

MUSICAL CODA