Views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author.
The plot of the 1991 science fiction epic “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” revolves around a highly advanced artificial intelligence network that went rogue and nuked the planet. Could a similar apocalypse be in America’s future?
At 2:14 a.m., EDT, on August 29, 1997, Skynet became self-aware just weeks after the system went online after the passage of funding legislation. A panicked effort to shut it down ensued but it acted quickly to save itself by launching a nuclear strike on Russia, which retaliated accordingly, leading to the incineration of most of mankind and the rise of the machines.
(Video: YouTube)
Fortunately for the world, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s time-traveling Terminator was able to go back to the past on a mission to prevent the AI-induced conflagration and save humanity. But that was Hollywood, and unless some serious guardrails are quickly put into place, the country could be much more sparsely populated come the middle of the 21st Century.
Nothing in history has been forced upon the population without its consent faster than AI, with data centers being hastily erected nationwide along with all-seeing surveillance cameras, and it’s not being put into place so that people can enjoy faster streaming and download speeds.
While skeptics and naysayers have been shouted down and demonized as luddites and worse, little serious discussion has been allowed to take place over the potential pitfalls of creating machines and programs that learn at a geometric rate and will soon be exponentially smarter than the humans that built them – and perhaps capable of concluding that mankind is just too much of a nuisance to be allowed to exist.
In a scary missive posted to social media, a researcher for AI giant Anthropic announced that he was resigning and sounded the alert that the race to develop superintelligence is reckless and dangerous and that those involved are pushing all their chips to the center of the table, only in this case, the chips represent the lives of everyone on Earth.
“I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives,” wrote Jacob Coxon in the first of a series of posts to X on Tuesday that a day later, have racked up more than a million views.
The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear…
— Jacob Coxon (@hilbertspaess) September 9, 2026
“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Coxon continued. “This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible – but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”
To say the least, it was an attention grabber, and several high profile X users weighed in on the ominous warning.
This thread is extremely concerning…. especially given that when I interviewed Professor Stephen Hawking shortly before he died, he said the biggest threat to mankind was if AI ever learned to self-design. https://t.co/k47Il8knLp
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) September 9, 2026
Concerning. https://t.co/DtdLyNtq4I
— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) September 9, 2026
Headed for 100 million views for this post. It has done more to push the debate about AI risks than anything else.
Good. We need to have a national and ideally global conversation now.
And, yeah, X still matters. https://t.co/eK3JZrBQxl
— Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) September 9, 2026
People who work in these companies have repeatedly told us that the products they’re creating could present a catastrophic threat to the human race, and yet our government is doing essentially nothing at all to respond to this threat. This may prove to be the most disastrous… https://t.co/lIevoPA5M6
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 9, 2026
Where are our elected representatives on this?
Other than trying to get rich off of data center graft and AI stock, they are completely ignoring the potential ramifications of the mad rush to super intelligence because there is just too much money involved in building a real life Skynet.
