AI Reality: The Race to (P)doom End-times

Dario Amodei, “(P)doom vibes” pre IPO must have been his idea. CEO, Anthropic. My Friends, The datacenter State capital of the U.S., Texas, is going dark. It paused Datacenter approvals way back last month on August 3rd and is now putting the brakes on them. BigAI featuring OpenAI and Anthropic were already compute constrained, and now suddenly as if to rescue us (on X), a CEO who has the biggest AI IPO in history in 7 weeks is mysteriously calling for a frontier model slowdown, with a manifesto blog entitled We Must Pace the Frontier. Ah, I think the American people already decided that one for you. So are we all doomed, or something? The AI news aura got a bit wacky over the weekend and I’m curious to see how markets respond this week. P(doom) is the probability of existentially catastrophic outcomes (so-called "doomsday scenarios") as a result of artificial intelligence and its uncertain future impacts. If you turn AI trust & saftey into a marketing stunt, what exactly should we expect from you in the near future?"No other human activity poses this level of danger." - Jacob Coxon As more Anthropic employees leave the company commenting on Coxon’s Twitter/X remarks, we have to cover the story a bit deeper. Now there has been another announcement by a former Anthropic employee, Joe Benton, the former manager of Anthropic’s Scalable Oversight. Source. Humanity are building machine that are much smarter than any human, and we may not survive this, he tweeted. While he’s going to work at METR a company Anthropic and OpenAI are both nomating to oversee some of their work as frontier evaluators. METR stands for “Model Evaluation and Threat Research”, claiming to be an independent non-profit research institute that evaluates frontier AI models for complex, long-horizon, and potentially dangerous agentic capabilities. What an incredible coincidence! ShareSuddenly two of the lesser rival AI firms (with lesser models and less ARR), led by tycoons Sam Altman of OpenAI and Elon Musk of SpaceX AI, have both said they agree with Amodei frontier slowdown thesis. Anthropic’s anti-China CEO cited the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident (OAI-HF) and the risks of recursive-self-improvement (RSI) improving beyond our ability to control. So how long till the end-times exactly1? X-Risk chatter is distracting and masking from other macro events that threaten the AI boom. “One of the most worrying risks linked to frontier AI is extreme power concentration.” - François CholletThe AI slowdown appears to be a marketing theme that suddenly emerged on X this weekend. The scripted sequence of events was supposed to introduce the public and AI researchers to why a frontier slowdown or pacing of model releases is a good idea and how their chosen “evaluators” could safeguard model releases in the future. Approach with extreme caution and skepticism. A “Scary Good” Slowdown into a $2 Trillion IPO In 2026 it’s hard to imagine how super-intelligence leads to our extinction as a species. But don’t argue, P(doom) is trending and I’m guessing Anthropic wouldn’t have it any other way. Anthropic is telling investors that they will be profitable for a second straight quarter with gross margins are above 80% before accounting ​for revenue shared ​with distribution partners, including Amazon and covering the cost of training. Being compute constrained, while open-weight models take token marketshare while the general public show a marked decline of sentiment towards AI is not a great macro position for BigAI labs to be in in 2026. There are so many AI risks to democracy, capitalisms and society2 not being talked about when x-risk takes the center of the stage. What would AI at the end of civilization actually look like? AI being used in a global nucleur warAI being used to create a catastrophic biological weaponized virus Humans weaponizing extremely powerful AI in unpredictable ways is inevitable Humans losing control of super-intelligent AI that has goals that conflict with human civilization is now possible in the foreseeable future.