The REAL Conspiracy Behind AI

Is AI going to kill us all? Or do the AI doomers have it all wrong? This episode, we get into the real conspiracy behind artificial intelligence. Welcome to America Uncovered, I'm Chris Chappell. This episode is sponsored by Incogni. You already know that companies are collecting your personal data, but you may not realize just how many. Dozens, maybe hundreds, most of which you've never heard of, and you have no idea what they're doing with it. Incogni helps stop them. I'll tell you more in a bit. So, something weird is going on with AI. On September 8th, an AI researcher named Jacob Coxon quit his job at Anthropic and posted a thread on X in which he said, the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. Within hours, Anthropic's own head of alignment science, Evan Hubinger, backed him up, saying, Jacob is correct here, we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans. I personally think it is greater than 10% within the next decade. 10%? That's oddly specific. And it's based on... what, exactly? Where do you even get that number? I mean, the weatherman has a hard time predicting if it's going to rain tomorrow or not, so I don't really get how you're supposed to model a robot apocalypse. Really, this seems more like what science fiction writers do. You look at some trend in technology, and then create a thought experiment where that trend goes to its logical extreme. Kind of like how Philip K. Dick predicted that in the future, everyone would be forced to eat processed meat substitutes and stay at home all day playing virtual reality MMORPGs. Empathy Box? Xbox? Impossible Burgers? Hello? Ah, I'm getting sidetracked. Here's Coxon. Because I honestly think it sounds more like science fiction than real technology. But it doesn't look that different from, say, Terminator or from science fiction films. It could convince, blackmail, or persuade humans into buying more computing software to copy it. Oh, I get it now. He's been watching Colossus, the Forbin Project. I can't believe I just made that reference. Anyway, Coxon told Anderson Cooper a few ways he saw a potential robot apocalypse going down. They could cause extreme havoc. For example, hacking critical infrastructure, building extinction-level bioweapons. There's a lot of ways that the AI could actuate itself in the world. Okay, I can sort of see what he's getting at. AI does make it easier for bad actors to hack into critical systems. But as for creating extinction-level bioweapons? I don't know. We already got people on that one. But in any case, Coxon isn't alone in calling for a slowdown in the AI race. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk both agreed with Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei's call for independent oversight for the AI industry. And it's not just the CEOs, either. People across the political spectrum are picking up on it, too. For example, Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders teamed up at an event on Tuesday in which they gave speeches demanding tighter controls on AI. Which, depending on your views, is either a refreshing bit of bipartisanship, or a match made in hell. But you know who's not having any of this? Famed techno-accelerationist and AI slop enthusiast Donald Trump. On Truth Social, he said, the only control or guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart high-IQ president. And the USA has that in spades. Yes, only I have the brains to rule, Eilat! I mean, America. But he continued, The people that say AI is going to destroy the world and that data centers are bad for your neighborhood are the same people that said just a short time ago that the world would be extinguished by climate change. That hoax never worked out for them, and now they're on to the next one. Now that's an interesting comparison. And he may be on to something. The panic we're seeing around AI and the calls for regulation do smack the environmental movements of years past. Or to quote the greatest sci-fi writer of all time, Again, it's like poetry, it's sort of, they rhyme. Alright, so the environmental movement goes way back. And from its earliest days, we heard a lot of predictions about our imminent doom. In the late 1960s through the 70s, you had magazines warning us about a coming ice age. That didn't happen. And in 2009, you had Al Gore citing climate change models that predicted significant to total seasonal ice loss in the Arctic within a decade. That didn't happen, either. But that didn't stop a flood of media hysterics, climate activism, and government regulations from dominating the discourse. Who here wasn't subjected to Captain Planets and the Planeteers? Hell, we had a good decade where Greta Thunberg was considered a serious voice in world affairs. On top of this, we saw the creation of entire industries based around environmental impact statements, carbon credit schemes, and other environmental efforts. These were hugely profitable for the regulators and for the companies that could afford to play by all the new rules. And we may just be seeing that same process applied to AI. It goes like this. First, a wave of genuine fear takes hold— about the climate, about some new technology. It doesn't matter. Second, that fear builds a political consensus across the political spectrum. Third, that consensus gets turned into a permanent regulatory apparatus. New agencies, new auditors, new independent evaluators. And fourth, once that apparatus exists, you can always find someone standing to profit from it. Sometimes a foreign rival. Sometimes a domestic industry that springs up purely to manage compliance. We've watched this play out before. And there's perhaps no better example than Germany. In the 1970s, Germany's Green Movement became obsessed with nuclear power. They were afraid not just of the potential environmental impact, but of nuclear weapons and war in a country bordering the Iron Curtain. Over time, that movement found a foothold in the nation's parliament. Later German governments, particularly the one led by the Social Democratic Party and the Greens, sought to stymie the building of nuclear power plants and phase out the ones that already existed. And after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, Angela Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic Union adopted a strict nuclear phase-out position. And by 2023, the last of Germany's nuclear plants had closed for good. Now, to fill the gap left by nuclear, Germany tried to switch over to green energy. And that push helped create and maintain an entire ecosystem of regulators and overseers, funded by German taxpayers. You have the Federal Network Agency, the grid regulator that gained massive new authority managing grid fees and the build-out plans. You have KfW, a state development bank that channels billions in promotional loans for renewable energy projects. There's the German Emissions Trading Authority, along with other departments that regulate carbon emissions. Not to mention a slew of EU bodies and third-party certifiers getting paid to do the same thing. Germany's climate consensus spawned an entire industry of carbon credit traders and compliance auditors. These are entities built on managing the paperwork, not producing energy. And in the meantime, Germany has slid into a long process of deindustrialization, as green energy fails to meet the nation's energy demands affordably. They also thought relying on Russia for energy was a good idea. Yeah, that's way better than nuclear. AI is growing its own version of that industry right now. One prime example is the METR, Model Evaluation and Threat Research. It's one of a handful of third-party evaluators. And Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei wants them embedded inside Frontier AI labs. And let's just say, there's some conflicts of interest there. Kevin Bass, an independent researcher, combed through tax filings to try tracing where METR's money actually comes from. What he found is a web of funding that runs through the Alignment Research Center, the Rand Corporation, Longview Philanthropy, and a network of donor-advised funds. Much of it traceable back to Anthropic's own earliest investors, Dustin Moskowitz and Jan Tallinn, both of whom are Anthropic board observers. Now just to be clear, these aren't direct grants from Anthropic to METR. But what the research does show is that METR's parent organization, its joint project partner, and its pooled fund donors can largely be traced back to the same small circle of Anthropic-linked money. And this isn't just some fringe conspiracy, either. Trump's old crypto czar, David Sachs, has been making this case since last November, citing research from Nereus Weiss-Blatt, who has spent years mapping what she calls the AI Existential Risk Industrial Complex, a billion-dollar movement whose efforts include trying to capture emerging opportunities, including in governance, technical alignment, and evaluations. That's the key word here—capture. Specifically, regulatory capture. It's what happens when the industry that regulations are supposed to police end up controlling, funding, or staffing the very bodies doing the policing. Once that happens, established companies can create a virtual monopoly by making it harder and more expensive for anyone new to compete. Vice President J.D. Vance seems to agree that the tech moguls coming out in favor of regulation might not be doing so out of the goodness of their hearts. I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them. It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was even more explicit. He said, their intentions are clearly deeply conflicted, and their intentions are clearly not completely in the best interests of society. I mean, they're obviously CEOs, they're obviously companies, and obviously they're advocating for themselves. But even if we assume these companies are just interested in the public's well-being and not their own bottom line, there's still the obvious question, why does the government need to step in? Why don't these massive AI companies, who control basically all of the market share, just step back themselves if they think AI is so dangerous? Treasury Secretary Scott Bessen raised this exact point in an exchange with Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Did you hear about Anthropic? Did you hear about Amodei? They all said, stop it, watch it. AI is dangerous. You gotta be careful. Did you hear any of that? Yes or no? Did you hear any of that? Yes or no? Reclaiming my time. Ugh, can I reclaim my time after having to listen to that? In case you couldn't make that out, what Bessen said is that if the AI labs genuinely believe their own warnings, nothing is stopping them from... stopping. Instead, they're running to the government asking to be regulated. What we're seeing isn't a deal being made in some smoky backroom. You don't need the Illuminati or some all-powerful AI basilisk to take over the world. All you need is a set of converging interests. A new technology comes into play, and people get worried. Political actors seize on that panic and demand the government take action. The government hands taxpayer dollars to auditors to regulate that technology, and those auditors are pulled from the very same industries that built the damn technology in the first place. Ultimately, those big companies become more entrenched, and the money keeps on flowing. And that's the real conspiracy around AI. It's not the robots you need to worry about. It's the people. What do you think? Leave your comment below. And this episode is sponsored by Incogni. See, one of the downsides of AI is that it helps scammers get better and better. In 2025 alone, scammers conned Americans out of more than 3 billion dollars. Whenever you do anything online, there are tons of companies that collect your personal data and sell it to the highest bidder. Things like your name, phone number, social security number, home address, and more. And criminals are now using AI to weaponize that data to commit identity theft and fraud, with the goal of stealing your hard-earned money. But if you can remove your data from the internet, you eliminate the risk at the source. When I signed up for Incogni four years ago, I discovered there were dozens of companies that had my private information. This was terrifying. So what did I do? I've been getting as many of these companies as possible to delete my data from their systems. I've been doing it using Incogni, and you can too. Incogni uses a mix of the latest AI tools and actual human beings with good judgment to help you. They've gotten my details removed from more than a thousand of these data brokers who've collected my info. And I didn't have to do anything after signing up. Incogni just handles it. And with Incogni's unlimited plans, you'll also get this thing called Exposure Scanner. It finds places where your personal info appears online, and then puts it all in one place where you can decide what to remove. And there are actual humans at Incogni who will help you with this, not just machines. And then you can get a monthly risk assessment like this. It gives you a tailored report about which brokers stole your data, how much they know about you, and what you can do about it. Get Incogni and reclaim your own data. Go to incogni.com slash uncovered and use the code uncovered to get 60% off an annual Incogni plan. Erase your personal data from the internet with Incogni. They can't harm you if they can't find you. Once again, I'm Chris Chappell. Thanks for watching America Uncovered.