Utopia Yesterday, Apocalypse Today

The country is firing on all cylinders, focused intensely on one sector to reaffirm America's role in the world. The economy is adding jobs at an impressive pace; the unemployment rate is healthy and nearing full employment.

Suddenly, there's news that a cataclysmic event is about to unfold. The economy slows and practically drags to a halt. The impact spreads quickly across nations, and soon it is global. The promise of a vibrant America and its leading role in setting the stage for global development is halted.

The above storyline is not from a Hollywood thriller. It actually happened in early 2020, under the first Trump administration. In 2019, America exported more energy than it imported for the first time since 1952. Overall unemployment stood at 3.5%, and unemployment among Black, Hispanic, and Native American workers fell to the lowest levels on record.

Then COVID hit. The focus on survival brought America's economy to a grinding halt, and the pandemic would go on to claim roughly 7 million reported lives worldwide.

We do not believe in conspiracy theories, but the recent AI scare, amplified by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates's August memo and followed by a drip-by-drip spilling of horrific scenarios from many tech insiders, sounds suspiciously like a plot to stifle American leadership under President Trump.

Two weeks ago, at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Sam Altman told the gathering that AI was as "non-negotiable" for nations as electricity was a century ago. In the same appearance, he warned that AI is advancing so fast that things could go "very wrong" in cybersecurity unless governments act urgently. That echoed Gates's memo, which warned of the damage bad actors could do with AI.

Last week, Jacob Coxon, a researcher who had worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, quit Anthropic and announced it on X, warning that the people building AI believe it "could kill us all by the end of the decade." His resignation post has drawn more than 170 million views, and he has since taken his warning to the national press.

Now Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI models, has published an essay titled "We Must Pace the Frontier," declaring that "we must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models." He warned that AI is increasingly helping build its own successors, and that its capabilities are outrunning researchers' ability to understand and control them. A misaligned swarm of AI agents, he argued, could one day seize large parts of the internet.

Even Elon Musk agreed, tweeting on his X platform, "Dario is right."

But just six months ago, these leaders were telling us how remarkable and consequential AI is to global development.

In his 2024 essay "Machines of Loving Grace," Amodei outlined an optimistic future in which AI systems would be smarter than Nobel Prize winners. He has repeatedly cited AI's promise to revolutionize medicine, treat major diseases, and elevate human life within 5 to 10 years. Even his January essay, "The Adolescence of Technology," while cataloging AI's risks, still described a "country of geniuses in a datacenter" arriving within a year or two.

At the India AI Impact Summit in February, Amodei told the audience that AI models were only "a small number of years" from surpassing the cognitive capabilities of most humans, and that humanity is "increasingly close" to a "country of geniuses in a data center" — AI agents more capable than most humans at most things, coordinating at superhuman speed.

Sam Altman has long promised that AI will usher in an age of abundance. At the same India summit, he said the world may be only a couple of years from early versions of true superintelligence, and that "by the end of 2028, more of the world's intellectual capacity could reside inside of data centers than outside of them." He called AI democratization "the only fair and safe path forward." And while he acknowledged that AI will disrupt today's jobs, he predicted that people centuries from now will see us as "impossibly rich people playing games, trying to find ways to pass their time."

These leaders have been driving the AI revolution for more than a decade, since OpenAI was launched as a non-profit in 2015 with Elon Musk as a co-chair and major backer. The technology industry's first big investment in OpenAI came from Microsoft, which went on to build its Copilot assistant on OpenAI's technology.

These companies closely guard their models in-house before releasing them to the public. There may be genuine concern that a super-aggressive AI agent could indeed create havoc. The world doesn't get to see what is happening in those labs.

But ever since ChatGPT came out nearly four years ago, the world has indeed changed dramatically. A member of our editorial board cataloged how AI had changed his life in a Substack piece last October. It is hard to believe it hasn't even been a year since that piece was published. AI's capabilities have already improved significantly.

The markets have reflected this promise. According to Goldman Sachs, AI-infrastructure companies are expected to drive roughly half of the S&P 500's earnings growth this year. What many feared would be a pure speculation bubble has become a cycle backed by staggering real-world revenue. The massive AI build-out has supercharged corporate profits, steering the broader S&P 500 toward an expected 24% overall earnings expansion.

As one solution, AI leaders are now insisting that democratic governments join hands to set safety standards and oversee the development of advanced AI models. You read that correctly. These AI leaders want to slow down their own innovations and abide by the mandates of the very same governments that hopelessly handled the COVID-19 pandemic.

Lest we forget, democratic governments displayed extraordinary incompetence globally just six years ago. Failures were everywhere in preparation, execution, and communication.

In the United States, the initial response by federal agencies and public-health bureaucracies was plagued by delays and mixed messaging around social distancing and masks. The federal government faced severe backlash for a shortage of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). Government agencies and White House leadership frequently issued contradictory guidance regarding the virus's severity, treatment methods, and mask efficacy. The lockdowns were prolonged, with school closures triggering a massive youth mental health crisis and learning loss, which disproportionately impacted disadvantaged communities. Leading federal officials aggressively silenced dissenting scientific views, ignored the validity of natural immunity, and imposed vaccine mandates without adequately addressing public concerns.

The timing of these warnings, just two months before the November midterm elections, is also problematic. President Trump has aggressively promoted data centers, chips, and AI technology as the hallmark of American economic renewal. Yet over the weekend, it emerged that former President Obama had urged Democrats at a private fundraiser to make AI oversight a centerpiece of their agenda, warning that the technology could be "dangerous."

Forty years ago, President Reagan's watchword in dealing with the Soviet Union was "Trust, but verify."

The American people should trust, verify, and remember who the doomsayers were the last time they asked for our faith.