(2026-09-16) Zvim Trump Goes Full Hoax On Ai Existential Risk

Zvi Mowshowitz: Donald Trump Goes Full Hoax on AI Existential Risk. Everyone in a position to know is freaking out about AI potentially killing everyone this decade and wants to pace the frontier, and people are finally listening.

It only took a few days for the conversation to fully pivot to the counteroffensive, where the Usual Suspects and those they recruited attacked anyone and everyone who dared point out that we are in danger, with every attack they can think of, usually without substance or any attempt at understanding.

Table of Contents

• Hold Your Fire.
• If You Don’t Like the Weather.
• Trump Does Not Take Kindly.
• Trump Goes Full ‘Hoax’.
• This Is Not About Data Centers, Mr. President.
• I Am The Hoax Buster, I Am The Hoax Buster, I Am The Walrus.
• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Is a Lying Liar.
• Trump Quietly Draws Key Distinction.
• Calling For Pacing the Frontier Is Bad For AI Stock Prices.
• People On The Internet Sometimes Lie.
• Origins of Cynicism.
• Ineffective Egoism.
• The McCarthyist Faction Attacks METR.
• Other Key Republicans React.
• David Sacks Stops Being Plausibly Constructive.
• Federal Trade Commission Chooses Danger.
• Chris Lehane Heel Face Turn.
• A Matter of Trust.
• China Calls It Fearmongering.
• Pick Up The Phone.
• If You Want To Beat China So Badly You Should Act Like It.
• Never Go Full Hoax.
• Trump Uses AI For Things.

Hold Your Fire

The most important thing, as this plays out, remains to not make things worse.
Please do not make this any more partisan or personal than it already is

For the same reason, to avoid reinforcing a partisan frame, I will refrain from including related statements from Democratic politicians.

If You Don’t Like the Weather

Before we get into details, I also emphasize: Nothing here is fixed.
Every month is different. Trump changes positions on a dime.

And a lot of this can be posturing in advance of the US-China summit, to look tough and stake out a negotiating position, as could be China’s reactions to all this.

Trump Does Not Take Kindly

On Monday, as Trump made some rather concerning statements, I cautioned that the press was jumping to conclusions and misreading what Trump said

If you think Trump’s first comment should have updated us all the way, and his later comments did not contain much information, I think you are incorrect. I still think it is likely that, at the time of his first comments, Trump himself did not know what he intended to do here.

Trump Goes Full ‘Hoax’

*Then something got him fully on the warpath. I am guessing it was Jensen Huang.
Trump went Full Hoax.

Concerning AI, when, in the History of Business, did anyone see the Leaders of an Industry call for Regulation that, if strongly implemented, will drive them into oblivion and bankruptcy?*

This Is Not About Data Centers, Mr. President
The only reason the AI/Data Center outburst is happening is because the United States is leading, by a lot, every other country. Don't kill the Golden Goose!
It sure sounds like Trump thinks these warnings are a plot against data centers?

One can see how that compression got made. No, it makes no sense, but such is life.

I Am The Hoax Buster, I Am The Hoax Buster, I Am The Walrus

*And then things went, well, to another level.

I am the Hoax Buster, and I’m right now breaking another Hoax — That AI is going to take over, consume, and destroy the World, and that Robots will be marching into our Cities, and getting rid of us all!*

I know this is tragic, horrible and many other things. But.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang Is a Lying Liar

*It is patently absurd that people claim not to notice that he is a constantly lying liar.

Exec Sum: NEWS: Jensen Huang says ex-Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon’s tweets are “outlandish, deeply untrue, arrogant and ignorant of the industry’s safety work.”*

I say this as a shareholder. To claim that Coxon’s claims are ‘ignorant of the industry’s safety work’ means Huang is straight up lying. This has moved beyond mere bullshit. Do not pretend otherwise.

Presumably you noticed that no, we won’t sue you, on account of being dead and all.

Jensen is a maximally cynical commercial and political actor whose one and only goal is to sell Nvidia chips to whoever he can, especially China. This could not be clearer.

Trump Quietly Draws Key Distinction

I do take solace in some word details.

I realize this is going to sound like splitting hairs. Fine.

But notice that he’s saying the ‘doomers’ are ‘playing right into the hands’ of people.
That is an implicit admission that, in Trump’s mind, the ‘doomers’ warning us are sincere

Calling For Pacing the Frontier Is Bad For AI Stock Prices

Zac Hill is the latest to remind us that if AI companies wanted to sell America on their new technology, they would do pretty much the opposite of what they are doing. Yet the product still sells itself

Michael Burry has moved on from calling AI a bubble to calling it a cartel. For the reasons explained by Tabarrok, and demonstrated by the reactions of Jensen and Trump, this makes no sense. In his case I do not think he is lying. I think Burry is just in way too deep

People On The Internet Sometimes Lie

*Ad hominem is famously almost the lowest level of discourse, but actually there is an additional lower level: Ad hominem attacks that are also exactly the opposite of true.

Erick Erickson (lying): The nuclear power doomers became the climate doomers and now they’re the AI doomers. The only commonality is they want the United States to recede.

The opposite is true.*

Origins of Cynicism

A lot of people say that AI might kill everyone. A lot of them are in a position to know.
There are those for whom ‘they believe it’ does not compute as an explanation. Why?

Ineffective Egoism

*Definitely do not panic about ‘Effective Altruists’ being called out by name.

This scapegoat campaign started long ago, spearheaded by Marc Andreessen.

Brunella (300k+ views): bro theyre gonna do mccarthyism to effective altruists

No. They’re not.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, a16z has been trying, and they have in some ways made it a dirty word in politics in particular. But this kind of blind rage should if anything be welcomed.*

Alex Tabarrok: Imagine the Department of War tweeting "Utilitarians in shambles! Kantians on the run!" No philosophy has ever mattered enough to be attacked by the government. Until EA. Amazing success

This also invokes the Streisand Effect. Essentially no one knows what Effective Altruism is, or most of the ideas around AI existential risk

*Attempting to launch a new McCarthyism not only will not work, it will cause everyone to go ‘hey check out this thing they’re trying to do a McCarthyism on.’

And then they find out it’s about trying to do the most good via charity.*

The McCarthyist Faction Attacks METR

This is a logical first target. Maybe I should be more concerned but mostly I find it counterproductive and more importantly hilarious.

This is the actual, real life front page of the New York Post,

If there was a new version of Pangram that used AI to detect Hack Job Hit Piece Voice, you would not need it, because this is so classic.

*The ‘woke’ label is purely something they threw in the headline and first sentence, with neither any actual truth to it nor any evidence provided, as per usual. METR is not, in any sense whatsoever, ‘woke.’

The ‘globalist’ label in the headline is a complete non-sequitur. Usual playbook.*

That is not to say that there are no issues with potential conflicts of interest

The issues that are real here are well known, acknowledged, and were not avoidable

It would be even worse for Anthropic and METR if you were to say that in order to generate a real check on Anthropic you need the audits and evaluators to be universal, mandatory and protected by law, and otherwise given more teeth to be a ‘real check.’

There are indeed all the signs of a coordinated smear campaign against METR to make them sound bad to right-wing echo chambers. The next few weeks are likely to suck in many ways for the METR folks, especially as some rather vicious people dig around for the tiniest bit of actual dirt. I do not expect this to work, indeed I expect it to backfire via the Streisand Effect

Other Key Republicans React

There are also many Republicans, with the mainstream arm of that led by Ron DeSantis but also increasingly many others, who increasingly understand the stakes or simply understand the politics.

Axios’s post is largely about the bipartisan investigation of the HuggingFace attacks where Senator Hawley is taking point, but it also includes the more recent concerns.

House Speaker Mike Johnson continues to act sanely and this continues to be reported strangely

Indeed, Johnson said Monday that there will be a White House meeting with AI executives by early next week at the latest, prior to the China summit.

David Sacks Stops Being Plausibly Constructive

*JD Vance finds the whole thing ‘a little weird’ with companies asking for regulation, saying it feels ‘a little bit to me like a Trojan horse.’

David Sacks was initially hostile but in a potentially constructive way. He has now retreated to joining the other Usual Suspects like his co-host Jason and is back to fully lying about what is being requested, as per usual*

Federal Trade Commission Chooses Danger

I am not going to pretend Andrew Ferguson actually thinks that leading AI labs working together on AI safety is suspicious or sounds like moat digging.

Maggie Eastland (Bloomberg): US antitrust regulators are already signaling their skepticism toward giving AI companies an exemption to coordinate on safety. Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson said Tuesday he would be “deeply suspicious” of such requests

Chris Lehane Heel Face Turn

Alex Bores claims, consistent with my observations and reporting, that a16z, Chris Lehane and Leading the Future have, at least until recently, consistently followed the standard industry lobbyist playbook. You try to kill all the bills, then if you cannot kill the bill you claim to support the bill, and try to weaken the bill or shove your provisions into the bill, then turn around and say you supported the bill all along. Which they are now trying at the federal level

If OpenAI and Greg Brockman and Chris Lehane were to all collectively pull their support and funding from Leading the Future, and disavow its activities, that would be an excellent way to show that this new pivot to safety is fully legit. Leading the Future could also fully pivot to data center concerns

at Meta, where Mark Zuckerberg has been actively blocking action all the way at the top, and it makes sense to say first things first you have to stop before I will work for you, at any price.

Lehane announced, per Bloomberg, OpenAI support for various legislative initiatives, ‘whatever we can get through.’ Quite the change of tune, if he means it.

A Matter of Trust

OpenAI is also exploring the legality of a coordinated industry slowdown. The worry is that this might conflict rather more forcefully with antitrust law, potentially making it illegal to agree to not risk killing everyone

China Calls It Fearmongering

China is responding as if calls to slow down Anthropic and OpenAI are a plot to ‘slow China down’ and be anti-competitive in some way. This is consistent with their standard rhetorical position.

if we wanted to actually be anti-competitive, we would just impose the controls and then keep building better AIs as fast as possible.

Pick Up The Phone

*A key question in all this is: What would a deal with China look like?

Part of that is asking: What would China want as part of that deal? Why would China care about ‘America invests more in safety’ when they don’t care about safety in that sense*

they’re not trying to get to superintelligence.

What I realized was, if that’s what Xi turns out to want, then you don’t need a deal with China, any more than we need a deal with Germany.

All we need from China in that world is some amount of good stewardship. We need them not to allow model releases that would destroy the internet or cause a plague

Meanwhile, China has put out its version 3.0 of its AI Safety Governance Framework. Here are some translated quotes, this is prosaic stuff but they do pay attention:

If You Want To Beat China So Badly You Should Act Like It

As Roge Karma points out in The Atlantic, our current AI policy is contradictory.

At a bare minimum, that starts with enforcing strong export controls on chips, and also on other ways for China to use American compute for training frontier models.

If one were fully serious, one would also do things like make it easy to brain drain China of its best AI engineers

If one were really fully serious, there would be a major push for all forms of electrical power and energy, and for things like building more housing especially in San Francisco, and for deregulating barriers to AI diffusion in places like the FDA, and so on. These are things I would strongly support.

Never Go Full Hoax

Trump went full hoax

he is alone on an unpopular and unstable island. Speaker Johnson, Scott, Cox and DeSantis are far from the only Republicans to break ranks.

Even if the situation stabilizes for now, and will likely make it as far as the China summit, the next AI incident is coming. Trump responds very differently to concrete threats than to hypotheticals

Trump Uses AI For Things

: What do you use AI for?
Trump: I don’t want to tell you that.