‘Rogue AI’ Is Covid 2.0

he AI panic is not going away, in fact it’s gathering the kind of fevered hysterical momentum we have not seen since the birth of Covid.

Nothing about it is organic, it is all 100% cultivated and steered in a direction. The final aim of this manufactured, fear-based social programming is new regulation. That has become undeniably obvious.

All that remains to be discovered is how bad it’s going to be.

But before we get into where we are right now, or where we might be heading, I want to look back and reflect at how we got here, because the timeline is revealing.

In late July, OpenAI claim – (the MSM used leading words like “revealed” and “admitted”, but it was just a claim) – that some of their AI agents had “gone rogue” and hacked a tech company called “Hugging Face”.
In the immediate aftermath of this “revelation”, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told the media he was “surprised more people didn’t feel it viscerally”.
In the following week, we were told the original hack was worse than initially reported, and three other AI agents reportedly also went rogue.
What followed was a procession of stories – some big, some small – filling the headlines with “AI is scary” content, everything from “AI designed viruses” to “digital telepathy”.
AI was routinely being compared to nuclear weapons, or other WMDs, and calls grew for an “international non-proliferation treaty”
Alongside this, we were told of a steady stream of resignations, and many of those who didn’t resign were signing open letters condemning the industry.
Then, out of nowhere, one particular resignation – that of researcher Jacob Coxon – hits international headlines. His claim that AI has a “10% chance of killing all humans by the end of the decade” is amplified and published in every newspaper. He gives interviews with every major English speaking network repeating that claim.
Far from seeking to quieten this alarmism, many AI experts and CEOs actually agree, with some going so far as to call it an understatement, and estimate a 20%, 50% or even 70% chance of human extinction.

In other words, they told a story about scary AI, failed to frighten people, upped the scare volume, tried again and kept trying until finally, by sheer brute force of manic overstatement, they got the desired reaction.

And that’s how we find ourselves here – amid the greatest conglomeration of hysterical bullshittery we’ve seen since the pan-bangers and nurse clappers were out in force.

In the last few days alone, the UN has claimed AI is a threat to all human rights, that it’s being used by tyrants to wage war, that an AI “takeover of the internet” could happen “any day now” and the AI data centers are going to use so much gas and make climate change worse.

Anthropic have alleged they had to prevent dangerous researchers using AI to make bio-weapons.

And AI agents are “better at coordinating than humans”:

Tristan Harris, co-founder of Center for Humane Technology, is sounding the alarm amid fallout from the so-called Hugging Face incident and AI CEOs calling for a slow down. AI agents “appear to be better at coordinating than humans,” he says. https://t.co/L4hcNQETeN

— Anderson Cooper 360° (@AC360) September 16, 2026

One repeated refrain is that “AI = nuclear weapons”. We’re warned that AI might have a “Chernobyl moment”, that it’s “more dangerous than nukes” and that its development is the like a “mini Manhattan project”.

Time’s cover story declares this “The AI Tipping Point”

In one wonderfully coincidental piece of timing, Netflix just released the AI apocalypse documentary they’ve apparently been working on for the last three years.

The fear stories are still gushing out, as the overwhelming consensus on the need for regulation swells.

Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon are uniting left and right wing in the name a “pro-human” future.

This on-message unity encompasses Secretary General of the UN, Barack Obama, Bill Gates, Ursula van Der Leyen, Nobel Peace Prize winners, Kamala Harris, the CEOs of every major AI company, the Council on Foreign Relations…it goes on and on.

The only person resolutely defending AI is Donald Trump, but it’s his job to always be “wrong”.

Let’s just emphasize that none of these people mean a single word of the doom-speak coming out of their mouths.

Though maybe Andrew Marr is just dim enough that he might believe the nonsense he sums up thus…

Humanity is at a crossroads this Autumn. This is more important than the migrant boats crisis, than the budget, than Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin […] this is bigger than any country, it’s a lot bigger than any single company, no matter how gigantic. We have to learn to think differently.

This is Covid-era rhetoric. Real New Normal 2.0 stuff. This IS the major psy-op, only this time they don’t need to fake a pandemic, they just claim an illusory threat.

And meanwhile the only real threat AI poses – as an essential aid in propaganda and the nurturing of unreal ‘reality, is being entirely ignored.

You can bet whatever regulation is rolled out it won’t touch the manufacturers of those fake history and crime channels on Youtube, or the generation of ever more deceptive LLM information bots.

Fortunately, people are sort of like a non-Newtonian fluid – the harder the powers-that-be push, the more resistance they can tend to  meet.

That means we’re starting to see the growth of some pushback – which is good, although it is often, and misguidedly I think, phrased in terms of the fear campaign being about money, stock prices and looming IPOs. I don’t doubt that may play a role, but this degree of unanimity  is a big effort for nothing more than a little money. Especially considering that a lot of the fear-manufacturers already have more money than they can ever spend.

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