I take no joy in saying this, but after watching a recent segment on CNN, I’m embarrassed for Anderson Cooper. (Or maybe I’m depressed; if this is all that’s required to have a prime-time news program and the $18 million annual salary to go along with it, surely I’ve chosen the wrong career.) I should confess here that I’m not a regular viewer of Cooper. That said, I’ve seen plenty of his segments on either CNN or 60 Minutes over the years, and I’m also old enough to remember his coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And so my general impression is probably similar to most: Cooper is a serious, diligent, trustworthy newsperson who values thoroughness and integrity. I don’t think he would intentionally mislead his audience. I don’t think he’d intentionally let himself be used by those spreading propaganda.
And yet, I’m writing this for a reason. That reason is a recent Anderson Cooper 360 segment that boosted a carefully crafted marketing stunt from an AI doomsday cult known as Effective Altruism, which is one of the Es in the larger Silicon Valley quasi-religious belief system known as TESCREAL.
In any event, Cooper’s piece instantly made me remember a segment on Google’s Deep Mind AI lab that was reported by respected and trustworthy 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, who recently resigned his own post after the Silicon Valley takeover of CBS News. The reason I thought of Pelley was this: whether we’re talking about him and 60 Minutes, or about Cooper Anderson (also a 60 Minutes correspondent), these reporters, and by extension their producers, reveal how utterly out of their depth they are when it comes to coverage of AI.
Here was Anderson’s story, for those unfamiliar: A junior-level researcher named Jacob Coxon, 27 years old, quit his job at Anthropic, one of the big three US-based Large Language Model (LLM) developers, with Google and OpenAI being the two others, followed by irrelevant players like Meta and xAI. In the days leading up to Jacob turning in his resignation, Jacob and a few of his colleagues worked on a shared Google Doc where they drafted and revised a series of social media posts that were to accompany Jacob’s resignation. In other words, Jacob and his dimwit colleagues in the AI doomsday space (more on that in just a bit) were crafting his Anthropic departure in the same way a TikTok influencer crafts messaging about supplements or skincare. They were trying to get a post to go viral.
Coxon’s Tweet reads as follows:
Coordinating with several colleagues, the announcement was immediately retweeted in order to goose X’s visibility algorithm, as Coxon’s X account had barely been used prior to September 8th, 2026.
Even more revealing than the uncanny retweet timing, the Wall Street Journal had a story on Coxon’s dramatic resignation up on their website roughly 15 minutes before Coxon’s tweet went live. Consider the implications of that previous sentence. Unless Anthropic’s AI crapped out the instructions for time travel and we all just missed it, front-running a tweet about humanity’s extinction with a press release to the WSJ seems a lot less like a troubled conscience wrestling with concerns over work they find morally objectionable, and rather more like evidence of a deliberate marketing campaign.
And yet. 150 million views and 200,000 new followers later, here we are.
Now, before I click ‘publish,’ is it worth investigating the initial re-tweeters who improbably stumbled on Coxon’s tweet within mere minutes of it going live? It is.
According to some sourced digging from Parker Thayer posted to X, those accounts included Nathan Calvin, General Counsel at Encode AI, Peter Wildeford, Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network, and Daniel Kokotajlo, Head of the AI Futures Project. Never heard of these dudes or these nonprofits, either? In what I’m sure is pure coincidence, a couple of web searches reveal that all three of these entities are AI doomer advocacy nonprofits. (AI doomer = AI will wake up and kill us.) Firms like the AI Futures Project, for example, predict that AI will take over the world in 2027. As corollary, the web searches further reveal that all three are white guys whose livelihoods depend on nonprofit fundraising efforts; all three nonprofits are fundraising off the back of a prophecy claiming that AI is Skynet from The Terminator.
Speaking of the AI Futures Project and Daniel Kokotalo: is it worth mentioning where Daniel spent the afternoon on September 9th, the day after Jacob Coxon’s viral resignation tweet. It is.
He was on fucking Rogan!
So in a 24-hour span, we have Daniel Kokotajlo appearing on Joe Rogan for 2 hours, while Jacob Coxon appears on Cooper Anderson 360 for 10 minutes (before making the rounds on other outlets like Fox and MS Now.) As I said, I’m only a casual observer of Cooper’s work, but if there’s one thing I know for a fact, it’s that when it comes to a newsman’s reputation, Anderson Cooper does not want his name in the same sentence as Joe Rogan.
Moreover, when you pull a bit more at the thread of Coxon’s resignation tweet, you find the financial backing of the these nonprofits (like Kokotajlo’s AI Futures Project) from folks like Jann Tallinn (Skype billionaire) and Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook billionaire) and Max Nadeau of Coefficient Giving, yet another Moskovitz philanthropy. In fact, according to tax returns we have access to thanks to ProPublica, we learn that there have been direct cash payments from a Moskivitz firm to Jacob Coxon in 2022.
All of the men I just mentioned, and the connections between them, are explored in my book Lies My Tech Bro Told Me. In that book, I argue that what appears at a glance to be opposing viewpoints are, on closer inspection, not all that opposing after all. Whether we’re talking about an AI boomer like Altman, Musk, and Peter Thiel (AI boomer = AI will wake up and save us), or an AI doomer like Yudkowski, Moskovitz, and Jacob Coxon, all of these deeply strange Silicon Valley men are running the same grift. And that grift is based on a prophecy about Large Language Models which simply will not come to pass.
In fact, I can summarize this argument in two questions.
If AI can do all you say it can do, why hasn’t it done that already?
Conversely, if AI is going to kill everyone, why hasn’t it done that already? (And moreover, what are you doing to stop it?)
This is why The AI Doc was such a waste of everyone’s time, by the way! This is why Anderson Cooper’s CNN segment featuring Jacob Coxon was such a disservice to its audience. Just take an extra day before repeating every unverified and/or unfalsifiable claim! All of this stuff is trivially easy to track down - if I can do it, surely a $18 million/year newsman at 60 Minutes and CNN can do the same, or at least have a producer do some digging!
The reason why all this matters is because Anderson’s CNN audience, unfortunately, is other news outfits. For example, the audience is my local CBS affiliate who runs a headline about the Anthropic “whistleblower” in its crawl during its weather segment. (Coxon is in no way a “whistleblower,” a designation which grants specific legal standing.)
Even more unfortunately, that audience is policymakers who we’re counting on to understand the issue and respond appropriately. As of September 9th, Coxon’s tweet had replies/reposts from no less than 22 major politicians - 2 governors, 7 senators, and 13 house representatives. But Anderson’s piece helps precisely no one understand what’s going on. What’s going on is that we’re being conned, and we’re being stolen from, all to make a trivial number of white men, like Amodei and Altman, like Jacob Coxon and Daniel Kokotajlo, very very rich.
Even more depressing is that one of those senators was Bernie Sanders, who started his Twitter reply with “Mr. Coxon is right.”
Full disclosure: I’m generally a fan of Bernie. But he appears to be getting terrible, terrible advice from his staff about all things AI. (He supports a moratorium on data center construction for example, which I think is good, but not for the reasons Bernie gives, which ends up playing into the hands of AI bros. He’s also proposed that the government become shareholders in AI companies like OpenAI, which is a staggeringly bad idea for reasons we don’t have space to unpack here.)
As a final note (at least for now), I’ll add here that Bernie is right about Coxon being right about AI posing a grave threat to humanity.
The extinction level threat from AI is global warming. It’s AI bros trying to cover the surface of the earth with data centers that consume massive amounts of fossil-fueled electricity. It’s data centers that produce massive amounts of heat as waste. It’s AI cloud giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google helping fossil fuel companies accelerate their extraction of yet more fossil fuels to be burned, to fuel the data centers, to produce the waste heat. And it’s especially the titanically stupid AI bros who think they can launch data centers into space from the moon.
The threat from AI is that despite having all the knowledge and tools we need to begin reversing course on further warming the climate and setting off record El Niños in the Pacific, and glacier collapse in Nepal, and raging fires throughout Europe, the only problem AI seems really good at solving is how to generating sexualized images of Sonic the Hedgehog, or of Donald Trump dressed up in a toga.
You got played, Anderson Cooper,1 and in turn helped countless other media outlets get played as well. I’m not saying you did it on purpose. But you’re getting paid too much money, and have too many producers available to assist, to be the unwitting mouthpiece of a strange, self-dealing AI cult.
I’d say you got played, Joe Rogan, but for Rogan that’s a business model.