Do COVID And AI Rhyme?

Different threats, familiar warnings — and the same prescription: more government.

Brian C. Joondeph | September 21, 2026

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes, is a maxim commonly attributed to Mark Twain.

COVID and artificial intelligence don’t rhyme in the traditional sense. But listen closely to the political cadence and the similarities become difficult to ignore.

Both arrived as potentially existential threats. Both generated remarkably coordinated warnings from politicians, government officials, experts, and industry leaders. And both quickly produced the familiar prescription: We are facing catastrophe, time is running out, and government must act.

Image created by ChatGPT

The latest AI chorus began rather suddenly.

On Sept. 3, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar announced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, legislation intended to permanently prohibit the development of artificial superintelligence and temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulator establishes safety rules.

Five days later, Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher who had worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned from Anthropic and made his first post on X.

It was quite a debut.

Coxon warned that AI companies were “gambling with our lives” and racing toward self-improving superintelligence. He said people building AI genuinely believed it could kill us all by the end of the decade.

His post went viral, accumulating well over 100 million views and transforming a relatively unknown researcher into an international voice on AI safety virtually overnight.

Days later, some of the biggest names in artificial intelligence joined the chorus. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Elon Musk agreed that development should be slowed or, in Amodei’s terminology, that we should “pace the frontier.”

Think about that for a moment.

Some of the people leading the race are now asking government to help slow the race.

Business titans generally don’t beg Washington to regulate their industries. When they do, it is reasonable to ask why.

Perhaps these executives genuinely fear what they are creating. Given the extraordinary capabilities of AI, that possibility should not be dismissed.

But there is another possibility.

Regulation is expensive.........

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