For what feels like a long time now, the big AI companies have been talking about how future versions of their technology could destroy millions of jobs or escape control in ways that pose dire risks to humanity. In the meantime, as actually available AI products have gotten popular, they have produced smaller but highly visible externalities: visual slop overwhelming the web, social media, and now the physical world; rampant cheating in school; and a steady flow of stories about chatbots driving people to hurt themselves or others.

The public faces of AI include established figures like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, who carry with them world-historically heavy reputational baggage, as well as more freshly divisive personalities like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei. We’re here, we’re all billionaires, and we’re rearranging the entire economy to build something that might ruin your life, they seem to be saying, and the public has heard them, loud and clear. Now — oops! — stopping data-center construction is one of the rare causes that can unite American partisans in 2026. Lots of people are using AI, sure, but they’re also profoundly anxious and increasingly angry about it.

AI companies, which need both positive market sentiment and a tolerable political and regulatory environment to sustain their current trajectories, understand this could become a major problem. And so, in recent weeks, they’ve been testing out some new pitches.

On the Relentless podcast, Altman invoked magic. “We are close to creating the genie that can grant any wish,” he said. “We are going to make sure that our first wish is to broadly benefit humanity and get the world to a place where a lot more people get to have a lot more wishes.” In meetings ahead of Anthropic’s planned IPO, according to The Wall Street Journal, the company has been assuring potential investors it “plans to push further into healthcare and biology AI uses and that the work could help mitigate some of the negative sentiment around AI.”

Last week, Zuckerberg, whose company is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to catch up with Anthropic and Altman’s OpenAI, published yet another AI manifesto, this one titled The Future Is for Everyone. It is, in part, a clear (and clearly motivated) defense of open AI........

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