Artificial Intelligence

The 'AI Safety' Movement Is Making AI Less Safe

The fear of superintelligence is driving decisions that make AI less transparent and more consolidated.

Matthew Petti | 9.22.2026 5:16 PM

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Isn't it weird that the most dramatic cries about AI risk are coming from inside the AI companies? After Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon resigned over fears that its product could destroy humanity itself earlier this month, the company's alignment science lead, Evan Hubinger, publicly agreed that his product has a 10 percent chance of causing human extinction in the next decade. Employees at Anthropic's competitor, OpenAI, have been voicing similar sentiments.

It's not a coincidence. Many AI frontier researchers and "AI doomers" alike are animated by an almost religious belief that "artificial superintelligence" will soon supplant humanity. The philosopher Émile Torres calls the debate between the AI labs and the doomers a "narcissism of small differences."  Not only do both sides share a vision of the future, but they also agree on a very specific set of philosophical assumptions, which Torres abbreviated as "TESCREAL."

These assumptions are driving an extremely counterproductive "AI safety" movement. In the name of protecting humanity from a dangerous technology, would-be regulators (including leaders of the AI industry itself) are pushing to keep this technology in the hands of an unaccountable monopoly. Enforced through tyrannical means, a ban on uncontrolled research would deprive the public of both an understanding of the state of AI and the technology needed to defend against its harmful uses. And while TESCREAL-influenced industry leaders push the government to embrace this tech, the same TESCREAL beliefs are leading to some bizarre design choices that make AI harder to control.

The second "E" in TESCREAL stands for "effective altruism," a philosophical movement popular among computer nerds over the past decade. Anthropic's Dario Amodei and the leadership of OpenAI were both heavily influenced by effective altruism. (So was infamous cryptocurrency scammer Sam Bankman-Fried.) Many members of this movement have become convinced that the most important question of the 21st century is keeping AI "aligned" with human values.

Perhaps the clearest........

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