A coordinated “AI apocalypse” scare campaign has erupted at the exact start of the 2026 midterm election season, looking suspiciously like the climate hoax that once demanded global control over energy. New York Post columnist Miranda Devine argues the timing is no accident.
Just as voters begin focusing on November races, a low-level 27-year-old AI researcher named Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic last week and announced it in a Wall Street Journal exclusive plus a viral X thread claiming the people building AI “earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade” and “are gambling with our lives.”
His boss, Democrat-aligned Anthropic founder and CEO Dario Amodei, immediately amplified the message. On Saturday he published a 3,800-word essay calling for the industry to slow the pace of AI capabilities. On Sunday CBS aired an interview in which Amodei essentially argued for one-world-style regulation: “the right combination of governments” providing “some kind of joint governance” to control the technology. He said a single government or company could abuse it equally, so democratically elected governments should share oversight.
Coxon, a Brit who previously worked at OpenAI on pretraining models, spent only four months at Anthropic and left before his equity vested. He described colleagues using terms like “crunchtime” and “endgame” for the race toward self-improving systems that could spiral out of human control by the end of next year. Anthropic’s own alignment lead publicly agreed that researchers sincerely believe AI could kill all humans, with some putting the chance above 10 percent this decade.
The campaign launched with a relatively junior researcher’s dramatic resignation, then the CEO’s lengthy essay and prime-time interview—classic amplification tactics.
Critics, including Elon Musk, immediately questioned whether Coxon’s high-profile exit was a setup to push regulation. Coxon insisted his beliefs are genuine and that he had no prior coordination with advocacy groups. Meanwhile President Trump has dismissed such doom predictions as “things that won’t happen” and said the United States must win the AI race because “whoever wins AI, wins.”
The sudden intensity of existential warnings from inside the very labs racing to build the technology, arriving the week midterm campaigning ramps up, raises the same questions Devine has long asked about climate messaging: who benefits from the panic, and why now?