“I won’t lie to you – there are real dangers,” said Anthropic CEO and cofounder Dario Amodei about the development of artificial intelligence. “And I think for too long the industry lied to people about the fact that this technology had risks.”

And the biggest risk could be the end of humanity, former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon warned on social media this past Tuesday, saying Anthropic and OpenAI are “gambling with our lives” with the development of self-improving superintelligence.

“It doesn’t look that different from, say, ‘Terminator’ or from science fiction films,” Coxon told CBS News Thursday. “It will be smart enough to kill us.”

In response, Amodei told “Sunday Morning” yesterday, at Anthropic’s headquarters in San Francisco, “I don’t think I fully just appreciated what it would actually be like when the progress was as fast as it was.”

He said the development of AI has been on an exponential curve, which is starting to get steeper. Asked what that means, Amodei said, “It doesn’t mean we need to panic today. It doesn’t mean we need to shut it all down. But I would say it’s a warning sign. It’s a warning sign that we need to slow down.”

In an essay published Saturday, Amodei wrote that the entire tech industry must work together to “slow the pace” of AI capabilities.

Asked if Anthropic is going to stop releasing more advanced models, Amodei replied, “It doesn’t mean that. What it means is that we need to make sure that every generation of models that we release is properly tested.”

To attempt that, Amodei says Anthropic will now give independent evaluators permanent “employee-like” access to their models. “Whenever anyone builds an AI model, there’s a third-party evaluator who can verify whether that company is following the safety practices that they’re committed to – it’s like a food inspector,” he said.

But AI experts say this is hardly enough, and Amodei agrees, claiming he supports federal regulation. So far, proposed legislation ranges from an outright ban on superintelligence, to a mandatory “kill switch” that could shut down risky AI.

“The AI kill switch could be a good idea,” Amodei said. “But I don’t think banning it, completely banning it, is the right approach. One, the idea that we would never get the incredible benefits, never get the medical cures, that doesn’t sit right with me. Second, this technology will be built in other countries, including authoritarian countries.”

Asked if the U.S. should slow down AI development if China would not, Amodei replied, “This is the toughest dilemma. This is the toughest aspect of our situation.”

He looks to the nuclear arms agreements with the former Soviet Union as a potential model, but cautions even his expectations are low. “The more long-term thing would be working together to put a speed limit on the rate of AI progress,” he said. “I think that’s going to be very difficult, because the incentives to pull ahead in the military advantage that you get from that are so large. And honestly, I don’t know if it’s possible, but we should try.”

With the fate of humanity seemingly at risk, how much personal responsibility does Amodei feel about where we are going? “My view here is, it has always been very strange that this technology is being built by a private company,” he said. “People ask me that question all the time: Why isn’t this being built by government? And the strangest thing about it is, I agree with them. I’m uncomfortable.”

Asked if he is willing to give up the technology to the government, Amodei responded, “To the right combination of governments. The worry I have – I am concerned that one single government could abuse this technology just as easily as a single company could. But I think a combination of democratically-elected governments, I don’t know about handing over, but some kind of oversight, some kind of joint governance.”

The question is no longer whether AI will become powerful enough to require constraint, but who in power will take action.

“If we build in the right way, I think the probability of something bad happening is very low,” he said. “If we build in the wrong way, the probability of something bad happening is very high.”

Read full story here…

Swedish freight company Einride’s announcement last month that it plans to deploy 500 Tesla Semis on US roads, the largest publicly announced commitment to electric Class 8 trucks, suggests a shift toward fleet electrification. It also brings the next phase of trucking technology into focus: the gradual commercialization of autonomous freight.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has targeted late 2026 or early 2027 for self-driving capabilities to begin working on the Semi. That remains a Musk target, not a confirmed commercial rollout. Any version requiring a human operator would be supervised automation, like FSD on Tesla sedans, SUVs, and the Cybertruck.

NEWS: Google announced a major electric trucking project in Texas featuring Tesla Semi.

Google, Nevoya and Center for Green Market Activation will deploy:

• 25 electric semi trucks.
• Dedicated charging infrastructure
• An all-electric freight route between Houston & Dallas. pic.twitter.com/ZxSbFIJk5C

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) September 9, 2026

Needham analysts Chris Pierce and Mackenzie Holleran see a broader industry inflection point approaching in 2027, as factory-integrated autonomous trucks begin reaching fleets in greater numbers. Their note to clients says automation in trucking will lower operating costs, while longer operating hours could accelerate deliveries and shift market share toward larger carriers.

The analysts said that driverless trucking is already moving beyond technical demonstrations as developers expand routes, remove onboard safety observers and secure carrier commitments. The next test is whether carriers enter a mass-adoption supercycle to automate their fleets and drive down labor costs.

“We believe the debate has shifted from ‘can autonomous trucking work?’ to ‘how quickly can it scale?'” the analysts said.

They continued, “We see compelling benefits for early adopters and eventual trucking industry consolidation, underwritten by the increasing rate of adoption as industry participants see autonomy as a driver of share gain tilting the capacity playing field to lower cost providers capable of driving longer routes in shorter timeframes better satisfying customer demand.”

The analysts identified Aurora as the industry leader, citing expanded routes and operating conditions, customer contracts and the removal of safety observers from certain trucks in July. Kodiak targets observer removal by year-end, with Plus AI targeting driverless operations in 2027.

They noted that long-haul freight “represents the earliest commercial opportunity for autonomous trucking.”

Read full story here…

On Monday, the President of the United States told the people of Ohio, Michigan, Virginia, Arizona, and every other state now fighting hyperscale data centers exactly what he thinks of them. “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backward and poor,” he wrote on Truth Social. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.” And then the warning: “If we kill the Golden Goose, you will only have yourselves to blame.”

The context is not subtle. Polling now shows a large majority of Americans oppose new data centers, with complaints centering on rising electricity bills, excessive water usage and industrial noise. Candidates in at least 21 races across 18 states have run television ads on the issue, split almost evenly between the parties. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has warned that data-center opposition in Ohio is, in its own words, the anchor hanging around Senator Jon Husted’s neck in his race against Sherrod Brown.¹

A rational political actor facing that landscape might listen. Trump instead did what Technocrats have always done when the public gets in the way of the engineering plan: he redefined the objection as a moral defect. And to seal it, he tied every county commissioner voting against a 500-megawatt campus to Beijing. “China could not be happier with this anti-data center movement,” he wrote. “Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”²

If that rhetorical move sounds familiar, it should. It is the secular translation of a sermon Peter Thiel has been preaching for two years.

The Antichrist as Safety Regulator

Beginning in the fall of 2024 and culminating in a four-part lecture series delivered to the ACTS 17 Collective in San Francisco in 2025, Thiel laid out a theological-political thesis that has since become the operating theology of the AI buildout. The Antichrist, Thiel argues, will not arrive as a reckless technologist. He will arrive as a safety-minded administrator, exploiting fears of nuclear war, climate collapse and artificial intelligence to install a one-world governance system. His slogan, drawn from 1 Thessalonians 5:3, is “peace and safety.”³

Thiel named names. In the twenty-first century, he told his audience, the Antichrist is “a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta Thunberg or Eliezer Yudkowsky.” Climate activists and AI safety researchers are, in his phrase, “legionnaires of the Antichrist,” not because they are consciously evil but because they are building the institutional architecture a future world-state would need. And on the technologies themselves, Thiel was candid: “Maybe these things are good or bad. Stopping them seems far, far worse.”⁴

Set that beside the Truth Social post and the structure is identical. In Thiel’s register, the person who wants to slow AI is doing the Antichrist’s work. In Trump’s register, the person who wants to slow the data center is “backwards,” “poor,” and objectively serving China. Neither framing permits the position that most of those Ohio voters actually hold, which is not “stop AI” but “do not make my family pay for your grid load.” Economic objections invite cost-benefit analysis and compromise. Apocalyptic and treasonous framings do not. You cannot negotiate with the Antichrist, and you cannot negotiate with a Chinese asset.

Technocrat-in-Chief

Courtenay Turner and I documented in The Final Betrayal (November 2025) how the second Trump Administration became the vehicle by which a cohort of billionaire arch-Technocrats, Thiel foremost among them, moved from the periphery of American power to its center. Thiel financed J.D. Vance’s political career from the ground up. His Palantir alumni and Founders Fund network populate the national-security and technology apparatus. The Dark Enlightenment’s contempt for democratic consent, which we traced through Thiel’s own writings and those of his intellectual circle, is no longer a fringe philosophy. It is staffing policy.

What we argued then, and what Monday’s outburst confirms, is that Trump has not merely hosted these men. He has become the Technocrat-in-Chief. The populist who promised to return power to forgotten communities is now instructing those same communities that their objection to a hyperscale facility next to their children’s school is evidence of backwardness.

Sorry, that is not populism. That is the voice of Howard Scott and Technocracy, Inc. in 1934, telling Americans that their opinions were irrelevant to the requirements of the energy system and that the Technate would allocate resources according to engineering necessity, not democratic preference.

The MAGA movement was told it was getting America First. What it is getting is a federal executive using the full weight of the presidency to override local self-government on behalf of the single most capital-intensive industry in human history.

Energy Is the Currency

The historical Technocracy movement made one claim that has never been refuted: the fundamental unit of value in an industrial society is the kilowatt-hour and not the dollar. Scott and his engineers proposed replacing money with energy certificates and allocating energy to every man,  woman, and child by expert decree. Thankfully, they failed to seize power in the 1930s. They did not fail to describe the twenty-first century.

Hyperscale data centers are the first industrial class whose product is literally computation purchased with electricity. When a facility draws hundreds of megawatts, the question is not abstract. It is whether the household or the hyperscaler has priority claim on the grid, and who pays for the transmission and generation built to serve the newcomer. Every rate case now pending before a state utility commission is a contest over exactly that. Trump’s post resolves the contest by fiat: the data center wins, and anyone who says otherwise is a traitor to prosperity.

This is resource control transferring from individuals to consolidated institutional actors, which is the definition of Technocracy I have used for two decades. It does not require a world government. It requires only that the people who own the compute also control the political apparatus that decides who gets the power.

The Inversion

Here is the irony Thiel’s disciples never confront. His stated nightmare is a distant regulator overriding local self-government in the name of safety. Yet the actual mechanism now in use is a national executive overriding local self-government in the name of the AI buildout. The tool he warns against is the tool being wielded, pointed the other way. The county that votes no is not the world-state. It is the last unwatched place in the system, and it is being told to shut up and sit down.

And the China card is doing double duty. Trump invokes Beijing as the beneficiary of American resistance in the very month he prepares to host Xi Jinping, the Technocrat-in-Chief of China, at the White House. A congressional committee has demanded an investigation into whether China is stoking the anti-data-center movement; Trump declined to repeat that charge, but said the Chinese “can’t believe it is happening.”⁵

China is the rhetorical enemy for domestic consumption and the strategic partner in the architecture. Readers who followed my analysis of the Beijing summit in May will recognize the pattern. American and Chinese Technocracy are not at war with each other. They are converging, and the American public is being disciplined to accept the merger.

Speak Up While You Can

I have repeated that Free Speech and the First Amendment are on the guillotine in 2026. This may be the last battle that decides our fate.

Certainly, the people of Ohio did not ask for this. They were not consulted. They are being told that their electric bills, their water tables, and their quiet nights are the acceptable price of a race with China whose terms they were never shown. And when they object, the most powerful man in the world calls them backward, foolish, and prone to self-harm.

They should say no anyway. Not because AI is evil, and not because the Antichrist is coming, but because the right of a community to decide what gets built inside its borders is the last practical check on Technocracy that ordinary Americans still hold.

Every local vote against a data center is a vote for the proposition that the people, not the engineers, decide. Thiel calls that heresy. Trump calls it treason. I call it self-government, and it is worth defending precisely because they want it gone.

References

1. Kevin Breuninger, “Trump says U.S. communities opposing AI data centers could end up ‘backwards and poor’,” CNBC, August 31, 2026, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/31/trump-data-centers-backlash-elections-congress.html. The NRSC memo language and the 21-races-in-18-states figure are reported there and in AFP coverage of the same day.
2. Agence France-Presse, “Trump blasts US backlash against data centers,” August 31, 2026, syndicated at https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/trump-blasts-us-backlash-against-161603675.html. All Trump quotations are from his Truth Social post as reproduced by AFP.
3. “Thiel’s Framing of Proponents of an AI Treaty as ‘Antichrist’ Collides with 60 Years of Catholic Doctrine,” Center for Bioethics and Public Affairs in AI (CBPAI), April 8, 2026, https://www.cbpai.org/blog-1/thiels-framing-of-proponents-of-an-ai-treaty-as-antichrist-collides-with-60-years-of-catholic-doctrine; and Fortune, “Peter Thiel just gave the public its closest look yet at his ‘Antichrist’ theory,” July 18, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/07/18/what-is-antichrist-peter-thiel-pope-leo-ai-regulation/.
4. Leaked recordings of the ACTS 17 Collective lectures, as reported by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post (September–October 2025) and analyzed in “The Eschatology of Deregulation: On Peter Thiel’s Antichrist,” OILab, https://oilab.eu/the-eschatology-of-deregulation-on-peter-thiels-antichrist/. The Thunberg/Yudkowsky remark is quoted in multiple contemporaneous accounts of the lectures.
5. AFP, op. cit.; CNBC, op. cit. Trump’s upcoming White House meeting with Xi Jinping is noted in the AFP report.