Silicon Valley’s AI accelerationists fight back against doomer mind virus | Latest Tech News
Physicists are warning against Effective Altruists spreading a “mind virus” over Silicon Valley, selling a “doomer” view of Artificial Intelligence.
Calls to regulate AI have been growing from industry leaders Anthropic and OpenAI, who warn the technology they’re building may kill us all.
However, those who checklist themselves as AI accelerationists really feel such firms are bluffing in a bid to safeguard the benefits they’ve gained after spending billions of {dollars} creating their AI fashions.
Guillaume Verdon, founder of e/acc motion. Courtesy of Guillaume Verdon
“I don’t think AI is going to kill us all. I think that sort of thinking is more dangerous than the AI itself,” Guillaume Verdon, the physicist who based the Effective Accelerationism motion, told The Post.
“If you ask any of these doomers how it’s supposed to kill us all, they can never flesh out all the details … I’m a mathematician. Show me the math.”
Verdon identified how the follow of Effective Altruism — a philosophy which believes a sure circle of enlightened people dedicated to doing the most good are the only ones to be trusted — has “culturally, ideologically compromised all these big labs.”
“Someone has to stand up to this complex,” he said, noting he has endured pushback he blames on AI “doomers.”
“They think I’m Voldemort,” he added, referring to the Harry Potter villain. “They are obsessed with ‘Harry Potter.’”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei revealed “We Must Pace the Frontier,” earlier this month, urging firms to slow advances in their most highly effective systems, embed outdoors evaluators inside their labs and work with the federal government on regulation.
Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort in a scene from “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2” in 2011. ©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection
Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief govt officer of Anthropic, is pictured during an interview on “The Circuit with Emily Chang” at Anthropic’s headquarters in San Francisco on April 30, 2026. Anthropic is testing a different model of management, one where the CEO protects almost all of his time for big-picture conversations, organizational tradition, and giving enter on research direction and strategy, reasonably than managing people in senior management roles. Bloomberg via Getty Images
But Verdon famous the proposed regulators are all mates with the CEOs and higher-ups at the largest AI firms.
“They propose the third-party auditors that are all from the same ideological school of thought. They’re all friends, and there’s a revolving door,” he said.
“They’re just gonna be a sort of cartel with fake checks and balances,” he charged.
Anthropic didn’t reply to a request for remark from The Post.
Government regulation as nicely as partisan regulators aligned with Anthropic and OpenAI can be large obstacles for smaller firms — or those who don’t adhere to the same philosophy.
“The AI CEOs can only do so much,” Verdon said, describing Anthropic CEO Amodei as “a very thoughtful guy.”
A post by Donald J. Trump on Truth Social is shown on Sept. 14, 2026. actualDonaldTrump / Truth Social
“I don’t think they’re necessarily bad people,” he said of people he is aware of at the company. “I think they are just so deep in this ideology they can’t see clearly.”
President Trump and senior authorities officers have rejected calls for new guardrails for AI firms, telling them there may be nothing stopping them from regulating themselves.
The public stays uneasy. A Pew Research Center survey of 3,488 adults in June discovered 52% have been more involved than excited about AI’s growing position in daily life.
Verdon says his Effective Accelerationism motion is totally decentralized. Its zeal for fast technological progress has discovered a champion in enterprise capitalist Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”
“We don’t have billions of dollars of shadow funding trying to influence things,” Verdon said, tongue-in-cheek. He advocates for more competitors, more open-source AI fashions and freedom to construct.
His startup, Extropic, is developing energy-efficient computing chips. In July the company announced a nonbinding letter of intent for up to $75 million in Commerce Department funding.
Not every builder is offered. Bojan Tunguz, a data scientist and founder of Tampa-area startup TabulAI, calls himself “adjacent” to e/acc.
“I don’t believe that acceleration at any cost is an absolute good,” he told The Post. “I do think that some cap might be necessary at some point and some pacing might be justifiable.”
Noting the fast tempo of growth, he said today’s AI instruments already let him construct issues that weren’t doable “even six months ago.”
He welcomes open fashions as a dependable fallback if big labs prohibit access to their instruments. But he rejects the concept cornering the market is their motive.
Asked about Verdon’s “mind virus” claims, Tunguz took a broader view.
“I think we all have our own mind viruses — our own perspectives, our own favorite worldviews,” he said. “I think we are all to some extent accelerationists. The question is just how far.”
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