Dear AI Companies: Stop the “Doom Trolling”

Imagine, for a moment, the following scenario. The Ford Motor Company releases a slick whitepaper making the alarming claim that they’re concerned their popular F-150 pickup trucks might soon spontaneously burst into flames. The report features a fancy animated graphic depicting a line of vehicles catching on fire, one after another, and concludes by acknowledging that this “possible future” would be bad, but that there’s nothing they can do about the issue so long as “less cautious” automobile companies exist. This, of course, would be absurd. But it’s the exact type of communication some Frontier AI companies have been subjecting us to in recent years. Indeed, in this example, if you replace Ford Motor Company with Anthropic and F-150s bursting into flames with AI coding agents recursively self-improving themselves beyond human control, then you get the ​“When AI builds itself”​ report that Anthropic published earlier this month. For me, that particular release was the last straw.…