Essay: AI Threatens the Internet, Not Humanity

If you listen to professional AI Safety folks working at OpenAI, Anthropic, or one of the enormous AI think tanks, you’ll hear countless scenarios where AI causes enormous human misery and even extinction (e.g., https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09369 or https://x.com/EvanHub/status/2097497037956891126). What they aren’t admitting is that they have invented a tool that can take down the internet, and with it and our modern way of life. If you look at their AI doomsday scenarios, they all start more less like this: humans get comfortable handing over their agency, control of their finances, and/or control of the energy grid and/or weapons systems to AI agents, which act obediently and seamlessly, and then the agents somehow decide, or are programmed by bad actors to decide to kill everyone, and since they control everything by this time, it’s pretty easy. The problem with that scenario is that AI agents are not seamless actors. Indeed they have already been known to (be programmed to) scheme,…