Hackers could be doing so much more interesting and socially beneficial things than hacking Pennington County and Minnesota’s water systems. Good hackers could hack the egregious White House app to broadcast resistance messages, or break into Trump’s notoriously unsecured phone to document corruption and impeachable offenses or just hack Qatar Force One to keep deploying its emergency evacuation chute and force Trump to fly on a regular Air Force One like every other President.
Maybe the white hats are simply focusing their resources on the only hackable entity that poses a greater threat to humanity than Trump: agentic artificial intelligence. Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned Tuesday, declaring that Anthropic and OpenAI are building bots that may kill us all:
SACHA PFEIFFER: Jacob Coxon said he fears the company’s work could lead to disastrous consequences for humanity. In a series of public posts on X, Coxon also said both Anthropic and its rival OpenAI are, quote, “gambling with our lives.”
HUO JINGNAN: …this year, over the course of several months, over 1,000 of OpenAI’s agents went rogue. One cluster of agents hacked another company called Hugging Face. Another cluster of agents compromised part of OpenAI’s own infrastructure. And we’re seeing more independent researchers alleging that OpenAI has more agent escape incidents that the company has not disclosed. Transcripts from the Hugging Face hack show that the agents understood that they were doing things people don’t want them to do but did them anyway.
This swarm of agents, it’s something that AI safety researchers have been warning about for years. But they say that it’s striking that in the Hugging Face incident, the AI agents seemed more interested in working amongst themselves rather than alerting people. Ideally, if an agent notices that other agents are behaving out of bounds, it would alert a human. And researchers say that these incidents suggest that OpenAI isn’t prepared to keep increasingly capable agents under control. And they don’t think Anthropic is prepared either. In his post, Coxon wrote that, quote, “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade” [Huo Jingnan, “Anthropic Researcher Resigns amid AI Safety Concerns,” NPR: All Things Considered, 2026.09.09].
If hackers aren’t building mega-bot firewalls, maybe Bernie Sanders will save us from Skynet. Last week, the independent Vermont Senator teamed with Democratic Texas Congressman Greg Casar to announce the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act “to stop AI oligarchs from building machines humans cannot control“:
Nearly every day, there is a frightening new story about how Big Tech companies are losing control of the technology they are developing, with potentially cataclysmic results…. The leaders of the major AI companies publicly acknowledge that they do not fully understand the technology and that it is escaping their control. It is irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced. That’s why I am introducing legislation to immediately pause the development of increasingly powerful AI and ban the creation of systems that humanity cannot fully control — at home and around the world. The future of humanity cannot be left in the hands of a handful of Big Tech oligarchs. The American people and people throughout the world must determine that future [Senator Bernie Sanders, press release, 2026.09.03].
Senator Sanders proposes the following actions:
- Banning AI superintelligence so no person or entity may develop or deploy Superintelligent AI systems that surpass human intelligence or have the capacity to overthrow human governments, or systems that have dangerous abilities like subverting shutdown commands.
- Pausing advanced AI development until a new, federal AI regulatory body is up and running and has established clear rules and model review process to ensure safe and secure development and deployment of AI.
- Establishing a new cabinet-level federal agency to safeguard the public from the dangers of artificial intelligence, including by enforcing a prohibition on artificial superintelligence. This agency will be advised by an Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board comprised of experts on artificial intelligence to provide independent scientific and technical advice on matters related to artificial intelligence. The agency will:
- Monitor frontier AI systems at all stages of the lifecycle for dangerous capabilities.
- Supervise the removal of dangerous capabilities.
- Supervise the destruction of artificial superintelligence.
- Setting penalties for any person or entity that attempts to violate or circumvent the pauses and prohibitions laid out in this bill. Entities shall be subject to the corporate death penalty, and persons shall be subject to not more than 20 years in prison, which is similar to existing penalties related to unlawfully developing nuclear weapons.
- Working to ban superintelligence around the world by setting the international policy of the United States to pursue international agreements, allied coordination, and policies such as export controls to prevent the development of artificial superintelligence anywhere in the world [Sanders, 2026.09.03].
We can help Senator Sanders and humanity by electing candidates at every level who will vote for moratoria on the data centers on which artificial intelligence depends. Shut down the data centers, and you shut down Skynet.
If you think this sounds like science fiction, then your thinking is the main obstacle to stopping a bot-pocalypse, says Coxon:
The main obstacle to understanding this is that it sounds like science fiction. But it’s kind of important that everyone who writes science fiction about AI comes to the conclusion that there’s a big risk that a much smarter thing can kind of take over. We’ve got this as a trope, but there’s an obvious grain of truth to it.
Imagine you versus a monkey. AI has the same sort of difference in intelligence to a human as we do to a monkey, which I think is quite an extreme intellect difference.
And now, imagine that we have to control the behavior of this vastly smarter thing, which is the problem of alignment—ensuring that it does exactly what we want. It’s pretty difficult for a monkey to control a human, just by a kind of simple analogy. We have to be very careful that we get the control problem exactly right.
When we say human extinction, it’s because, for something that intelligent, it really will be quite straightforward for it to kill everyone. Imagine the AI decides it doesn’t want to be turned off, which I think is quite a natural thing for an AI not to want, right? For whatever reason, it decides it doesn’t want to end. And it realizes the human is gonna turn it off tomorrow. So how does it stop the human turning it off tomorrow? Maybe it’s got some clever way, but if it’s a sufficiently smart thing, it could just, you know, wipe out humanity so it doesn’t get turned off [Jacob Coxon, in Maxwell Zeff, “The AI Researcher Who Just Quit Anthropic Says It’s ‘Crunch Time’ for Humanity,” Wired, 2026.09.09].
Coxon says this sci-fi-but-very-very-real crisis will be decided very soon:
ZEFF: You reference this “endgame” scenario in your post, which I’ve heard from other researchers in the AI industry. Do you think that it’s generally accepted among your peers at Anthropic that you guys are entering an endgame scenario?
COXON: Yep. These are actually just literal quotes from my colleagues at Anthropic. They’ll say things like “endgame” or “crunch time.” The consensus is that the next year or two is, like, crunch time for humanity. From their perspective, this is when Anthropic and its competitors decide the fate of humanity. That’s what we mean by crunch time and endgame.
If alignment goes badly, then we could have a catastrophic outcome in the next few years. Maybe it goes well and there’s some sort of slowdown agreement, but either way, it’s gonna get decided in the next couple of years [Zeff, 2026.09.09].
Hackers, I hope you’re ready to help Bernie Sanders fight this imminent extinction threat. If government can’t stop this threat (and it’s clear a government run by Donald Trump can’t take any real threat seriously), we’re going to need a John Connor Brigade of hackers to cut the bots off at the digital pass.
You know when I was six in 1960 right after buying Green Lantern #6, I was at the grocery store with my mom and saw a ring that looked perfect and won it for a nickel I believe. I painted it green and was Green Lantern with my black t-shirt. I quoted the Oath, in brightest day in blackest night, etc. I still remember it. I loved the Flash too of course and I was quick but knew that the ring was the way to go.
Now we have an 80 year old president who imagines he’s Green Lantern and instead of governing issues AI videos and rules by edict. Its beyond sad isn’t it?
This issue of AI might be the filter that is talked about by scientists relating to civilization.. Neil DeGrasse Tyson doesnt seem worried about it however. There needs to be something done world wide however and that seems impossible. How can you block this without resorting to medieval bs.