The Tyrannical Race to Build Superintelligence

Many people in Silicon Valley like to talk about the importance of democracy. The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, has repeatedly described the race to build artificial superintelligence as one between the democratic U.S. and an authoritarian China. “We should arm democracies with AI,” he writes. “It makes sense to use AI to empower democracies to resist autocracies.” He further promises that if Western companies build ASI in the right way, the result will be “a renaissance of liberal democracy and human rights.”

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, similarly declares that “AI has to be democratized” and that “we have to work within the democratic process, even though it will be messy and slower than we’d like.” In a 2016 interview with The New Yorker, he said that OpenAI is “planning a way to allow wide swaths of the world to elect representatives to a new governance board. Because if I weren’t in on this I’d be, like, Why do these fuckers get to decide what happens to me?”

Despite these bold proclamations of fidelity to democratic principles, there is nothing democratic about the way OpenAI and Anthropic have built or deployed their AI systems. Not once have these companies asked the people — you and me — whether we want their AI chatbots. Not once did they solicit our opinions about the AIs now flooding the internet with slop, polluting the environment and exploiting our collective intellectual property (everything on the internet) for profit. Rather, they unilaterally decided to unleash AI on the world without our permission or consent, while predicting that AI will soon take everyone’s job and perhaps even destroy the world.

If they took democracy seriously, and based their company’s decisions on what the people actually want, they’d immediately shut down all research projects aiming to further augment the capabilities of AI. That’s because the public — as you may have heard — doesn’t like AI. We don’t want it. We don’t want massive AI data centers popping up in our backyards. We don’t like reading about AI-induced episodes of psychosis in vulnerable populations. We don’t like seeing AI-slop videos on YouTube or reading the slop-filled articles now published at the same rate as human-written articles. We don’t like Grok undressing women on X or worrying about AI deepfakes posing as our children over the phone. We don’t like AI being shoved down our throats by companies that believe they’ll soon be able to replace all their workers with AIs cheaply rented through subscriptions from the AI companies. We don’t like AI-enabled mass surveillance or the U.S. government using AI to select targets in Iran and, soon, autonomously control lethal weapons that kill human beings with no human oversight.

Altman noted on X last year that he “never took the dead internet theory that seriously but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now.” The Dead Internet conspiracy theory claims that most online activity is the result of bots rather than real humans. But, as Altman notes, thanks to the LLM-based chatbots his own company is building, the conspiracy theory appears to be coming true. 

Is this what we want? An internet ecosystem in which most “people” are really just mindless AIs in disguise?

According to a survey from Glassdoor, 81% of employees in the U.S. had a favorable opinion of AI in 2019. Each year since has seen a decline in approval, and today only 43% have a positive view of AI, while 53% have a negative view. Among writers, editors and journalists, a whopping 81% view AI negatively. Eighty percent of accountants, 78% of those in customer service and 70% of designers also disapprove of AI. As Brian Merchant points out, a staggering 99% of artists dislike AI, as it directly threatens their livelihood while flooding the market with low-quality bullshit. In a recent article, he adds that,

anecdotally, … I’ve found it’s much more common for workers to have their lives made miserable by their companies’ AI policies than it is for them to lose their jobs outright. The Glassdoor data supports this generalization, as well as the notion that AI is becoming increasingly unpopular at work the longer and harder bosses push it.

Yet another survey found that “skepticism about the ethical conduct of AI companies is growing, while trust in the fairness of AI is declining.” As a recent headline from Futurism notes, “young people hate AI CEOs so passionately that it’s almost hard to believe.” Even more, a 2026 Pew study reports that “half of U.S. adults say the increased use of AI in daily life makes them feel more concerned than excited,” with “just 10% [saying] they are more excited than concerned.”

If decisions about building and unleashing increasingly powerful AI systems were left to a vote, the public would likely terminate the entire endeavor. But the AI companies are run by people who believe that current AI chatbots are the stepping stones to ASI — a Machine God, a Digital Deity — that will then usher in a “cosmic utopia” full of magical wonders beyond our wildest imaginations.

Both Altman and Amodei are products of what the renowned computer scientist Timnit Gebru and I have called the “TESCREAL” movement, where this acronym stands for a cluster of ideologies from transhumanism to longtermism (the “T” and “L”). Both CEOs believe, it seems, that the only way to upload our minds to computers and colonize the universe is to build a superintelligent computer that can overcome the barriers to them becoming digital “posthumans.”

If you’re skeptical of this claim, consider that Amodei published an article earlier this year in which he proclaimed that ASI will enable humans to “gain radical capabilities like the ability to increase human intelligence or radically modify human biology.” It could even “someday help humanity transcend its physical limitations” through mind-uploading. Meanwhile, Altman argues that the only way human beings will “survive” the advent of ASI is by literally “merging” with machines — which, to be clear, would be a form of human extinction, because digital “humans” would be fundamentally different from us. In preparation for this glorious transition to a digital world, he even signed up with a company called Nectome to have his brain chemically preserved and digitized, which he thinks will become possible within his lifetime.

This is why the AI CEOs don’t care what the public wants; they don’t actually care about democracy. Think about it: they promise democratic flourishing once ASI is here, yet reject democratic input from the people right now about whether ASI should be built in the first place. When Altman promised to include individuals on OpenAI’s board from all regions of the world, he was outright lying: OpenAI did no such thing. Its board currently consists of Altman, the former CTO of Facebook, the CEOs of Quora and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a retired U.S. Army general, the co-founder of Global Infrastructure Partners, the former president of Sony and a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon. 

Is that a good representative of the interests of everyone?

I have argued on many occasions that if any of these AI companies, run by people in the TESCREAL movement, were to succeed in building an ASI that implements their absurd version of “utopia,” the outcome would likely be catastrophic for humanity. The elite would become digital posthumans by uploading their minds to computers and radically amplifying their cognitive abilities, while the rest of us would be left behind or, as Altman claims, literally enslaved by the machines.

If power wants one thing, it’s to maintain power, and by controlling ASI those at the top could permanently entrench their positions of power, control and domination in society. That’s the ultimate promise of ASI — it’s why Altman describes the “totalizing philosophy of ‘being the one to control AGI’” as having “a real ‘ring of power’ dynamic to it,” a reference to “The Lord of the Rings.” Our species would ultimately be replaced by ASI and the elite who become posthumans, resulting in our extinction. Do we want that? Of course not.

We must never forget that “Utopia” is an inherently exclusionary concept: someone or something is always left out. In the “utopia” these people are trying to create through ASI, what’s left out is humanity itself. Utopia is not for us. It’s not for the 99% — it’s not even for our species. This is why Altman’s mentor, Peter Thiel, awkwardly paused last year when The New York Times’ Ross Douthat asked him if the human species should persist. He then rambled about how transhumanists like him want to radically reengineer humanity through advanced technologies, thus resulting in a “superior” new species of posthuman super-beings.

That’s the “good” case: extinction through replacement by posthumanity and ASI. The “bad” case? All the AI CEOs have repeatedly stated that a “misaligned” ASI might just turn around and annihilate the entire populations of China, India, South Africa, Bolivia, Venezuela, Norway, France, Australia, Russia and every other country on Earth.

Amodei says there’s a 25% chance that the technology he’s building might kill everyone. Altman claims that “AI will probably, like, most likely sort of lead to the end of the world” and “probably AI will kill us all.” (The only way to “survive” ASI would be, once again, to transform ourselves into digital beings just like it.) Meanwhile, Elon Musk estimates the probability of universal death as 20%, while the former CEO of DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, affirms that the likelihood is “definitely non-zero and it’s probably non-negligible,” which he describes as “pretty sobering.” 

One could say that, yes. Imagine if the CEO of a fertilizer company based in Toronto were to announce that they’re developing a new chemical compound that might spontaneously detonate, killing — in the CEO’s estimation — everyone in North America. Or, imagine the CEO of McDonald’s saying that there’s a 25% chance that everyone who eats their burgers in the next year might drop dead the following day. Wouldn’t this be all over the news, with authorities scrambling to stop and arrest these individuals?

It is utter insanity that the AI CEOs get away with making far more apocalyptic claims about ASI wiping out the whole human species. A sane society would immediately shut down these companies and put their CEOs on trial for placing the human species in imminent mortal danger — that is, based on the CEOs’ own prognostications.

Given the apparent stakes of ASI, why do we have no say in whether it’s developed? If ASI initiates the Singularity, and the post-Singularity world is fundamentally different in every way from our current world, why do we not have a seat at the decision-making table? If this technology is going to affect all of us, everywhere around the world, shouldn’t we have a voice?

A friend of mine, Monika Bielskyte, likes to say, “You cannot design for. You must always design with.” In other words, people of every nation, tribe, culture, tradition, religion, race, sex, gender, political ideology, socioeconomic demographic and so on, must be included in the design process from the very start.

It is not acceptable for a tiny elite of techno-utopian extremists in Silicon Valley to promise that at some future point, after ASI has arrived, democracy will kick in. Let’s call this what it is: a form of tyranny. The AI companies are subjecting us to a tyranny of monumental proportions by unilaterally building what they claim will be an unprecedentedly powerful technology without the permission or consent of the people.

But again, these “fuckers” — quoting Altman — don’t actually care about what we think because they’re driven by bizarre TESCREAL fantasies of uploading their minds to computers, colonizing the cosmos, and buying entire galaxies to own until the heat death of the universe. If Altman or Amodei genuinely valued democracy, they would be asking us right now whether we want the future they’re trying to realize. Of course, we don’t want that future, which is why they don’t ask us. They want to design a future for themselves rather than one with us.

This is a farce — a dystopian scenario come to life. Given that all the AI CEOs claim that superintelligence will arrive within the next few years, we may have only a small window of time to fight back. Boycott AI, join an anti-AI protest, call your representatives and tell them that this tyranny must end. There is still time to avert a bad outcome for humanity, but we must act with a sense of moral urgency.