Washington, D.C. — A coordinated right-wing narrative attacking an AI researcher who warned that leading labs are “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives” is falling apart under even minimal fact-checking, even as Republican elected officials and AI industry investors rush to amplify it.
On September 8, Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher with three years of pretraining work at OpenAI and then Anthropic, resigned and posted that both companies are racing toward dangerous superintelligent AI. The thread passed 120 million views in a day, and Evan Hubinger, an alignment science lead at Anthropic, said Coxon was right that researchers inside the labs privately fear catastrophic outcomes.
A counter-story followed within hours. Parker Thayer of the right-wing Capital Research Center drafted a thread that’s received nearly 6 million views to date, casting Coxon’s resignation as the start of a “VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation” designed to build support for Democrats regulating AI.
The Claims Don’t Hold Up
Despite its reach, Thayer’s story does not survive basic scrutiny:
- Thayer frames AI guardrails as a Democratic plot, but right-wing figures like Steve Bannon and Glenn Beck have also raised alarm about AI superintelligence and called for more safety measures.
- Thayer suggests it’s suspicious that an experienced researcher who had just been featured in a Wall Street Journal article making claims about humanity’s future would draw wide attention online. Thayer’s own viral tweet demonstrates how common that phenomenon actually is.
- Thayer claims Coxon “doesn’t have much of a resume,” but OpenAI’s system cards for GPT-4o and GPT-4.5 credit him as a core contributor.
- Thayer’s thread describes Jaan Tallinn as an Anthropic board member and treats it as suspicious that he funded groups whose staffers amplified Coxon online. Tallinn is not a board member. Anthropic’s listed directors are Dario Amodei, Daniela Amodei, Yasmin Razavi, Reed Hastings, Chris Liddell and Vas Narasimhan. Tallinn led the 2021 Series A round and specifically rejected taking a board seat himself.
- Thayer links Coxon’s resignation to a bill from Senator Bernie Sanders, but Sanders announced that bill on September 3, well before Coxon resigned, and has been discussing the dangers of AI for months.
- Thayer treats forethought or planning by Coxon about how he would exit Anthropic as nefarious, when it’s a logical step for anyone leaving a job, especially someone stepping away to warn the public about a dangerous new technology. Nothing about any planning undercuts Coxon’s claims.
Playing loose with the facts is standard practice for Capital Research Center, a group that boasted that Dinesh D’Souza relied heavily on its research for the widely discredited conspiracy film 2000 Mules. Capital Research Center’s director appeared in the film and pushed a conspiracy theory claiming now-Trump ally Mark Zuckerberg tried to manipulate the 2020 election by supporting COVID-safe voting measures.
Industry Figures and Republican Officials Are Amplifying It Anyway
The story should have ended once its source was revealed to be a researcher for a widely criticized right-wing “intel operation” in Washington, D.C. Instead, AI executives like Elon Musk moved to amplify the narrative, while AI investor and podcast host Jason Calacanis used the story to accuse Anthropic of “running some kind of regulatory capture playbook.” Other AI industry voices, including David Sacks, an investor and advisor to President Trump, Guillaume Verdon, founder and CEO of Extropic, and Josh Wolfe, co-founder of AI investment firm Lux Capital, also amplified or endorsed the claims.
From there, right-leaning content creators and elected officials began parading the narrative as fact. U.S. Senator Ted Cruz urged his supporters to “READ THIS”, framing Thayer’s claims as evidence of a plot to let “Dems strangle American AI.” Conservative media figures including Mollie Hemingway, Editor-in-Chief of the Federalist, Fox News host Gregg Gutfeld, and OAN’s Chanel Rion also amplified Thayer’s claims, as did former Trump National Security Council staffer Joshua Steinman.
Why This Matters
Online conspiracy theories come and go, but this one carries weight because of who’s behind it. The same organization pushing this narrative had one of its reports circulated at the U.S. Justice Department last fall as purported “evidence” for possible criminal investigations. Under scrutiny, those claims fell apart, and the group’s president admitted the document didn’t show any illegal behavior.
As Americans learn more about the risks posed by advanced AI, conspiracy theorists and bad-faith actors should not be allowed to control the terms of the debate. Today it’s a think tank staffer making outlandish claims to millions of people online; tomorrow it could be in front of the President.
###