Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) on Monday called on the Trump administration to provide a classified briefing to all senators on the dangers posed by AI after a researcher for Anthropic warned that companies chasing artificial superintelligence are “gambling with our lives.” “The American people deserve better from their…
Page A4From§Eachthe noon edition — 14 September 2026
THE DISMISSAL
White House says a high-IQ president is guardrail enough, weeks after illegally blacklisting the actual one.
As it ran on the front
Dario Amodei sent a letter this month asking the industry to slow down before the technology outruns the three companies racing to build it — his own included. Sam Altman signed it. So did Elon Musk, who was, per the New York Post, locked in a legal battle with Altman earlier this year; the letter made them allies over the weekend. Jacob Coxon, who'd worked pretraining at both Anthropic and OpenAI, quit Anthropic that same week and told reporters the industry is "gambling with our lives." That's the whole warning, and it's five days old: the men who built the thing, plus the man who just walked out on it, saying don't trust us to finish the job unsupervised.
The White House took the question and answered with a Truth Social post. The only guardrail AI needs, the president wrote, is a "STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT" — his, currently, in spades. Vance took the follow-up and called the whole warning a Trojan horse, industry regulation dressed up as safety. Neither man proposed a rule. Neither proposed a pause. What they offered instead was a compliment to the man already in the chair.…
…(cont) Here's the part that isn't rhetoric. Two and a half weeks earlier, on August 28th, a federal judge ruled that this same administration had illegally blacklisted Anthropic — the company that wrote the letter. The Pentagon had declared Anthropic's Claude a supply-chain risk and ordered every agency to drop it, after Anthropic refused to hand the military its technology for mass surveillance or autonomous weapons. That refusal is what a guardrail looks like installed. The administration didn't debate it. It blacklisted the company for building one. A court had to order the blacklist undone.
So the sequence runs: a company says no to autonomous weapons, gets punished for saying no, a judge rules the punishment illegal, and seventeen days later the same White House announces the only guardrail it recognizes is a man's IQ. In the gap between the ruling and the announcement, Interior pushed the Bureau of Land Management to find public acreage for AI data centers, and federal hospitals started letting AI agents prescribe medicine. Congress is set to break for recess with Schumer still asking for a briefing, not a vote. The guardrail exists. It already got punished for standing there.
“They built the guardrail, and the government blacklisted it for showing up to work — a judge had to order that undone. Now the same White House says the whole safety net is just one guy's IQ, while it's clearing federal land for the server farms and letting AI write your kid's prescription. That's not a Trojan horse, that's a company that told the Pentagon no, and got treated exactly the way you get treated for telling this administration no.”
“Look, the Vice President's point stands — these are the same companies that spent years selling 'move fast and break things,' and now they want Washington to slow everyone else down right as they hit a wall themselves, and that's not fear, that's a moat. The Anthropic thing? That's litigation, contracts get challenged in court all the time — the fact that a judge disagreed with the Pentagon's national security call doesn't mean, okay, it does kind of mean the government targeted the one company that said no to autonomous weapons, but that's — did I say that? That's not what I meant.”
The receipts
President Trump defended his approach to AI on Monday, saying the only protections needed are a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT” amid calls for AI guardrails. “The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A.
Altman and rival Elon Musk, who were earlier this year locked in a legal battle, made a rare alliance over the weekend as they backed a lengthy letter from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei urging global companies to slow their work on top AI models.
Some House Democrats are calling on Speaker Mike Johnson to delay the congressional recess expected at the end of the week until lawmakers pass AI safeguards.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is teaming up with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon and former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon to argue that artificial intelligence “should serve humanity,” after major industry leaders warned humans could lose control of the future to AI.
As whistleblowers in the artificial intelligence industry speak out about the extraordinary risk posed by their technology if it remains unchecked, a new poll out Wednesday reveals that more than two-thirds of US voters agree with a new proposal in Congress to pause artificial intelligence development until guardrails are set up and ban…
A growing chorus of artificial intelligence leaders are calling for a slowdown of the technology's development following a researcher's ominous warning that AI could soon destroy humanity. Shortly after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called to slow down AI capability development, several of his competitors, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman…
Vice President JD Vance is skeptical of artificial intelligence CEOs calling for a development slowdown, comparing the calls to a “Trojan horse.” Vance told reporters on Monday that President Donald Trump‘s administration is concerned about the speed at which frontier model development is happening but would prefer to “regulate smartly,”…
Federal projects are rolling out A.I. agents that offer therapy and prescribe medicine, raising concerns about safety and the influence of venture capital investors.
President Donald Trump's administration is making an aggressive push to find public lands to use for building artificial intelligence data centers, according to a Friday report in The Washington Sun. The US Department of the Interior, under the leadership of Secretary Doug Burgum, has pushed the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to…
Critics slammed US lawmakers on Wednesday for being completely out to lunch on artificial intelligence regulation even after multiple industry insiders warned that the technology could wipe out humanity within years. The controversy began on Tuesday after AI researcher Jacob Coxon announced that he had resigned from his position at AI…
One of the more curious developments of the artificial intelligence revolution is that its most visible political enemy has turned out to be a windowless warehouse filled with computers. Data centers, once infrastructure that interested few outside the tech industry and planning commissions, are becoming objects of intense opposition…
The American Prospect on Wednesday published an investigation revealing that top artificial intelligence firm Anthropic is building a predictive surveillance system aimed at tracking activists who are opposed to advanced AI development. The Prospect found that Anthropic last month issued a job posting seeking an intelligence specialist…
· Judge rules Trump administration illegally punished Anthropic from the morgue, 28 Aug 2026
· Anthropic researcher quits over existential fear of AI: ‘Gambling with our lives’ from the morgue, 9 Sep 2026
· Anthropic researchers warn out-of-control AI could destroy humans from the morgue, 9 Sep 2026
· Federal judge rules that War Department’s designation of Anthropic as a national security risk was illegal from the morgue, 28 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.