Rahm Emanuel over the weekend asserted that it was historic — unprecedented — that the CEOs of the biggest artificial intelligence companies want federal regulation of AI. Emanuel is trying to argue that, of course, we need federal regulation of A.I. today, if even the biggest businesses in the industry want it.
Page F6From§Eachthe early bird edition — 14 September 2026
Tech CEOs sound the alarm on AI; the only confirmed casualty is entry-level hiring, cut nearly in half.
As it ran on the front
The alarm bell rang loud enough to reach cable news this week: the men who build artificial intelligence are the same men telling Washington it might end civilization. Rahm Emanuel called it historic — unprecedented, in his word — that the biggest companies in an industry would ask the federal government to regulate them. Set that request next to the balance sheet and the historic part gets easier to price.
Michael Burry priced it first. The investor who shorted the last bubble looked at the warnings pouring out of Anthropic and OpenAI, days after a researcher named Jacob Coxon left the company, and called the whole deluge "hype and puffery" — self-serving, in his account, not a memo to the SEC. Sacks and Gurley turn up in the same reporting, named alongside him panning what the industry itself is calling fearmongering — the industry's own investor class lining up against the industry's own warning.…
…(cont) The left desk ran the same math from the other direction. The Intercept and The Lever both filed this week that the doomsday framing is the distraction — that arguing over whether the software ends humanity lets the people building the data centers and the war machines write their own rules while the executives get, in the Intercept's phrase, incredibly rich.
Pull the actual ledger and it shows one line item with a receipt attached. A study flagged by New York City Comptroller Mark Levine on social media this week found entry-level tech hiring in the city down by nearly half — the bottom rung of the career ladder, in Levine's words, breaking first. Not the species. The intern.
Five days earlier the same shape had already turned up across the ocean. An environmental think tank found the UK's planned data centers, marketed to the public as a 40,000-job build-out, on track to deliver about 10,400 — one job for every four promised. Different country, same column: the number attached to the announcement and the number attached to the audit run in opposite directions, and the gap lands on whoever was counting on the announcement.
Federal policy isn't waiting on an audit either way. The administration is rolling AI agents into federal medical care — prescribing medicine, offering therapy — over safety concerns already on record, and over the venture money sitting behind the vendors. The extinction warning gets a hearing. The intern's hiring chart does not.
That's the reconciliation, hon: the entry-level column is down by half, the data-center jobs came in at a quarter of what was promised, and the alarm bell hasn't cost anyone in the C-suite a dime.
“They tell you the robot's coming for the species so you don't notice it already came for the internship — half the entry-level jobs in New York, gone, and the guy who runs a hedge fund is the one saying the doomsday talk is a sales pitch, not the socialist. Follow the money and it goes exactly where it always goes: into the data center, past the twenty-two-year-old who used to get the first rung.”
“Look, when the biggest companies in an industry ask Washington for oversight, that's called being responsible — that's leadership, that's — okay, I hear how that sounds when Burry's the one calling it a sales pitch and he's not exactly a guy who misses a con. Fine, maybe the extinction talk and the entry-level numbers are both real and I just don't want you doing the math on the same page.”
The receipts
Burry joins a chorus of tech bigwigs including David Sacks and Bill Gurley panning the so-called AI fearmongering sweeping Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley says its machines could destroy humanity. The more immediate danger is letting the people building AI decide how they’re governed.
"AI may be starting to break the bottom rung of the career ladder, making it much harder for young people to enter the workforce," city Comptroller Mark Levine warned in a post on X on Monday.
The binary between AI apocalypse and AI redemption asks us to ignore data centers and AI war machines — all as tech executives get incredibly rich. The post Tech CEOs’ Doomsaying Is a Distraction from Real, Existing Harms of AI appeared first on The Intercept .
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.
Wall Street expert Michael Burry on Monday suggested that leading technology leaders have ulterior motives for their recent deluge of warnings about artificial intelligence, arguing they are simply looking to boost profit margins. The prominent investor weighed in on the AI debate that sparked last week, when Anthropic researcher Jacob…
· UK datacentres to create just 25% of jobs predicted by big tech, analysis finds from the morgue, 9 Sep 2026
· The data are in: AI is not causing a jobs apocalypse from the morgue, 8 Sep 2026
· Trump’s quiet jobs revolution from the morgue, 9 Sep 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.