When the intelligence about AI is artificial

Few people had heard of Jacob Coxon, the 28-year-old British AI researcher, on the morning of September 8, 2026. His X account had fewer than 100 followers.

By September 10, he was world famous, after he published a social-media thread on X about resigning from Anthropic because the company is not “acting responsibly.” The post has now been viewed 174 million times. It triggered a tsunami of news panic about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Suddenly, Jacob was everywhere: doing prime-time interviews; a celebrity whistleblower, the casus tumultus of a global conversation about the dangers of AI, which in turn led to a public fight among various tech overlords urging for more government regulation, and angry pushback from the Trump administration.

It all felt like a highly-orchestrated PR stunt. Because it was. The apparently new intelligence about artificial intelligence turns out to be artificial.

The tsunami of AI panic felt like a highly-orchestrated PR stunt. Because it was

According to Pirate Wires, Coxon has been working with DEY Ideas + Influence, a PR firm that seems to specialize in promoting tech “Doomer” literature and insight. DEY also works with Nate Soares, the interesting author of If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies, who also did a number of interviews on the back of Coxon’s message. Intriguingly, on 16 September, the New York Post’s highly prolific reporter Ariel Zilber published a grubby story about Soares’s relationship with a “sex worker who publicly chronicles orgies, gangbangs and extreme sexual kinks.” Revenge PR, or a coincidence? We may never know.

What’s certain, however, is that AI has essentially become the modern economy – trillions upon trillions of dollars have been staked on an expanding series of futuristic tech bets. When that kind of money is involved, the need to “craft narratives,” and control the messaging, becomes overwhelming. The PR vultures swoop in. “This is not a marketing stunt,” Coxon insisted in his X thread, and he has denied working with third parties to spread his message.

He seems to have had deeply held views about the power of AI ever since, as a clever teenager, he read Nick Bostrom’s SuperIntelligence.

But marketing stunts come in different shapes and sizes, and sometimes the people in the middle of them don’t quite understand what’s really driving the agenda. Just because Coxon truly believes in what he’s saying doesn’t mean his story is not part of some bigger propaganda effort to spread fear and awe about AI – a drive that often comes from the very people who are busy trying to create the monster they are warning us about. For more on this, read Geoffrey Cain’s excellent last cover piece for The Spectator, which warned us to beware of billionaires touting the apocalypse.

And speaking of billionaires, Elon Musk observed of the Coxon story, “I think the groundwork for this psy op (for lack of a better term) has been prepared for a long time. This was just the match that lit the fire.”

The question then is not who lit the match. It is who spent years stacking the kindling – and who profits from the flames spreading?

Is it those who have desperate and genuine concerns about AI safety? Is it the new AI-oligarchs who are pushing for the regulatory capture of a technology they cannot slow down by themselves? Or is it extremely rich and influential groups who want to make sure new technology is used only to further empower themselves and their agendas? The answer is probably all of the above.

DEY, the PR group, also does work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the social justice-oriented Ford Foundation and the progressive billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. We can expect to hear more “whistleblower” stories in the coming months, neatly packaged up to play into mass consumer fears about being replaced by machines. The actual scandals, however, and the really scary news, may take longer to emerge.