A former Anthropic researcher named Jacob Coxon posted his resignation on X last week, warning that AI could end civilization within the decade. The post hit 130 million views in a day. Within hours, more than 20 elected officials, mostly Democrats, were on camera demanding immediate AI regulation. Bernie Sanders dusted off his Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, a bill that would create a new cabinet-level federal agency, criminalize certain AI development with 20 years in prison, and empower the government to physically destroy non-compliant technology. He compared building advanced AI to unlawfully developing nuclear weapons.
Welcome to the new fear porn.
I am not saying AI carries zero risk. I have spent two decades building AI-powered marketing technology. I am a founding member of the National AI Association. I have written extensively in these pages about AI bias, the Sputnik mentality, and the reality that AI is not a technology but a synthetic entity with autonomous capabilities. When I say this alarm is being manufactured, I am speaking as someone who has been sounding a different, more honest alarm for years.
What concerns me is the choreography.
Coxon's X account had minimal history and few followers before the post, yet it gained over 100,000 followers within hours. A Wall Street Journal exclusive featuring his quotes went live within minutes of the X post, the kind of synchronization that requires advance coordination. The first accounts to amplify him were not random citizens but staff at AI policy nonprofits funded through vehicles tied to Anthropic's own investors. A program officer at the entity formerly known as Open Philanthropy, associated with another Anthropic investor, amplified it within half an hour despite rarely posting. Coxon himself reportedly received a scholarship from the same funding network.
None of this proves fabrication. But the machinery that turned a resignation letter into a national crisis in under 24 hours was not organic. It was funded, sequenced, and aimed.
Aimed at the calendar. We are weeks from the 2026 midterms. Democrats have been campaigning on AI regulation since February. Sanders' bill, with its cabinet-level agency and advisory board of AI experts, is not a safety measure. It is a power grab dressed in safety language. A regulatory body populated by advisors from the same nonprofits that lobbied it into existence is a captured regulator on day one.
Democrats have run this play before. They demanded government-tech collaboration on misinformation that became the censorship industrial complex. They built energy frameworks that strangled domestic production. The playbook never changes: manufacture a crisis, terrify the public, build a bureaucracy that outlasts the panic.
Here is the deeper problem. Every player in this drama, the whistleblower, the senators, the AI companies calling for voluntary slowdowns while raising money at trillion-dollar valuations, is answering the same question: How do we stop AI?
That is the wrong question.
"How do we stop AI?" leads to bans, pauses, criminal penalties, and government gatekeepers standing between American innovators and their work. It leads to what President Trump's executive order wisely rejected: mandatory licensing requirements that hand unelected bureaucrats veto power over the future. It leads to a world where China develops the technology that governs the next century while America argues about advisory boards.
The right question is: How do we build AI in a way that serves humanity?
That question changes everything. It does not dismiss risk. It takes risk seriously enough to address it at the source, in the design, the values, and the accountability of the builders, rather than handing the problem to a government that has never governed any technology it did not first weaponize.
If we use this flashpoint to ask that question prayerfully and with real intention, the right answers will emerge. They will not come from a federal agency. They will come from the principles that have guided civilization long before any of us plugged in a computer. That is why we built In Service of Humanity, a 501(c)(3) developing a citizen-led certification for AI that is secure, transparent, accountable, and aligned with human dignity. Not a federal license. A mark of trust, earned in the market.
The Democrats do not want to solve AI. They want the crisis, the committee, and the campaign ad. Do not let them set the terms. We are developing the most powerful tool in human history. The question is whether we develop it with wisdom and reverence for the people it serves, or hand the keys to a government that cannot secure its own email servers, balance its own books, or build a healthcare website that works.
If you think government is the AI answer, you are asking the wrong question.
Larry Ward is President of Market Rithm, Inc. and Chairman of In Service of Humanity, a 501(c)(3) dedicated to ensuring AI remains in service of humanity. He is a founding member of the National AI Association and has spent over 20 years protecting American businesses from digital disruption.
