Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse

If worries about AI safety and the end of the world entered your life recently, it’s probably because of a resignation letter. On September 8, 2026, a researcher named Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic, the one of the two premier AI labs in the U.S. whose brand has tried to cultivate the image of being the careful one relative to its competitors. He had spent the previous three years doing pretraining research at OpenAI and then at Anthropic, the engine-room work that makes large models capable, and his goodbye note said, among other things: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.” He left two months before his equity vested and walked away from it. The post was viewed more than a hundred million times within a day. His colleagues, surprisingly did not rush to correct him. Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment science at Anthropic, posted within hours that Coxon was right, that they really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans, and that his personal odds were somewhere north of one in ten inside a decade. More than two dozen members of Congress said something needed to be done. Elon Musk, who is building a frontier lab of his own, called the whole thing a psy-op, and mainstream news outlets predictably gave breathless coverage to the frenzy that followed. In order to realistically evaluate the gravity of this warning, we need to understand the people who are making it. The loudest voices warning about the end of the world come out of a very specific twenty-five-year-old internet subculture, one that understands itself as a community of people who think more clearly than everyone else. Outside Silicon Valley the subculture looks obscure, a fandom with unusually dorky literary preferences. Inside the technology industry it is anything but. Its writers make or break reputations. Its alumni staff the labs, the safety institutes, and the philanthropic organizations that decide what “AI safety” means. Its arguments, marriages, feuds, and sexual proclivities are heavily interwoven into the structure of the organizations now asking for the public’s trust about the future of the species. Ten months before Coxon resigned, in December 2025, nearly five hundred people gathered in a Berkeley music hall for a ceremony about the possible end of humanity. There was a live band and a twenty-eight-person choir. There were liturgical readings. As songs and speeches carried the room from humanity’s distant past toward its uncertain future, the chandeliers dimmed one by one.

Raised between Catholicism and atheism, Arnold discovered the rationalist movement as a young adult and found that it “radically expanded” his capacity for sacred feeling. In 2011 he invited nineteen friends into a New York apartment furnished for the evening with oil lamps, plasma balls, and lightsabers to beta-test a holiday for their new worldview. They sang about the first winter campfires and the technologies shaping humanity’s future, extinguished the final candle, and sat together in the dark. Two years later Arnold turned the experiment into a public production called Brighter Than Today. Versions soon spread from New York and the Bay Area to cities across North America, Europe, and beyond. Arnold had initially imagined Secular Solstice as a broad humanist holiday, but it became the rationalist calendar’s principal feast day. This was not entirely accidental. He has organized the community since 2011, now helps run both LessWrong and Lighthaven—the Berkeley conference campus that serves as its physical center—and has described his function, earnestly, as that of a “village priest.” Solstice was his attempt to construct the cultural technology a durable movement needs: a canon of songs and readings, a ritual progression from light into darkness and back again, and a yearly occasion for geographically scattered believers to gather in one room. By 2025, Arnold estimated the probability of an AI catastrophe at greater than fifty percent and worried that his own ritual was no longer equipped to contemplate extinction in a psychologically healthy way. He had largely ceded Solstice production to other organizers, but returned to shape what he thought might be “the last Solstice,” complete with an aftercare gathering around a firepit. The evening supplied everything religions have traditionally supplied: fellowship, ritual, a shared story about humanity’s place in the universe, and somewhere to sit with the knowledge that you are going to die. Possibly soon. Possibly because of something your friends built. Follow the connections out from that room and you pass through some genuinely strange territory. A Harry Potter fanfic used as a recruiting pipeline. Psychological workshops that former participants describe as coercive. A program for breeding smarter children, promoted by an AI institute. A sex worker from Idaho who became one of the subculture’s most-read writers and now runs an AI-doom propaganda residency with Grimes, Elon Musk’s ex-girlfriend. A splinter sect that fled to tugboats and whose members have been linked to six deaths.

The people in this story are not a secret society coordinating over dinner. They are a social scene: overlapping friendship groups, funding relationships, and sexual and romantic relationships, all of it threaded through the institutions asking you to trust them about AI regulation.

His own summary of the encounter is brief: after that he knew what was important, and that his career would touch it. In his late teens he found the transhumanists online. By 2000, at twenty, he had co-founded the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and his website was already offering the complete package: an essay about the Singularity, a document sketching how you might actually code a transhuman AI, a plan for getting humanity from here to there, and an autobiography explaining the author’s singular qualifications. His autobiography even opens with a parable: as a small child he threw his favorite squirtgun off a third-floor balcony rather than accept that his mother could lend out what was his, and felt complete when he heard it hit the pavement. He goes on to describes himself as a specialist in the technological transformation of the human species, one of the few people alive with the standing to steer it. He identifies with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the one person who sees the danger clearly and has to act while everyone else gets on with ordinary life. While his technical ideas would change a great deal over the next twenty-five years. His feeling of being the one person who to see the coming doom of AI did not. The Singularity Institute still exists, since renamed the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, or MIRI, and its founding worry has aged better than most founding worries: a sufficiently capable artificial intelligence might pursue objectives incompatible with human survival, and the job is to make it safe before somebody makes it powerful. While reasonable on the surface, the trouble was everything that grew on top of it.