Sunday, September 13th, 2026
Laramie, Wyoming
By Dan Denning
Dear Reader,
Have the elite techbros that run US-based close-source AI popped their own bubble this week? The latest phrase to enter the financial and popular culture is ‘pace the frontier.’ Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and even X’s Elon Musk have all agreed that it might be time to ‘pause’ the rapid pace of AI development on the grounds of ‘safety.’
It seems to be a coordinated call for government intervention/regulation based on the shocking claim from an obscure AI researcher last week that 70% of humans could be made extinct by AI in the next three years. Not jobless. But dead as a lifeless hard drive. Seven out of ten human beings.
Yikes.
The skeptical view of the sudden, Covid-like panic about AI, is that the companies involved are burning through wads of cash with each new model they release. The winner-take-all race to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) turns out to be obscenely, perhaps prohibitively, expensive. What now?
If the ‘frontier’ firms at the head of the AGI chase can’t raise cash privately, or sell bonds, or execute an initial public offering now…then investors may find out the companies are effectively bankrupt…beset by lower-cost competition from open-source Chinese models…and without a viable business model.
Three strikes and you’re out, AI bubble.
Solution?
Panic!
Specifically, hit the ‘doom’ button. Get all your socialist elitist friends in Silicon Valley and the mainstream media to ‘flood the zone’ with the same message. Draft never-done-anything Bernie Sanders and that old collectivist War Horse Hillary Clinton to go on the Sunday talk shows and call for more immediate government regulation. Maybe see if Tony Fauci can link it AI to Covid somehow.
But regulation to do what? To freeze the marketplace, lock out competitors, and lock-in a business model where there are only two or three government approved AI companies…providing a ‘safe’ level of AI to the public for purchase at a price.
It would be commoditized and lobotomized ‘intelligence’ as a public utility. Yet another government created quasi-monopoly foisted on the public by politicians and corporate oligarchs. Sounds familiar.
It’s all for your protection, of course. But wouldn’t it be something if THIS was the thing to prick the bubble we’ve been writing about at BPR since the beginning? See the chart at the top of today’s note. It may be that the great bubble has already begun rolling over.
What do you think? Is this it? Leave your comments below. And in the meantime, please enjoy all the best research we published last week as get ready for another big week. The Fed meets as well!
Until tomorrow,
Dan
P.S. In my Private Briefing with Bill on Friday, he confirmed he’ll be in attendance at The Future of Wealth conference in Dublin in late October. For those in the neighborhood wishing to attend, you can sign up here.
The Road out of the Valley
Happy Labor Day from Bonner Private Research. Below you’ll find a message from our friends in the wine business. Please note BPR receives a small commission when you order from the links below. Enjoy…
Bill Gates is a guy who know something about computers, so I asked Claude AI: is bill gates worried about AI? It had lots to say, starting with:
Yes, notably so — and it's a real shift for him. In late August 2026, Gates published a roughly 6,000-word essay titled "The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical," where he said that for the first time in his life, he wishes a new technology would advance more slowly.
No mechanism is outlined by which AI could kill off humanity, nor do I see one, other than malevolent humans deciding to use AI to figure out how to do this. And there are certainly humans who would see that as a good thing. But there are also humans who would oppose such actors and who also have access to AI.
It is possible that a large percentage of the human race may die in the next few years, whether by nuclear war or an engineered virus more deadly than C-19, or by some other means. However, while AI may be a tool used to bring that about, I seriously doubt that AI itself will be the agent causing this, and I doubt even more seriously that any US regulatory action will serve to protect us from such a threat. This sudden cry for regulation looks to me like the incumbent AI companies pleading for protection from competition.