Friday, September 11th, 2026
Laramie, Wyoming
By Dan Denning
Are the Silicon Valley insiders who’ve built the closed-source American frontier models trying to scare the government into regulating them? Might they be exaggerating the threat from AI in order to ‘freeze’ the industry, restrict competition, and lock in high prices for the tokens (and even higher valuations for the intial public offerings they hope to make this year)?
It kind of seemed like that was going this week. A 27-year old unknown AI researcher named Jacob Coxon made an X post earlier this week saying, ‘the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.’ His post came just before the Wall Street Journal published an article about him. Mostly left-wing politicians in Europe in the US immediately re-tweeted Coxon’s post, calling for a halt to AI development pending more studies about its safety and possible regulation/nationalization.
Maybe this will be just the thing to prick the AI bubble. It’s a topic Bill Bonner and I discussed yesterday in our latest Private Briefing for BPR readers. We talked about the ceiling for interest rates, why deflation is inevitable, and the future of wealth in a world gone bonkers.
Enjoy the video and transcript below.
Until next week,
Dan
P.S. In simple terms, it’s possible that OpenAI and Antrhopic are burning through so much cash so fast, they realize there is no business model where they can show prospective investors a profit—so they’re ramping up AI fear in order to freeze the market (and token prices) to prevent competition via regulation. It’s called regulatory capture and we’re seeing a full court press for it right now.
CLICK ON IMAGE TO PLAY PRIVATE BRIEFING
(This transcript has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity)
