In an article published by The New York Times, Cal Newport raises a question we should no longer ignore: How Scared Should We Be of A.I. Right Now?

Why are A.I. chief executives like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, leading the A.I. revolution, often among the first to point out the grave dangers their companies might be unlocking and react to incidents involving their own products as if they were third-party observers of an unstoppable force of nature? Is it all an elaborate marketing strategy? Is it an unavoidable response to a terrifying technology?

Cal Newport argues that they’re simply weirder than we realize. He thinks that figures like Mr. Altman and Mr. Amodei probably wouldn’t currently describe themselves as Rationalists, but the influence of Rationalism helps explain why this style of speech comes so easily to these A.I. leaders.

What is a Rationalist? You should read the article for the full picture, but in short: they are followers of—or deeply influenced by—Eliezer Yudkowsky. And to be fair, Yudkowsky is perhaps the ultimate living example of Don Quixote’s madness.

Here is a man who spent years studying decision theory and ethics, founded the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), created LessWrong (a community blog devoted to “refining the art of human rationality”), and compiled the monumental collection Rationality: From A.I. to Zombies.

And then, finally… he donned his great-grandfather’s armor, mounted his scrawny horse Rocinante, and set out to save humanity from the great threat of the Singularity for the honor of a non-existent Dulcinea del Toboso.

His latest book? If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All.

I have to admit that Cal’s article hits the mark. There’s a strict limit to how much pure Rationality a human mind can stomach—process, contain—before things get weird. Reading the latest statements from our tech AI Illuminati, that limit becomes glaringly obvious. Here’s a taste—just a few spoonfuls:

• Leopold Aschenbrenner | Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead (June 2024) analyzed the imminent arrival of AGI through a geopolitical lens, urging the US government to treat superintelligence as a national security imperative akin to a modern Manhattan Project.
  
  Leopold Aschenbrenner made headlines for founding the macro hedge fund Situational Awareness LP, which surged into a nearly $45 billion at its peak in July 2026. Aschenbrenner’s investment firm suffered $35 billion in losses in July 2026, due to its use of leverage and sharp declines in AI infrastructure investments

• Sam Altman | The Intelligence Age (September 2024) envisions an era of massive economic abundance unlocked by AGI, arguing that the primary bottleneck is the physical expansion of compute infrastructure and energy grids.
  
  Sam Altman makes the news every 48 hours like clockwork—pitching multi-trillion-dollar infrastructure dreams and surviving high-stakes legal battles with former allies like Elon Musk. Everybody loves Altman, but specially his colleague Musk.

• Dario Amodei | Machines of Loving Grace / The Adolescence of Technology / Statement on AI Defense) (October 2024 – February 2026). He balances AI’s transformative potential for scientific acceleration with an evidence-based governance framework, rejecting both existential doomerism and unchecked deregulation in national security.
  
  The Pentagon brands Anthropic CEO a ‘liar’ with a ‘God complex’ as deadline looms over AI use in weapons and surveillance.
  
• Yoshua Bengio et al. | International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI (2024 – 2025) synthesizes global scientific consensus backed by international bodies to establish empirical benchmarks for evaluating catastrophic risks, malicious exploitation, and loss of control in frontier models.
  
  Yoshua Bengio, alongside fellow Turing laureate Geoffrey Hinton, is one of AI’s repentant Godfathers—having helped invent deep learning, he now spends his time as a solemn Cassandra traveling global summits to warn us of the end times.
  
• Pope Leo XIV | Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of AI (May 25, 2026) establishes a moral framework placing human dignity above technocratic optimization, demanding a global ban on lethal autonomous weapons and structural protections for displaced workers.
  
  Pope Leo XIV is here to remind them that omnipotence doesn’t run on GPU clusters. Yet I suspect he knows well who the new god is.
  
• Mark Zuckerberg | The Future Is for Everyone (August 2026) advocates for open-weight models as the primary vehicle to democratize superintelligence, framing closed-source AI and doom-centric safety narratives as corporate gatekeeping.
  
  What could we say about Zuckerberg? Irony aside, he seems like the most sensible adult in the room lately. Maybe he’s simply growing up, and age brings perspective.
  
• Bill Gates | The choices we make about AI now are critical (August 2026) highlights the rapid disruption of skilled white-collar employment, proposing automation taxes and policy interventions to safeguard human-centered professions.
  
  Bill Gates, on the other hand, is well over the hill—and his views on work are already yesterday’s news.

Cal also accurately highlights China’s far more pragmatic posture. Maybe we in the West simply can’t grasp their visionary thinkers, but all evidence points to them staying grounded in real-world, bread-and-butter issues. He quotes Ross Douthat:

…whereas the United States is “behaving as though frontier A.I. models could be the equivalent of nuclear weapons,” the Chinese see A.I. as a “lower-risk technology to be shared and commercialized to win friends and influence the world.”

To wrap up my own quixotic excursion, let’s look at a recent piece from another AI Illuminati that hits much closer to my personal obsession about individual freedom:

Late last month, OpenAI launched its latest grand mission: nothing less than defending individual political freedom in an age of all-powerful machines. The company’s “Strategic Futures” team, led by Dean Ball, laid out the crusade in an OpenAI blog post —Introducing Intelligence Age— opening with a quote from James Madison in The Federalist Papers:

Will it be sufficient… to trust these parchment barriers against the encroaching spirit of power —James Madison, Federalist No. 48

I quote at length below—assuming a company whose entire model rests on harvesting collective human knowledge will surely respect my purpose—and a bit of fair use:

The modern state is the product of a long, uneven process of bargaining between various centers of power, such as the owners of capital and commodities, the wielders of political power, and the people. Most fundamentally, political and military power has rested on labor. To hold political power is to possess the monopoly on legitimate force. For all of human history, that monopoly has consisted of soldiers and what we today call “police,” along with a vast civil-military bureaucracy—complemented, to be sure, by many technological tools, but fundamentally operated by human beings whose support was needed to sustain the operation. And the whole apparatus—the soldiers, the tools, the attendant bureaucracy—was funded by taxes collected from the wages or production of human beings who had to be willing to pay.

Advancements in real-world autonomous systems may soon mean that states will be able to project force—domestically and internationally—without relying on cooperative soldiers or police officers. And advancements in machine intelligence may mean that the state can collect the revenue it needs not from the fruit of individual human labor, but from the outputs of data centers. The operation of the bureaucracy itself, too, could be largely automated. Power may therefore no longer require a society-wide bargain to be sustained, and the people, broadly conceived, may have only a small seat at the negotiating table, or perhaps none at all.

Avoiding this outcome is fundamental to the preservation of human freedom.

It’s all deeply weird—or what did you expect?