AI Doomsaying Is an Aggressive Sales Pitch
September 16, 2026United StatesScience and TechnologyFacebook IconTwitter IconEmail IconPrint IconAI Doomsaying Is an Aggressive Sales PitchByRichard SeymourWhen AI insiders warn that their products could wipe out humanity, they mean that their own work is maximally important and demands unprecedented investment. This extinction fantasy distracts from the real damage AI is already doing.AI executives and researchers keep saying their product might end the human race. A technology powerful enough to destroy us all is also a machine worth sinking a massive share of society’s resources into. (Terminator 2: Judgment Day / CBS photo archive via Getty Images)Our latest issue, “The New Empire,” is out now.
- ▪September 16, 2026United StatesScience and TechnologyFacebook IconTwitter IconEmail IconPrint IconAI Doomsaying Is an Aggressive Sales PitchByRichard SeymourWhen AI insiders warn that their products could wipe out humanity, they mean that t
- ▪This extinction fantasy distracts from the real damage AI is already doing.AI executives and researchers keep saying their product might end the human race.
- ▪A technology powerful enough to destroy us all is also a machine worth sinking a massive share of society’s resources into. (Terminator 2: Judgment Day / CBS photo archive via Getty Images)Our latest issue, “The New Empire,” is out now.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Jacobin |
| Canonical URL | https://jacobin.com/2026/09/openai-anthropic-human-extinction-criti-hype |
| Publication time | Wed, 16 Sep 2026 19:24:24 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-16T19:38:41.620Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-16T19:38:41.620Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | J2u-0AF9FHcc · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
September 16, 2026United StatesScience and TechnologyFacebook IconTwitter IconEmail IconPrint IconAI Doomsaying Is an Aggressive Sales PitchByRichard SeymourWhen AI insiders warn that their products could wipe out humanity, they mean that their own work is maximally important and demands unprecedented investment. This extinction fantasy distracts from the real damage AI is already doing.AI executives and researchers keep saying their product might end the human race. It hasn’t hurt business. A technology powerful enough to destroy us all is also a machine worth sinking a massive share of society’s resources into. (Terminator 2: Judgment Day / CBS photo archive via Getty Images)Our latest issue, “The New Empire,” is out now.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Jacobin.
