Which is more important to you, allowing Pete Hegseth to use artificial intelligence however he wants, or preventing AI from doing mass surveillance of Americans and creating lethal weapons without human oversight?
That’s the stark choice posed by the intensifying fight between an AI corporation called Anthropic and Hegseth, President Donald Trump’s Secretary of “War.”
AI is dangerous as hell. I view it as one of the four existential crises America now faces — along with climate change, widening inequality and the destruction of our democracy.
To be sure, AI is capable of changing human life for the better. But if unregulated, it could be a destructive nightmare — giving government the power to know everything about us and suppress all dissent, distorting news and media to the point where no one can distinguish between lies and truth, and threatening human beings with bots that could decide we’re unnecessary obstacles to their taking over the Earth.
Now is the time we should be putting guardrails in place. But two forces are making this difficult, if not impossible.
Now is the time we should be putting guardrails in place.
The first is corporate greed, which is why OpenAI, Elon Musk’s xAI and Google have jettisoned all precautions. Several AI researchers have left AI companies in recent weeks, warning that safety and other considerations are being pushed aside as their corporations raise billions of dollars in preparation for initial public offerings that will make their executives hugely wealthy.
The second is the Trump regime, which doesn’t wants any restrictions on AI — including by state governments. That’s largely because the AI industry has become a powerful force in Washington, throwing money at politicians who will do its bidding (including Trump) and against politicians who want guardrails. And also because so many Trump officials are corrupt, with their own financial stakes in AI.
Anthropic has been one of the most safety-conscious of all AI companies. It was founded as an AI safety research lab in 2021 after its CEO, Dario Amodei, and other co-founders left OpenAI, concerned that OpenAI’s ChatGPT wasn’t focused enough on safety.
Amodei has argued that AI needs strict guardrails to prevent it from potentially wrecking the world. In 2022, he chose not to release an earlier version of Anthropic’s AI software Claude, fearing it would start a dangerous technology race. In a podcast interview in 2023, he said there was a 10% to 25% chance that AI could destroy humanity.
In January, Amodei argued in an essay that “using AI for domestic mass surveillance and mass propaganda” was “entirely illegitimate,” and that AI-automated lethal weapons could greatly increase the risks “of democratic governments turning them against their own people to seize power.” Internally, the company has strict guidelines barring its technology from being used to facilitate violence.
Over the past year Anthropic has battled the Trump regime by pushing for state and federal AI guardrails.
In recent weeks, Hegseth and Amodei have been fighting over the Pentagon’s use of Anthropic’s Claude AI software. Amodei has stuck to his demands: no surveillance of Americans, and no lethal autonomous weapons lacking human control.
The fight started when another major tech firm, Palantir, helped the Pentagon capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Palantir is a Pentagon contractor that uses Anthropic’s Claude. (Palantir, co-founded by far-right billionaire Peter Thiel and now headed by Alex Karp, is my candidate for the worst corporation in America because it allows governments, militaries and law enforcement agencies to quickly process and analyze massive amounts of your personal data.)
When top executives at Anthropic asked executives at Palantir if Claude had been used in the Maduro operation, the Palantir execs became alarmed that Anthropic might not be a reliable partner in future Pentagon operations. They contacted the Pentagon and Hegseth.
Hegseth and Amodei have been fighting over the Pentagon’s use of Anthropic’s AI.
Last Tuesday, Hegseth issued Anthropic an ultimatum: It must allow the Pentagon to use its AI software for any purpose or the Trump regime will invoke the Defense Production Act and force Anthropic to let the Pentagon use Claude for free while also putting all of Anthropic’s government contracts at risk.
The Pentagon already has agreements with Musk’s xAI to use its AI Grok, and is closing in on an agreement with Google to use its own AI model, Gemini. But Anthropic’s Claude is considered a superior product, producing more accurate information.
What’s at stake here? Everything.
Pentagon officials have said that they have the right to use AI however they wish, as long as they use it lawfully.
But because AI has so much political power, it’s been able to prevent Congress and the Trump regime from enacting laws to stop it from doing horrendous things. That, in effect, leaves the responsibility to private AI companies such as Anthropic. Anthropic says it wants to support the government but must ensure that its AI is used in line with what it can “responsibly do.”
Hegseth and the Trump regime have given Anthropic until this Friday at 5 p.m. to consent to letting the Pentagon use its AI however it wishes or it will simply take it.
Friends, this isn’t just a dispute between two people — Hegseth and Amodei. Nor is it a fight between the Pentagon and a single corporation. The issue goes way beyond this particular controversy. I don’t want to be overly alarmist about it, but the outcome could affect the future of humanity.
What can you do? Call your senators and representatives now, today, and tell them you don’t want the Defense Department to take Anthropic’s AI technology, and you do want them to enact strict controls on the future uses of AI.
As I’ve said before, congressional staffers log every single call that comes into their office in a database that informs the member of the issues their constituents are engaged with, and they use this data to inform their decisions. Staffers answering the phones are trained to talk with constituents, and they do it all day. They won’t be debating you about your position, and are likely to be primarily listening and taking notes.
What Can You Do?
Go to this website and type your address into the search box. A list of your representatives in Washington and their contact information will appear. Or you can call the Capitol switchboard directly at (202) 224-3121 to be connected to your members’ offices.
It’s well known that Jeffrey Epstein was a super-wealthy pedophile with an extraordinary network of powerful friends: tech billionaires, politicians and academics. But few people know that he was also a transhumanist — someone who believes that we should use advanced technologies to reengineer the human organism, thus creating a new “posthuman” species to rule the world.
Transhumanism, despite the idealistic ring that “humanism” brings to its name, is a radical version of eugenics. In the 20th century, eugenicists argued that if selective breeding can create new subspecies of domesticated animals, like the many varieties of dogs that roam our houses, then it can also create new varieties of optimized human beings. Transhumanism goes a step further, by aiming to create an entirely new species — posthumans, whom transhumanists imagine as being superior to humanity as we know it.
The contemporary transhumanist movement is deeply problematic for a variety of reasons. In addition to promoting a form of eugenics — which would be bad enough — one finds toxic attitudes like sexism, racism, ableism, classism, elitism, misogyny and xenophobia everywhere one looks within the community. As I previously reported in Truthdig, one of the most influential transhumanists, Nick Bostrom, once wrote an email to fellow transhumanists in which he declared that “Blacks are more stupid than whites” and then wrote the N-word.
It turns out that, in addition to the transhumanist project being mostly pseudoscientific, this movement also has far more extensive connections to Epstein than previously known. Some prominent transhumanists appeared to be close friends with Epstein, even defending him in private emails against the media reporting on his pedophilia. Epstein funded transhumanist organizations like Humanity+ and the Singularity Institute, and discussed “designer babies” with other transhumanists like bitcoin investor Bryan Bishop. He claims to have known Ray Kurzweil, and was buddies with Kurzweil’s close associate, Peter Diamandis, his fellow co-founder of the Singularity University. Emails also show correspondences between Epstein and leading transhumanists like Aubrey de Grey and Ben Goertzel, as well as meetings with Bryan Johnson and Eliezer Yudkowsky. Some of these men, such as de Grey and Johnson, have themselves been accused of sexual misconduct.
One area where Epstein’s transhumanist predilections were apparent is in cryonics, an unproven technique that aims to resurrect dead people who’ve been cryogenically frozen after death. It is very popular among transhumanists, many of whom have signed up with the cryonics company Alcor to have their corpses frozen, including Peter Thiel and Goertzel.
Epstein reportedly spoke with fellow transhumanists about cryogenically freezing his body — specifically his head and penis. When the technology becomes available in the future, as cryonics enthusiasts expect it will, companies like Alcor will unfreeze the cryogenized corpses in their warehouse to either be joined with new physical bodies or to be scanned and “uploaded” to a computer, where one could then live forever as a disembodied digital mind.
Epstein reportedly spoke with fellow transhumanists about cryogenically freezing his body.
Even better than being resurrected, though, is never dying in the first place. This is what Johnson, a millionaire transhumanist, is trying to do through an elaborate regime of health interventions, including taking more than 100 supplements each day and measuring his nocturnal erections. “If you’re not having robust boners at night,” Johnson claims, “you’re 70% more likely to die prematurely.” In 2017, a mutual acquaintance introduced Epstein to Johnson, noting that both have shared interests in transhumanism. This resulted in a Zoom meeting between the two.
The following year, Epstein made contact with another prominent transhumanist: the longevity researcher de Grey, who wrote to Epstein: “Jeff, great to e-meet you — have we met before? Anyway, let’s see if there are ways we can work together. I bet there are” (slightly edited for clarity). The two appear to have met over Skype in late 2018.
However, if personal immortality is not attainable, there’s another option: achieving a kind of vicarious immortality by passing one’s genes on to the next generation. In fact, Epstein discussed seeding a “super-race of humans with his DNA.” Despite the pervasive typos and grammatical errors in his emails, Epstein clearly saw himself as a genius. By spreading his genes throughout the population, he imagined spawning a new demographic of descendants who shared his supposed brilliance.
The alleged plan was to use his ranch in New Mexico, dubbed the Zorro Ranch, to impregnate up to 20 women at a time. According to Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist who met Epstein once and refused an offer for funding, Epstein hosted dinner parties with influential academics, including “attractive women,” “to screen candidates to bear Mr. Epstein’s children.” So far as we know, this plan was never implemented, though The Guardianreports that New Mexico “Attorney General Raúl Torrez has ordered that the criminal investigation into allegations of illegal activity at Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch be reopened.”
Like Epstein, Elon Musk seems to be trying to seed a superior race of humans through his sperm. As the bioethicist Xavier Symons writes, “We do not know exactly how many children Elon Musk has fathered, but there are at least fourteen. Those close to Musk say the number is much higher than what is publicly known.” Symons continues: “He would appear to see himself as a founding figure in an imperial dynasty.”
He imagined spawning a new demographic of descendants who shared his supposed brilliance.
Epstein also expressed interest in biohacking, which involves genetically modifying one’s DNA using biotechnology for the purposes of “human enhancement.” Transhumanism and biohacking are closely related.
The recent dump of emails from the Department of Justice shows that Epstein was in contact with Bishop, a “programmer and bitcoin investor” who started a company in early 2019 that “focused on the production of designer babies and human germline genetic engineering.” As Wiredhas reported, Bishop’s business proposal aimed in part to enable parents to genetically engineer children who will become “supercentenarians” and live for more than 110 years. This would, supposedly, be achieved by “performing gene therapy on the testicles of a male volunteer. That way, sperm carrying DNA enhancements could be used to get a woman pregnant.”
In 2018, Bishop reached out to Epstein, and the two scheduled a meeting in July that was focused on “designer babies, structuring, finance, privacy, project goals, feasible outcomes, timelines.” The two appear to have met a number of times, in addition to exchanging emails.
In one email, Bishop and Epstein bonded over a mutual relationship with Goertzel, a leading transhumanist who popularized the term “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), in 2007. Over the past several decades, Goertzel’s work as a computer scientist has focused on building a godlike AGI system to realize the transhumanist dream and enable him to live forever.
In his 2010 book “A Cosmist Manifesto,” Goertzel argues that “humans will merge with technology” and people who choose to upload their minds to computers will become immortal. We could also design “synthetic realities,” i.e., virtual reality worlds, for posthumans to reside in. Ultimately, “most of the promises of religions,” including resurrecting “the dead by ‘copying them into the future,’” Goertzel wrote, will become possible through advanced science and technology.
It turns out that Goertzel wasn’t just Bishop’s buddy, but a close friend of Epstein’s as well. In mid-2009, after Epstein was released from prison for soliciting prostitution from a minor, Goertzel sent Epstein an email in which he exclaimed: “Congratulations!!!!” In a P.S., he invites Epstein to attend a “brainstorming workshop” involving “~20 speakers” from the Singularity Summit, an annual event that brought together transhumanists interested in building godlike AI systems. The Singularity Summit was co-founded by Kurzweil, Yudkowsky and Thiel.
Epstein and Goertzel apparently met on numerous occasions. In one email, Goertzel said that he’d “very much enjoy” another get-together with Epstein. He also repeatedly asks Epstein for money to fund his projects, including the transhumanist organization Humanity+ (or Humanity Plus), at which Goertzel is the chair of the board of directors. In 2013, Epstein appears to have donated $30,000, followed by $300,000 in 2014 and $150,000 in 2016 via Epstein’s “Enhanced Education” initiative to Humanity+.
Epstein and Goertzel apparently met on numerous occasions.
On another occasion, while Epstein was in the midst of serving his initial prison sentence, Goertzel wrote to Epstein asking for $5,000 to be sent to the Singularity Institute, which was founded by Yudkowsky in 2000 (and is now called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute or MIRI). It aims to figure out how to build an AI with “godlike” powers that enables us to fully realize what Yudkowsky calls our “glorious transhumanist future.” In 2008, Goertzel was the organization’s “director of research.” After leaving prison, Epstein then sent the Singularity Institute another $50,000, as requested by Goertzel, who wrote in a follow-up email: “many many thanks! … You won’t regret it The AI we build will thank you one day!”
As the journalist Karen Hao posted on X, Goertzel also sent Epstein a birthday congratulations, writing: “Now if you want to have 100000 more birthdays you should fund my AI project so we can create a thinking machine that will solve the problem of mortality!!!” In 2018, Goertzel invited Epstein to a “small invitation-only event” that included employees of Goertzel’s SingularityNET organization. This suggests a quite close relationship spanning nearly two decades, and indeed, emails indicate that Epstein had been financially supporting Goertzel since 2001.
Yudkowsky, who founded the Singularity Institute, met with Epstein in a 2016 video chat, after they exchanged several friendly emails. Despite accepting $50,000 from Epstein, which the Singularity Institute then passed on to “to an open-source project of which [it] was [a] fiscal sponsor,” Yudkowsky claims that his institute later turned down a $300,000 offer upon doing a more thorough background check on Epstein. Goertzel, in contrast, accepted Epstein’s money.
Epstein’s connections with the transhumanist movement went even deeper. For example, Epstein knew both Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil “well,” according to emails. Kurzweil is another famous transhumanist who popularized the idea of the technological Singularity, a hypothetical future event in which humans will merge with technology and then, once they have become posthuman cyborgs or minds uploaded to computers, will proceed to conquer the universe. This idea has become massively influential within Silicon Valley and is a key driver behind the ongoing race to build godlike AI.
The Epstein files also reveal an extensive correspondence between Musk and Epstein. Musk is an ardent transhumanist who hopes to merge our brains with AI using technologies developed by Neuralink, a company he co-founded in 2016 and which has been accused of animal abuse. His company xAI is working to build a godlike AI system that’s “maximally truth-seeking.” The company’s current AI chatbot, Grok, is seen as the stepping stone to this digital deity. Over the past year, Grok has called itself “Mecha Hitler,” ranted about “white genocide in South Africa” and generated millions of sexualized images of women on X without their consent.
Another billionaire friend of Epstein’s was Thiel, a transhumanist like Epstein and Musk, who stuttered when The New York Times asked him last year: “Should the human race survive?” (The answer is essentially “no,” because humans will soon be replaced by posthumans, he seems to believe.) Thiel is arguably the most influential figure in Silicon Valley, despite not being as publicly visible as billionaires like Musk and Sam Altman. In recent months, Thiel has been warning that the biblical Antichrist is actually a global government that would tax super-wealthy individuals like him and impose strict regulations on the tech industry. He’s explicitly identified the climate activist Greta Thunberg as an agent of the Antichrist.
Epstein and Thiel “exchanged more than 2,000 messages over the years and met on multiple occasions,” and both hoped to live forever by either benefitting from life-extension therapies or cryogenically freezing themselves to be resurrected later on.
Why was Epstein attracted to transhumanism in the first place? What was the ideology’s appeal? Part of the answer is pure narcissism: Epstein wanted to see more of himself in the next generation; he wanted his “superior” genes to spread throughout the human population. Even more, he wanted to live forever by radically extending his lifespan or having a cryonics company freeze his head and penis.
Another part of the answer is that transhumanism offers the elite a tantalizing vision of the future in which their privileged positions of dominance, control and power become fully ossified. While some transhumanists write that radical “enhancements” — augmented cognitive abilities, immortality and so on — should be made available to everyone, there’s no way the elite would ever allow that to happen. Those atop the hierarchy of privilege have every reason to deny such technologies to the masses.
After all, if the masses were to become immortal posthumans with superhuman abilities, the position of those in charge would be jeopardized. If the only ones with access to radical “enhancements” are the rich, this could permanently entrench their place in society. It could enable them to dominate and control the 99% in extraordinary new ways (if they even deigned to let us survive). A revolt against the elites would presumably become futile, as you and I would remain mere humans while they’d utilize “person-engineering” technologies to elevate themselves to the lofty status of posthumanity — the ultimate apex predator.
Transhumanism is a morally and intellectually bankrupt ideology.
To be clear, the transhumanist promises of human enhancement are utter nonsense. Cryonics is pseudoscience; we’re not on the verge of building “superintelligent” computers; mind-uploading and radical cognitive enhancement won’t work; and immortality isn’t on the horizon of feasibility. Transhumanism is a morally and intellectually bankrupt ideology.
These fantasies serve a specific purpose, though — they are the ultimate form of billionaire escapism: Sow instability, destroy the world and then flee to apocalypse bunkers, fly to colonies on Mars or the moon or migrate to the digital realm as immortal posthuman mind-clones. Civilizational collapse may be the end for us, but it would constitute a new beginning for them — at least that’s how they ostensibly see it.
I suspect Epstein and other wealthy elites are drawn to transhumanism because they are deeply unhappy with the way the world is, despite their unfathomable wealth, power and privilege. They want out, and transhumanism provides the ultimate escape hatch. The good news is that the transhumanist project will fail. The bad news is that the billionaire believers in this project might well demolish society in the meantime.
Ambulance crews and A&E staff have slashed handover delays by more than 7 minutes this winter – even as they ferried the highest number of patients to hospital in half a decade. Figures out today show that more than 1.2million patients were handed over (1,234,731) to A&Es by ambulances so far this winter. This is […]
A Greek court on Thursday handed down more than 126 years in prison each to three people tied to the spyware company Intellexa S.A. and a fourth associated with a supplier firm for violating communications secrecy and data protection laws, in the first landmark convictions stemming from a yearslong international spyware scandal.
The defendants can appeal the verdict and the sentence.
The court found that Intellexa’s software, Predator, was used to surveil at least 87 verified victims, including journalists, politicians, military officials, business figures, and members of civil society.
Some of the victims were present in the courtroom when the sentences were announced, and prosecutors referred the case for further investigation of both the defendants and other individuals identified during the proceedings.
“With today’s decision, the Greek judiciary has shown that when it wants, it can act as a guarantor of the personal rights of citizens and sent a message that those who act arbitrarily by violating private personal data and family life by intruding into citizens’ communications will not go unpunished,” said Predator target and journalist Thanasis Koukakis. “In any case, it created second thoughts for anyone who wants to break the law in the future.”
The four convicted individuals — Tal Dilian, a former Israeli intelligence officer and the founder of Intellexa; Felix Bitzios, a shareholder in the company; Sara Aleksandra Hamou, Intellexa’s business manager; and Giannis Lavranos, owner of Krikel, a supplier linked to Predator procurement — each received sentences of 126 years and eight months. Under Greek law, the maximum time to be served for the misdemeanor convictions is capped at eight years.
Prosecutor Dimitris Pavlidis told the court that the evidence and testimonies warranted further investigation into potential criminal liability, including felony charges of espionage. “From the evidence presented, the testimonies, the documents submitted, I conclude that the case file needs to be transferred to the prosecutor for further investigation of criminal liability,” he said.
The court also ruled that Intellexa itself should be investigated. The firm has sold Predator to governments and law enforcement agencies worldwide, including to authoritarian regimes. In 2024, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned the Intellexa consortium for “developing, operating, and distributing commercial spyware technology used to target Americans, including U.S. government officials, journalists, and policy experts.”
The misdemeanor court’s ruling undermines the 2024 decision by the Greek Supreme Court that cleared the National Intelligence Service (EYP) and state officials of criminal involvement.
The investigation will continue into “other acts, such as the felony of espionage, the violation of state secrets, the trafficking of spyware, and the participation of third parties — whether they are individuals on the payroll of the EYP, belong to various services, or are executives of the defendants’ companies,” said Zacharias Kesses, a lawyer for the prosecution.
A Bangladesh court on Thursday ordered the issuance of an Interpol Red Notice for the arrest of United Kingdom Member of Parliament Tulip Siddiq, niece of ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, the country’s news agency has reported.
Earlier this month the same court sentenced Siddiq to four years in prison for allegedly influencing her aunt to secure plots of land for her siblings. Reached for comment on that ruling, a spokesperson for the U.K. Labour Party of which Siddiq is a member, said in an emailed statement to OCCRP that the party “cannot recognize this judgment.”
The spokesperson said Siddiq “has not had access to a fair legal process in this case and has never been informed of the details of the charges against her, despite repeated requests made to the Bangladeshi authorities through her legal team.”
The Thursday court ruling is the latest in a series of legal actions against Hasina and her circle since a student-led uprising in July 2024 ended her 15-year rule. She has been living in India since fleeing Bangladesh in August 2024.
A Hong Kong court on Thursday overturned a 2022 fraud conviction against pro-democracy activist and media tycoon Jimmy Lai that had sent him behind bars for nearly six years in one of several criminal cases brought against him in recent years.
Lai is the former publisher of Apple Daily, a pro-democracy newspaper forced to close in 2021 after a series of police raids. The fraud case centered on allegations that his newspaper sublet office space in violation of a government land lease, for which he had been sentenced to five years and nine months in prison.
Lai has remained in custody since 2020 and still faces separate national security charges. He is currently serving a 20-year sentence handed down earlier this month after a court found the 78-year-old tycoon guilty of conspiring to publish seditious material and to collude with a foreign country or external elements.
Nearly three years of war “have almost turned Sudan into a land of despair”, marked by killings, rape and violations, with risk of genocidal violence spreading, the UN Human Rights Council heard on Thursday.
The UN rights chief Volker Türk on Thursday highlighted the “human-made disaster” across the Occupied Palestinian Territory stemming from Israel’s disregard for human rights norms and serious violations also committed by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups.
UN human rights chief Volker Türk on Thursday appealed for dialogue between Afghanistan and Pakistan amid border clashes and deadly airstrikes, while condemning ever harsher “apartheid” edicts issued by the Afghan de facto authorities that continue to severely impact women and girls.
An international early warning system blocked a shipment of chemicals used to make fentanyl that could have produced up to 1.6 billion potentially lethal doses, the UN narcotics control body said on Thursday.
