In the last two years, I’ve written dozens of articles about artificial intelligence and its growing effect on business and our society. I’ve tried my best to work through the obvious hype and salesmanship and tried to highlight the real and growing dangers, opportunities, and incredible possibilities of a future world where AI is fully integrated into all aspects of our lives.
From my perspective, it’s scary, exhilarating, awe-inspiring, confusing, and very, very worrisome. It’s not just the dangers involved in a worst-case scenario; it’s the very definition of “The Great Unknown.” AI’s most brilliant and driven men and women are pushing us into a future that even they have no idea what it will be like.
Anyone who isn’t a little worried or scared about that needs to stop deluding themselves and start thinking about AI.
Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen are both long-time political pros and excellent journalists. Neither is prone to exaggeration or hyperbole. They don’t write stuff to get clicks or noticed on the internet.
In Axios, the publication they co-founded, they have issued a stark warning. While you’ve been living your normal life, going about your business, AI models have been getting faster, smarter, and more capable. Why?
Because the AI models are on a “self-improvement kick.” They are improving on their own with very little or no human intervention.
Six facts. No hyperbole. All in the past 60 days.
- AI is the fastest-growing product category in world history.
- One of the latest models [Anthropic’s “Mythos”] is so powerful that its maker won’t release it to the public.
- OpenAI and Anthropic say their most powerful AI coding models are now building themselves.
- AI companies are growing less transparent as models grow more powerful. The federal government requires zero transparency.
- AI resentment is building fast. In early April, the San Francisco home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was the target of two attacks in the same week. Shaken, he wrote: “The fear and anxiety about AI is justified … Power cannot be too concentrated.”
- AI havoc is no longer theoretical: This year’s great software rout erased $2 trillion in value as investors realized, week by week, new human tasks that the latest models would wipe out, from coding to real estate services to legal research to financial management.
It’s not hype. When $2 trillion in value disappears from some of the most successful companies in history, something is up.
“We’ve been warned — by the data, by the technology, and by the people most responsible for building it — that we’ve unleashed something powerful, something growing exponentially, and something understood by very few, especially those in power,” write VandeHei and Allen.
Even if only half of that is true, we should be very worried. Right now, politicians are nibbling at AI around the edges, empowering communities to refuse to build the data centers that AI needs to power the models, and warning us about the coming job-loss apocalypse.
That jobs apocalypse is very real and already underway. As of late April 2026, more than 92,000 tech employees have been cut industry-wide. Major firms like Meta (8,000 jobs) and Microsoft (roughly 8,750 jobs) have recently announced mass reductions specifically attributed to a “relentless shift toward AI” and efficiency. Nearly 80,000 U.S. tech workers lost their jobs in the first quarter of 2026 alone, with AI directly blamed for approximately half of those cuts.
The notion that no one knows how the AI revolution will play out has generated enormous anxiety in some people. A man who believes that AI will lead to human extinction tossed a Molotov Cocktail at the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman’s House. He then went to OpenAI headquarters and threatened to kill managers and workers.
“We’ve no clue where this ends, and the good or bad that might be unleashed along the way,” the authors write. “No one does. But it’s increasingly clear that absent better leadership, collaboration and understanding, American society, workers, academic institutions and government aren’t remotely ready for what’s unfolding.”
Hours after the attack on his house, Altman penned a blog post.
- “The fear and anxiety about AI is justified.”
- “AI has to be democratized; power cannot be too concentrated.”
- “[W]e are in the process of witnessing the largest change to society in a long time, and perhaps ever.”
- “We are all learning about something new very quickly; some of our beliefs will be right and some will be wrong, and sometimes we will need to change our mind quickly as the technology develops and society evolves.”
The man running the most-adopted AI product in history, hours after someone tried to kill him at his home, publicly acknowledged that the anxiety about his technology is warranted — and neither he nor anyone else knows exactly where we’re headed.
It’s too late to heed the advice to “slow down.” The tech bros in charge of this runaway train wouldn’t listen anyway. As I’ve been saying for months, even though companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are all trying to be conscientious in AI development and keep the agents under control, when they don’t know what the capabilities of their creation are, how can anyone be sure of the future?
China isn’t slowing down, you might observe. That’s a huge problem, but there’s little we can do about it. More to the point, the government has to step in and set hard and fast guardrails that everyone can follow.
It has to be done before we wake up one day and discover a world we hardly recognize.
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