<p>Have you noticed your social media feeds suddenly flooding with terrifying content about AI existential risk? </p><p>From TikTok clips warning about &quot;AI psychosis&quot; to viral YouTube shorts claiming chatbots are pushing people to the brink, the anti-AI movement has taken over the internet... But what if these &quot;anti-AI&quot; influencers aren&#39;t actually what they seem?</p><p><strong>SUPPORT MY WORK: </strong></p><p><strong>Buy a paid subscription to my newsletter at </strong><a href="http://usermag.co"><u>usermag.co</u></a>   </p><p><strong>Support my work on Patreon for bonus episodes, monthly Q&amp;A livestreams, and more:</strong> <a href="http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz"><u>http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz</u></a>    </p><p>In this week&#39;s episode of Power User, Washington Post journalist Natasha Tiku join me to pull back the curtain on the massive, billionaire-funded &quot;anti-AI&quot; astroturf campaign. </p><p>We track the money and expose how the exact same millionaires and billionaires building the world&#39;s largest AI companies (like OpenAI and Anthropic) are quietly paying influencers thousands of dollars to promote AI doomsday scenarios.</p><p>We dive deep into the 25-year history of the AI safety movement, from Eliezer Yudkowski’s rationalist blogs and Harry Potter fan fiction to Effective Altruism and the &quot;paperclip maximizer&quot; theory. We talk about how Silicon Valley elites are co-opting VERY genuine public anxieties about jobs and real-world harms related to AI technology in order to push their own pro-AI, anti-regulatory agendas.</p><p>We also talk about how to spot the hidden corporate pipelines, dark money nonprofits, and staged research papers designed to control the narrative around AI. If you&#39;re seeing AI doomer videos all over your feed, please watch this one!</p><p><strong>✨ SUPPORT THE CHANNEL: </strong></p><p>👉 Substack Newsletter:<a href="http://usermag.co/"><u> http://usermag.co</u></a> </p><p>👉 Patreon: <a href="http://patreon.com/taylorlorenz"><u>patreon.com/taylorlorenz</u></a> </p><p>Nitasha&#39;s WaPo story on all this:<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/04/18/ai-doom-influencers-safety/"> <u>https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/04/18/ai-doom-influencers-safety/</u></a></p><p><br></p>