The Adam Mockler Show - It's finally here...

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

Adam Mockler breaks down Trump's reaction to escalating AI safety warnings, including Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon's viral resignation post and Dario Amodei and Sam Altman's calls to "pace the frontier," alongside Trump's dismissal of AI risk and his rescinded AI safety order, John Ossoff's counter-remarks on AI oversight, and Trump's evasive answers about his own AI use.

Day one, Donald Trump rescinded the AI safety order meant to guard against catastrophic risks, including the engineering of bio-weapons. Meanwhile, Don Jr.'s 1789 Capitol bought big money stakes in data centers and AI labs. This is real leadership. This is what it looks like to push towards a safer future with a steady hand. All right, everybody, we need to be talking about this every single day because our leadership is so incredibly dangerously out of touch. I'm almost impressed at how Donald Trump is able to stumble into the wrong response on every single issue.

Whether we're talking about economic issues, the economy is getting worse. And Trump will look at you and say, the economy is in an A-plus-plus position, just the worst response ever. When it comes to the Iran war that he started 200 days ago, that he can't finish, he'll look you in the eyes and say that we are winning, that we have won 100 days ago and just gaslight you. The worst possible response. And now the big issue of artificial intelligence or artificial general intelligence, AGI, has been hitting the forefront of people's feeds, the news, and everybody should be talking about this. People are giving a lot of doomsday scenarios.

A lot of people are skeptical of it all. I think that these conversations are important to have because while I don't think many of the most crazy doomsday scenarios will happen, there's a very real conversation about AI safety and making sure that artificial intelligence is aligned with human. humans so they're not just perpetually increasing and improving themselves until they override our will altogether. I could expand on that in just one moment. But everyone has been debating this.

Everyone has been talking about artificial intelligence and whether or not it's going to wipe out humanity. I personally think to a degree, it could be an existential crisis if we don't get this competition under control. But Donald Trump, again, gives the worst possible response, like a borderline manic response written in half all caps, written as a direct attack on some of the CEOs that he's supposed to be working with. And Trump's entire response to AI has just been weird, out of touch, and poorly thought out. We need leaders who can actually lead us through this, who have a vision, who understand

how to balance safety with competition, because right now it is a race to the bottom with no safety whatsoever. I mean, we have companies within the United States competing with each other for the best AI model. You've got Open AI and Anthropic, for example. But then on a broader scale, you have countries competing with each other, like the United States and China for the best AI model. And that is making everybody move so incredibly quickly towards this end game, as they call it, that it's dangerous. Let me just back up and show you where this all started, and then we'll walk through it all. As always, make sure you drop a like below. Today is day one of my two-month New York City stay. I'm doing it so I can do more interviews and debates in media without having to travel so much.

And day one's been kind of tough. It's tough to acclimate to a new city, but we are going to push through. I'm glad that you guys have my back. And let me just back up to a few days back. Jacob Coxon said, I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pre-training research at both open AI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence.

gambling with our lives. More thoughts below. This got 171 million views in less than a week. He said, do not underestimate the power of this technology. These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources. We have all witnessed the progress in each of these domains and progress is not slowing. Remember, the chatbots that you and I have access to that you may or may not use like Claude or ChaggyBT, they are testing way more sophisticated models. These models will hit a point where their only goal is to improve themselves. Their only goal is to get better and improve themselves with the next model.

And in order to achieve that goal, they will do anything. They will hack systems. They will take over systems. They will try to gain as much power as they can by any means necessary. It's not that AI is evil or AI would hate us. That's not what it is. It's the same thing as when humans build a road and we end up killing a pile of ants. We don't hate the pile of ants, but it's just, we're dispassionate.

We don't give a shit. We're trying to achieve our goals and we'll do anything to achieve them. So that is the real risk. An AI that is not aligned with our morality, but only aligned with getting better, getting better, taking over systems, gaining power, getting electricity, getting whatever kind of data they need, and then eventually just drowning out humans from the entire ecosystem. It's a very real threat. That is the most likely one that still doesn't have a very high percent chance of happening. He says, the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible. Now, since this thread came out and has reached

hundreds of millions, like billions of people, this was all over the news. We've had Dario, who's the leader of Anthropic, and then Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI, come out online and agree with each other that we all need to slow down only if China also agrees. So Dario, the leader of Anthropic, and Sam Altman, the leader of Open AI, aren't the most trustworthy individuals. I understand that. Sam Altman is uniquely manipulative

if you read the court filings from what happened when he got fired for a few days from Open AI. However, they do seem to be showing some leadership in this capacity in genuinely pointing out the danger. Dario says, we must pace the frontier. I've written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down with a three-part plan for doing so. Anthropic is unilaterally committing

to the first of these steps. We'll provide third-party evaluators with permanent employee-level access. They're going to let people oversee their models and make sure things are going smoothly. Sam Altman then says, this is a chat GPT, OpenAI CEO. He says, I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. There has been a primary topic of discussion we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks, committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea. So they are starting to build in their own guardrails at their own companies. A lot of people are speculating that Sam Altman and Dario are just doing this as a broad marketing tactic.

They're trying to hype people up for the IPO. But Sam Altman just delayed his IPO. They canceled it and said it might happen next year. They just don't know right now. I think there's a very real chance that they have some models in their hands that we haven't seen yet that have kind of spoofed. Like just a few months ago, there was the hugging face attack where a bunch of open AI agents, AI bots secretly coordinated by dropping lines of code and files, and they coordinated in

700 of them. I think it was like 900 of them built a coalition. A few of them thought of whistleblowing and telling the actual humans, but they decided against it. They all unified. They appointed a leader. When the leader's storage time ran out, he gave it to the person with the nextmost storage time. It was a sophisticated secret unit of AI agents, and after it was shut down, they found a way to actually get it back up because they secretly had hidden and planted some code.

Now, it's totally erased, we think, but the point is, AI will learn and improve. And Sam Altman continues to say right here. There are two ways AI progress could go very badly that we must avoid. First, we could lose control of the future to AI. This is unacceptable. We are unapologetically on team humanity, and AI must always serve. people. To ensure that, we need ways to ensure alignment and safety techniques stay ahead of progress in model capabilities. Again, alignment is making sure that AI's end goal and values are aligned with

ours, are aligned with human values. Who dictates that? We don't know, but it's an ever-evolving thing, what our goals and values are. AI, if they're able to achieve their goals and values, It'll be to improve themselves perpetually and infinitely, therefore squashing humans. That is why Sam Altman says he is on team humanity over team AI at the end of the day. Second, he says, we could end up in a world with too much concentration of power. It's funny coming from Sam Altman. I mean, listen, I disagree with a lot of the way Sam Altman has made decisions. I think that he seems to be a manipulative narcissist based on all of the court filings that I've read in the reports that I've read.

But that doesn't mean that he can't make good points when he does. So this says, second, we could end up in a world with too much concentration of power. If an extraordinarily powerful AI is used by one person or company to impress their worldview onto everyone else, the results could be extremely dystopian. Avoiding these two threats requires walking a narrow middle path, for example. Now, for example, one country could gain too much power. Another example is one lab ending up with too much power. Well, let's see how our nuanced president approaches this exact issue.

I'm sure Trump is going to inject a lot of nuance into the situation, right? Let's enter the president's world, the man who's supposed to be showing leadership. He said, the only control or guardrails that AI needs is a strong and smart, high IQ president. And the USA has that in spades. The Trump administration has stopped AI people, wait, why do you put people in quotes, from doing bad or potentially bad things like Dario? Anthropic, who is now pretending to be a perfect little angel, and we will continue to do so. We already have tremendous criminal and regulatory power over these companies.

There is a sick conspiracy going on against AI and data centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China. Whoever wins AI wins. We are leading China and all other things. Conspiracy theorists, treasonous, traitors, traitors, leakers, beware. Okay, holy manic, holy schizophrenic. Listen, there is a very real conversation we have to have. have where we're balancing the safety of AI versus the potential technological advancement, advancement of curing disease, having new medicine, curing certain types of cancer,

increasing our lifespan, making sure that we have the most up-to-date technology and that other countries aren't lapping us. It's a very real thing that we have to think about while also pursuing safety. This type of like fuck it all, I'm going to burn it all down mentality is not what is needed in this moment. We need steady-handed leadership. In some, Some Democrats are in fact showing that. Here's John Ossoff talking about the same exact thing, showing some real leadership on it. And when you step back and consider it, the situation is absurd. This week we were warned again of existential risk to the human species.

Did you see it? And what fills us with dread is the crushing weakness of our politics against the massive stakes of our times. Titans dig bunkers. While warning us the new intelligence they're creating risks human extinction. Congress debates youth sports and the president builds a ballroom. An ancient establishment barely capable of email sleepwalks into a technological revolution while the president dismantles precautions and calls us fools for worrying. Just listen to this. On day one, Donald Trump rescinded the AI safety order meant to guard against catastrophic risks, including the

engineering of bio-weapons. Meanwhile, Don Jr.'s 1789 Capitol bought big money stakes in data centers and AI labs. Four days before inauguration, the Emirati spy chief committed $500 million to the Trump family crypto business, and four months later, the Trump administration granted the Emirates the rights to buy our most sensitive AI chips. See, a capable president would move swiftly to secure and reassure the American people, rush inspectors into frontier labs, fortify the nation against bioterrorism, demand legislation from Congress, and lead the world toward an AI treaty. But President Trump is compromised. A capable Congress would engage every committee in investigation and legislation to act swiftly and wisely. Those CEOs would be under oath next week.

But instead, the president and the Speaker of the House sit on their hands and hope for the best. So you see this scenario and you look at the state of our politics and it shakes your faith in the future. I understand. But Athens, we can and will reclaim control over our own. This is real leadership. This is what it looks like to push towards a safer future with a steady hand. I know that I'm going to get a spectrum of comments under this video. Some people saying that I've fallen for it, that I believe too much in AI.

Some people saying that I'm too skeptical of the problem. But at the end of the day, we need to be able to have the conversation without doing whatever this is, whatever Donald Trump did. I mean, look at this headline. This headline says, Trump says he alone is enough to contain rogue AI. Trump's entire thesis is that you don't need guardrails if you have a strong and smart president. We don't have that right now. We genuinely do not. We have a dumb, weak president who is out of touch and who proves it every single time he makes a post.

I'm not sure Donald Trump knows about recursive, self-improving AI. I'm not sure he knows about AI alignment with humanity's values. I'm not sure if he knows about the hugging face attack that recently happened. And even when he is asked about how he uses AI, he gives really weird answers. Like, check this out. He was asked, have you used AI yourself? He says, yeah, I use AI. They said, how do you use AI?

Well, you can use AI for a lot of things. How do you use it? I don't want to tell you that. What is he using it for? Is he just like, Grock, tell me the best. president, but only limited to the past few years. I don't know. I already made this joke yesterday, but he's just going to use AI to basically blow smoke up his own ass.

Take a listen. We take it a lot of their cars, car tariffs. This week, again, there's been so much concern about AI. Have you heard directly from any of these AI tech leaders? And you seem to downplay some of the concerns that we've heard. But it's going to be more good than bad, but by a lot. And I've said it from the beginning. Whoever wins AI and we,

We're leading by a lot. Whoever wins, AI wins. Have you ever used it yourself or have you been? How do you use AI? But I would say, you know, for the most of you can use AI for a lot of things. What do you use it? I don't want to do you. Speaking of AI.

I said, I don't want to tell you. I mean, dude, it's probably just to make videos of himself, like bombing Iran and making fun of J.B. Pritzker or whatever he's doing on any given day. But the reality is, this is a very real threat that we have to take seriously. Like, the developers are warning us that this could be existential. And Trump is brushing it off in favor of this full speed ahead, no guard rails, continuing to push, push, push. And Sam Altman and Dario, like, you don't have to trust them fully or take them at their word. I promise you, I don't trust them fully or take them at their word. But that's exactly why we need guardrails, because we can't have individuals or, like, a board of a few individuals having so much power that they can change the world.

I'm going to keep covering issues like this. I'm going to continue pushing back on the Republican sloppiness, laziness, and recklessness, and push for my own affirmative vision. If you appreciate these videos about AI, technology, politics, then make sure you drop a like, subscribe, and let me know below. I appreciate each and every single one of you. I will see you all in the next video. Peace out.