Cathie Wood Backs David Sacks' View: Reports on 'AI Will Destroy Humanity' Are Manufactured

September 13: Cathie Wood, known as "Wood Sister," stated that David Sacks, co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, believes recent reports about "AI will destroy humanity" may have been orchestrated, with the related remarks initially coming from a long-inactive X account of an Anthropic employee who left just 6 weeks after joining, after which the content quickly entered mainstream media. David Sacks also named the parties involved in the related events and criticized the role played by The Wall Street Journal.

Recently, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a long article calling for slowing the capability improvements of frontier AI, arguing that AI is increasingly participating in next-generation AI R&D, and that combined with several recent incidents of agents going out of control, safety research is failing to keep up with capability growth. Sam Altman subsequently publicly supported this, saying that OpenAI has also been discussing "pace the frontier" in recent weeks and announced that OpenAI would also bring in similar long-term independent evaluators.

Former White House AI and cryptocurrency lead and current co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology David Sacks then hit back: "If you really think internal models are dangerous, then stop yourself." Sacks believes that if government approval is still needed to get several of the largest AI companies to sit down together and limit speed, it looks very much like a monopoly alliance. He also named METR, questioning whether it is suitable to serve as an independent referee for the entire industry. METR has long conducted external evaluations for companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI, and recently Anthropic safety researcher Joe Benton left to join it. However, METR made clear that it does not accept funding from these frontier AI companies and only accepts model access and free tokens.