Winter is coming for the AI industry, and the great houses are already drawing swords
On one side sit OpenAI and Anthropic, wrapping themselves in the banner of “safety”…House Monopoly. On the other sit the accelerationists including David Sacks, President Trump, and a growing faction that wants the pathway cleared, not blocked…House Speed Racer. The fight is being sold as existential risk versus national destiny. This is a battle for power, money, and control. The average citizen is not at the table.
I have been watching this movie since the post-Labor Day panic dropped. I wrote last week an article titled “The Post Labor Day AI Panic Psyop Has been Launched” where I detailed a former Anthropic and OpenAI employee with almost no prior X footprint posted a polished warning that the labs are “gambling with our lives.” It exploded to 123 million views in a day. Mainstream media, NGOs, and members of Congress materialize on cue. Two days later, after I wrote my Psyop post, Dario Amodei is on every airwave demanding we “pace the frontier.” Sam Altman nods along and then Elon agrees even after he questioned the well-coordinated messaging. I suspect his motivation for agreeing is that he wants to make sure he is in the room should this path gain momentum. Even Hillary and Obama weighed in…obviously on House Monopoly side. Basically House Monopoly wants embedded evaluators inside the labs and common safety standards. Coordination that would require government blessing and, conveniently, an antitrust waiver so the two biggest closed model shops can sit in a room and decide how fast everyone else is allowed to run and regulate their competition out of existence. This is not altruism, rather this is regulatory capture.
The reasons for attempting this regulatory capture are simple and I touched on it in my previous article. Open source models are putting real pricing pressure on the closed frontier systems. The closed system companies are burning cash with profitability nowhere in sight. Enterprises are finally asking about ROI and whether they want their data sitting inside OpenAI or Anthropic. Secondary market valuations are starting to crack. Growth is slowing and capex is increasingly getting harder to finance.
Hellbound and Down 