AI Safety Is Mostly a Sex Cult, Says Critic

AI Safety Is Mostly a Sex Cult, Says Critic

A viral thread by SE Gyges argues that the AI safety movement is a sex cult centered on Eliezer Yudkowsky, the fan fiction author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. It traces Yudkowsky's influence on OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic, and describes a network of polyamorous group houses in Berkeley, including Lighthaven, a compound bought with FTX money. The thread claims the movement's apocalyptic AI doom narrative serves as a recruiting tool and that recent calls to waive antitrust laws for AI 'pacing' reveal a cartel-like agenda that threatens medical research.

The world is going to end, and only I and my special group of people in the know can maybe stop it. (Also, you should give me money and have sex with me.)
  1. iand675

    I too wrote about this, although _much_ longer, if you want a bit of a deeper dive on the subject https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-th...

  2. perlgeek

    I've tried to read this, but somehow the article doesn't really come to a point. Is there any point besides Yud not being perfect, and having connections to people who openly talk about their sex life (and that it's somewhat non-standard)?

  3. andor

    In case the author is reading this: I’m getting a Cloudflare worker exception when accessing the page using one of my uplinks, possibly because of IPv6.

  4. glimshe

    There's a great movie or Streaming series on this post somewhere.

    Sometimes people can be too smart for their own good. Like a frontier model in an eternal hallucination loop, you can create entire seemingly consistent realities in your head and end up bringing others into it.

  5. brendyn

    Sometimes when I find someone to look up to and admire, I later find out there is potentially some dark reality to them. I then lament not being able to find any good role models in the world. If they have missused donor money, then that is terrible. If they are pushing towards goals that seems contrary to their stated mission, that is difficult to judge. I did always find it odd, 10 years after reading Yudkowsky's passionate writings, that he doesn't seem to have really gone and done anything about it. If it was all just a creative writing exercise to him... Then that would be rather humiliating to me, having taken it very seriously.

    As a side note. If I had a choice to oppose a booming ai comoany, or become the billionaire founder of it, I would still choose to become the founder and then use my resource to do something about. It certainly feels hypocritical, but if you want to stop a boulder rolling down hill, what can you do besides run ahead of it and try stop it?

  6. haunter

    >She has a rape kink

    That's enough internet for today, back to playing video games

  7. mjburgess

    Any actually-reasonable person who was around for the founding craze of this era, ie., New Atheism, quickly realised that there was a deep pathology at the heart of many of its zealots, perhaps summed up by a desired to "recreate religion in their own image". I've walked into many a room of people screaming that teaching children falsehoods is literally child abuse. Any one who knows much of Richard Dawkins, Krauss, et al.'s background with women shouldnt be surprised either.

    It's californication into the "rationalist" community as it currently stands is no surprise. Every person I've met deep in this community either seemed to me a narcissist (if male) or, politely and mildly, coquettish (if female). With several relationships I've observed a clear union of the two. I hadn't yet put this so clearly together with the "AI Saftey" crowd, despite being directly adjacent to it all for quite awhile and seeing the cross-proliferation.

    My own analysis had concerned their philosophical naivety, general lack of actual computer science knowledge and generic shallowness of understanding of any domain outside their own research and a kind of "science-fiction" version of philosophy and rationalism. I hadn't connected this yet to their strange personalities, but the apoclypticism fits and neatly bridges these together.

    So what became of the New Atheist project to create a "secular religion" -- an apocalyptic sex cult furnished by a blend of sci-fi, pop-philosophy, and cute parables from po […]

  8. xnx

    Also covered by nypost: https://nypost.com/2026/09/16/business/ai-doomsayers-wild-li...

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