The AI Doomsday Cult: How a 25-Year-Old Internet Subculture Convinced Itself the World Is Ending
Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse
When Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon quit in September 2026, warning that AI could kill us all, his colleagues didn't disagree. This deep dive traces the rationalist subculture behind such warnings—from Eliezer Yudkowsky's early writings to a Berkeley solstice ritual where attendees extinguished candles and contemplated extinction. The movement's intertwined friendships, funding, and romantic relationships now thread through the AI labs and safety institutes asking for public trust. The author argues this scene, not a secret society, shapes today's AI safety discourse and even our politics.
The people in this story are not a secret society coordinating over dinner. They are a social scene: overlapping friendship groups, funding relationships, and sexual and romantic relationships, all of it threaded through the institutions asking you to trust them about AI regulation.
- throwaway13337
The framing of how we think about AI has really been cultivated by a quite homogeneous group of people. These people, like all people that belong to a sub-culture, are almost certainly prone to groupthink.
It's extremely important to see that group as such. That it is not thousands of individual perspectives but a chorus of connected/aligned people who have all read the same things and talked to the same people and are rewarded implicitly for thinking a similar way.
Many of them read HN and are offended I put them this way. But it's inescapable that we as humans have this flaw when we're surrounded by a culture.
There's another universe where we do not constantly compare AI to nukes. I bet that world has a lower P(doom).
- vinkelhake
I'm not saying there aren't weird things going on, but this article sure does a lot of guilt-by-association. We're putting neoreactionaries, polyamorous rationalists, doomsday AI researchers and the Zizians in one big web.
- arcticfox
This whole "we can't trust the people warning us because they're either weirdos or involved" deal is such a strange angle when you can just start from zero, look at what's known to be happening right now, and draw a very straight line to catastrophe.
It's like being concerned Oppenheimer and company are exaggerating when looking at the first nuclear tests at the same time.
- cameldrv
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Few people have the ability/temperament to reason about things that have never happened before. Those that do have a weird psychological profile. Usually you can ignore them. Every once in a while, you can't.
- walrus01
Oh, man, not this again. I recommend listening to the "Behind the Bastards" podcast episodes on the Zizians if you want to really be confronted by the personal histories of some people who went really far down the rationalist rabbit hole. Yes, the harry potter fan fiction features prominently in it.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=behind+th...
- Animats
If you want to meet the sex part of that crowd, Slutcon is in a week.[1]
Tickets are $3,300 to $10,000. This is Aella's creation. It's in Berkeley, California, and there's a fair amount of overlap between the organizers and the Berkeley "rat" community mentioned in the parent article.
- raincole
It seems that the author has very weird and strong obsession over Yudkowsky and his HP fanfic and took the public hatred toward AI companies as an opportunity to ridicule him.
- alexpotato
I remember first watching the Matrix.
They they made the Animatrix as a companion piece.
The Second Renaissance [0] episode of the Animatrix talks about how the machines came to power in the Matrix universe. At the time, it made sense within the bounds of the movies.
Reading about a lot of this AI discussion makes me feel like it was a documentary sent back in time.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUouZgbTp2o_7LK7zqubt...