Barack Obama isn't making it a secret that he is a big fan of government-controlled Artificial Intelligence.
In a closed-door meeting with top Democrats, the former president went so far as to say he would make AI the "centerpiece" of his agenda if he were running for president again.
But amid a fear-based media campaign about unregulated AI threatening to end humanity, some fascinating details have emerged that sow major doubts into the credibility of "the current scare."
Much of the current hysteria about AI can be traced back to the Hugging Face incident near the July 4th holiday, when numerous media outlets reported that AI "went rogue" and escaped into the wild.
It can hardly be overstated how hyperbolic the media coverage of this event was, but sufficient for our purposes are a sample of headlines.
- “OpenAI AI models went rogue during testing, triggering ‘unprecedented’ breach. (Reuters)
- "OpenAI blamed a hacking event on its AI models going rogue.” (AP)
- “Oops, Our Models Went Rogue.” (PC Mag)
- “The AI that went rogue.” (Vox)
- "White House monitoring incident after OpenAI models escaped containment and hacked Hugging Face systems." (Fox Business)
Before we get into what actually happened with this ExploitGym operation, let's take a look at the political fallout.
House Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Nathaniel Moran (R-TX) almost immediately introduced legislation for a "Kill Switch." That was on July 23 — mere days after OpenAI’s disclosure.
Politico tied the legislation directly to OpenAI’s “unprecedented” incident: models that, in Politico’s phrasing, “escaped a sandboxed research environment and autonomously hacked” Hugging Face.
The draft would cover companies with at least $500 million in annual AI revenue and models trained with at least $100 million in compute, require incident reporting and a technical ability to throttle or kill a system, and authorize fines of up to $20 million a day.
“Powerful AI systems can go rogue, behave in extremely dangerous ways, or even resist human intervention,” he said. “It is imperative that these AI systems have kill switches so we can keep this technology from causing catastrophic harm, and that the federal government has the clear authority and process to shut down rogue AI models.”
But was the AI that escaped truly "rogue"? Or was this merely a convenient label for a security incident that lacked proper safety protocols?
If you are smelling a public relations rat, read on.
🚨1/ Obama just endorsed a FAKE AI breakout.
— Sayer Ji (@sayerjigmi) September 13, 2026
OpenAI ran a hacking test with the safety filters OFF.
Gave 700 AIs tasks impossible to solve honestly.
They cheated — using a known bug and two leftover passwords.
The NYT called it “AI has gone rogue.”
Six days later Obama… pic.twitter.com/X5P4haFvFH
Because Sayer Ji has laid it out in painstaking detail how this Hugging Face incident was not what the media made it out to be.
The plain-English summary of this article: OpenAI ran a hacking benchmark on shared infrastructure with its safety filters turned off, gave its AIs tasks that were impossible to solve honestly, and then acted shocked when 700 of them cheated by breaking into Hugging Face using a known parser bug and two leftover passwords. A New York Times op-ed rewrote that as “AI has gone rogue.” Six days later, Barack Obama walked into a closed-door Democratic fundraiser and told the House minority leader to move an AI regulatory framework to the center of the party’s agenda — the same framework Anthropic’s CEO had just proposed, written in part by ControlAI (which told TIME it “wrote the U.K. bill and consulted on the U.S. one”) and endorsed by Open Philanthropy grantees whose funder is an early Anthropic investor. The framework would license frontier AI and put open-source developers in prison for twenty years.
Oh. So maybe AI will only "destroy us all" if we have sociopaths in charge? It's a question worth considering, especially since the moral character of our leaders is, shall we say, lacking.
Speaking of which, there is a very important nugget that needs to be understood: Ted Lieu and Anthropic are directly linked through campaign funding.
Anthropic’s direct corporate contribution to Public First Action, the super PAC advocating its preferred AI regulatory framework: $20,000,000 announced on February 12, 2026, plus a second $20,000,000 announced on July 22, 2026. Total: $40 million.The super PAC is led by Brad Carson**, who simultaneously runs Americans for Responsible Innovation — the Open Philanthropy grantee ($3 million from Open Phil in August 2024) that has endorsed the Lieu AI Kill Switch Act.
Dario Amodei’s personal contribution to Public First on May 4, 2026: $1,000,000. It is his only federal contribution recorded in either the 2024 or 2026 cycle.
Anthropic employee individual contributions in the 2026 cycle: 2,009 records totaling $11,976,949, versus $220,180 in the entire 2023-24 cycle. Of that: $113,600 to the DCCC (Obama and Jeffries’ Sept 10 host); $227,610 to the DSCC; $3,550 to Jeffries for Congress. Source: FEC individual contributions bulk file.
Rep. Ted Lieu — Jeffries’ AI Commission co-chair, author of the AI Kill Switch Act: Anthropic PBC employees are his number two donor for the 2025-26 cycle at $49,000 (per OpenSecrets; $42,000 by strict FEC employer-field match), sitting behind AIPAC and ahead of Alphabet and Microsoft.
That brings us to the Obama shindig. The former president's remarks were obviously leaked to the New York Times, although the Times refuses to name its sources.
Here's what reportedly went down. On Thursday at a private Democratic fundraiser in a conversation with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Obama said AI is moving very fast in private hands and “if we don’t get on top of it, I think can be dangerous.”
“Once you are speaker, I would strongly urge that the Democrats put together a framework for a very public conversation, and you can break it out into three or four or five issues and lay the foundation for a broad public conversation," he also reportedly said.
Now, it gets very obvious that this is a statement that Barack Obama wanted aired throughout the entire Democratic Media Superstructure.
“If I were running for president next year, this would be one of my central agendas, and I would have a very clear plan, and I would talk about this, and I would say, ‘Here’s our plan for safety, here’s our plan for making sure our kids are not corrupted by this.’ … I would be thinking about the economic impacts in very concrete ways and understanding what does it mean if there’s going to be job displacement.”
Obama made sure to qualify that he is neither a “doomer” nor an “accelerationist.” In a highly ironic aside, he also compared unregulated AI to nuclear power, another technological advancement that the organized left was effectively able to hamstring after the 1970s, much to our country's detriment.
Now, Barack Obama being interested in Artificial Intelligence is nothing new. Under the previous administration, he literally pushed the Biden Administration's AI policy — that's not overstatement.
Now, we have Bernie Sanders shilling the Ban Superintelligence Act and then pretending to target Big Tech "oligarchs." But make no mistake, the oligarchs want an AI slowdown.
This would allow time for regulatory capture, staking out market share, damaging would-be competitors, limiting their own liability, fostering a symbiotic relationship with government, and laying the hammer down on Open Source.
The dangers of this approach were brilliantly summarized in an All-In-Podcast.
"This is a Doomer Psyop and the ultimate target is Open Source."
— Kyle Becker (@kylenabecker) September 12, 2026
This is the best explanation for the PR stampede to get public buy-in for government-regulated AI.
It's the same kind of fear-based PR we saw with the nuclear scare, global warming, and COVID lockdowns.
It all… pic.twitter.com/QGkuQQuJfI
This playbook is simply the next evolution in an elitist gameplan to scare the public into submitting control to the government.
We saw it with the nuclear energy scare in the 1970s. We saw it with the global warming scare the last few decades. We saw it with the COVID hysteria.
The Artificial Intelligence "Apocalypse" is the next logical step in the globalists' attempt to socially engineer humanity.
Regardless of the elites' intentions, it provides the opportunity for yet another truism: The government's control of artificial intelligence is more dangerous than artificial intelligence itself.
