On September 8, an AI researcher named Jacob Coxon announced in an exclusive WSJ interview that he was quitting his job at Anthropic because the big labs were recklessly putting the world at risk. Then, he expanded on his fears in an X thread that garnered 173.8 million views (and counting). Cue widespread panic.

But his meteoric rise may have been carefully coordinated.

DEY. Ideas + Influence, a communications firm associated with prominent AI safetyists, has been working for Jacob, according to two people familiar with the matter as well as an email seen by Pirate Wires in which DEY. was looking to book Jacob for an interview on September 9.

According to one of the sources, who had direct knowledge, DEY. also preemptively booked Nate Soares, a prominent AI safety figure, for interviews that directly overlapped with Jacob going public.

If Jacob is working with DEY., that’s interesting for two reasons: First, he said he wasn’t working with third parties. Second, we are in the middle of a national conversation about the future of AI that is actively determining how we regulate the most powerful technology in the world, largely thanks to the panic stirred up by Jacob — and it’s in the public’s interest to know who, exactly, is behind it.

Jacob is not publicly listed as one of DEY.’s clients and did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The firm also did not immediately respond.

Yes, Jacob’s Rise Was Probably Orchestrated

“The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade,” Jacob wrote in the now-famous X thread. “This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible — but I hear the same people express fear privately. No other human activity poses this level of danger.”

Jacob’s warning was suddenly everywhere: TikTok, Instagram reels, your grandma’s favorite MSM newsroom, Bernie Sanders’ tweets, and Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show. Primetime interviews and flashy profiles minted Jacob as a new celebrity whistleblower challenging the machine.

The speed and volume of the attention and coverage seemed suspicious to many (including Elon Musk). They noted that Anthropic’s alignment chief immediately weighed in to affirm Jacob’s argument; that he had worked at Anthropic for just four months; that he’d scored a fancy blob media interview on his first attempt; that he’d recently worked for a left-wing political advocacy group; that his X account was largely inactive prior to his thread; that his first post received reposts from prominent AI doomer organizations and personalities within 15 minutes.

Fox News’ Bret Baier, for example, wanted to know if Jacob’s media tour was orchestrated in advance: “Did you work with any third parties as far as this whistleblowing and coming out?” he asked Jacob on-air on September 9.

“Not at all,” Jacob said.

The idea of Jacob’s media coordination is often framed as some kind of “gotcha” that proves he doesn’t deeply believe what he’s saying, but rather is chasing fame.

It’s more likely that he does believe what he’s saying and wanted help in persuading the public that he was right.

It’s also possible that many people, who have warned of AI’s risks for years, are coordinating to control the narrative here, possibly with substantial resources.

In which case: who is paying for this?

Meet DEY.

The firm that’s booked media interviews for Jacob, which says it works with “artists, scientists, dissidents, and dreamers” (such as Noam Chomsky), also happens to represent the most prominent AI doomers.

According to its site, DEY. represents AI’s colloquial Doomer-in-Chief Eliezer Yudkowsky, who co-authored If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, a book warning that artificial intelligence advancement would lead to humanity’s extinction.

Another customer is Timnit Gebru, Google’s former Ethical AI lead who parted ways with the company after speaking out against LLMs. She also claimed AGI research was “rooted in eugenics,” and accused Google of “silencing marginalized voices” because they asked her to remove their employees’ names from a paper she’d published denouncing LLMs.

DEY. also directly advises Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Stanford Medicine, and MIRI, one of the leading AI safety nonprofits.

In a testimonial on the site, MIRI’s president Nate Soares (who the firm was promoting around Jacob’s debut), praised DEY. for “[spending] time to understand what we were actually trying to accomplish, rather than treating the engagement as a shallow communications project.”

Beyond the AI sphere, DEY. advises prominent philanthropic organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the social justice-oriented Ford Foundation, and left-wing billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.

DEY. describes its strategy as “the ongoing work of shaping public understanding over time.”

When it comes to AI, that strategy appears to be succeeding.

— Hunter Ryerson

This article has been updated to include the date of the email seen by Pirate Wires (September 9).