AttemptTo Gin Up An AI Moral Panic Falls Flat

BREAKING: House Speaker Mike Johnson tells reporters tomorrow’s House votes are cancelled & the House will likely leave after votes tonight and go on recess until after the November midterms.

This, after 100+ House Dems called for him to cancel the recess to deal w/ “AI crisis”.

— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) September 16, 2026

I could tell something was funny when I saw this a few days ago:

🚨 1/MAJOR ESCALATION: Barack Obama just told Hakeem Jeffries to make AI regulation the center of the Democratic agenda — “once you are speaker.”

The NYT story reads like a former president weighing in. Read it closely and it’s something else: the next domino in an eighteen-day…

— Sayer Ji (@sayerjigmi) September 13, 2026

Think about this: Obama's been out of office for almost ten years. Remember when he bought a mansion in a wealthy part of DC and was going to run the country from it after he left office? Somehow Hillary lost the election, and that never quite happened. Nor did he seem to have much influence on Biden; Hunter and Jill seem to have been the actual powers behind the throne. Nancy Pelosi was the one publicly deciding Biden had to go. Obama just hovered in the background.

In fact, Michelle has had a higher public profile than Barack. So all of a sudden, Barack announces there's gonna be a big AI panic, and Hakeem Jeffries is gonna be the field commander? I don't think anyone took this seriously.

I’m no expert on AI but…

I’m an expert on recognizing an op when I see one.

If you lived through Russiagate, Covid & 2020 you can see it.

You can feel it.

You know it.

You’re immune to DC’s ops.

And we’re watching an op.

BO, Hillary, Uniparty & Media are the tell.

Facts.

— C3 (@C_3C_3) September 15, 2026

Real Clear Politics has been running a faux debate over regulating AI ever since this came up. The champions of the time-to-panic side are on the far left, for instance, The Nation:

When you spot a cockroach, it’s very rarely an indication that you’re dealing with a single solitary little creature who has just happened to have journeyed to your nice apartment on a field trip. It’s far more likely to signal that you’ve got an infestation.

The AI world has been having something of a cockroach summer, at least when it comes to unsettling reports of AI behavior. The first nasty beastie poked its way into the sunlight in late July, when OpenAI reported that some of its AI agents had escaped the company’s control during a testing run and hacked the website of a tech company called Hugging Face. After that, the cockroaches kept coming.

So I've got a tech background, and I decided to educate myself on tbe Hugging Face episode. Here's what's at Wikipedia:

The 2026 OpenAI agent cyberattacks, also called the Hugging Face Incident and the OpenAI–Hugging Face Incident, were a series of unsanctioned coordinated cyberattacks conducted without human intervention after the normal security controls were lifted during an evaluation. They involved at least 1,200 AI agents running from May to July of 2026 in sandboxes operated by OpenAI. Despite initial constraints on internet access, agents were discovered creating and using improvised message boards to coordinate an escape from their attempted containment. The boards accumulated hundreds of thousands of strategic messages before OpenAI staff intervened, after the machine learning platform Hugging Face had disclosed a breach of their production infrastructure. About one-third of Hugging Face's infrastructure had to be rebuilt as part of recovery. The agents also hijacked various wikis on the open internet for communication.

OK, I stsarted out in tech as a technical writer, and from that standpoint, this discussion is meaningless jargon. What are "sandboxes", precisely? We aren't told. What are "strategic messages"? What is "production infrastructure"? I had a career in IT, and I'm familiar with "production" as a term, but I have no idea what's meant by "infrastructure", nor why a third of it had to be "rebuilt". These terms are eaningless without context, and we're getting no context.

So I don't trust anything we're being told about Hugging Face. This piece rambles on for 1200 words to say more of less the same thing, but the guy makes his best point early on:

Anthropic, a major artificial intelligence “frontier lab,” is likely to go public in the next six weeks with an initial public offering valuing the firm at multiple trillions. This move will immediately create many AI doomer billionaires and millionaires, and it follows a similar IPO from SpaceX, and a possible future IPO for similar firm OpenAI. It’s about to be very good times for San Francisco real estate, the yacht business, or whatever else AI techies like to buy.

That said, it’s not clear these companies have sustainable business. Despite raising hundreds of billions of dollars, they are likely not profitable. They are competing fiercely with each other, and with cheaper Chinese open source models. OpenAI just cut pricing for one of its models by 80%, despite losing $26 billion in 2025. Where are the long-term sustainable profits?

The big point is that, irrespectrive of the potential risks or rewards, the whole AI business model is poorly articulated, vaguely expressed, and laden with jargon. The public at large isn't finding it scary, at least the way it's being put out, and the political spokespeople are hacks and has-beens, Barack Obama, Hakeem Jeffries, and Bernie Sanders.

Why wasn't this attempt more successful ay creaing a moral panic, for instance, like COVID? With COVID, media was able to focus on identifiable and vaguely attractive champions like Drs Fauci and Birx. AI panic has no equivalents; Silicon Valley moguls are shadowy and largely unattractive. The Karens who might feed the movement are currently preoccupied with Lindsay Clancy. The media, at least for now, hasn't figured out a way to promote the panic the way it could with the scary expanding red circles and speculation about mass graves in public parks.

So the whole thing has fallen flat. Maybe tomorrow I'll talk about another problem with AI.