Bestselling author Robert Wright and I are back for round two of our collaboration, reacting to the week in AI. We cover Trump's summit with the AI labs, the FTC's investigation of OpenAI & Anthropic, the latest Gemini announcement, and much more. The Overton window is moving fast, but is the AI moving faster?
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li-rc6swhQs
Timestamps
00:00:00 — Cold Open
00:00:21 — Round Two of Nonzero × Doom Debates
00:01:23 — Trump, the FTC, and an Industry Feeling the Heat
00:05:37 — Google Says Gemini 4 Exists
00:07:41 — Greg Brockman Pulls His $25M from Leading the Future
00:12:53 — The Break-Ins Keep Coming
00:15:23 — The Market Wants Agent Swarms
00:18:30 — The End of “Alignment by Default”
00:20:55 — The Prelude to Recursive Self-Improvement
00:26:14 — David Sacks Can’t Explain Dario
00:30:31 — The All-In Echo Chamber
00:33:47 — Scott Alexander vs. Steven Pinker
00:38:37 — Jason Calacanis vs. the Public Benefit Corporation
00:43:03 — The Elephant in the Room Is the AI
00:46:21 — What the Average American Thinks
00:48:17 — From Chatbot to Agent to Swarm
00:54:20 — Boeing, Agent Swarms, and the Off Switch
00:57:07 — Skynet as a Botnet That Trades With Us
01:00:32 — Tyler Cowen: National Treasure, Net Negative on AI
01:04:01 — Liron’s Doomer DCF Yields a 20x P/E
01:07:11 — Interest Rates: Where Cowen Has Me
01:09:12 — Does Pinker Owe Us a Debate?
01:12:48 — Pinker vs. Instrumental Convergence
01:17:00 — Wrap-Up
Links
ROBERT WRIGHT & NONZERO
Nonzero’s post for this episode — “Trump and the AI Safety Vibe Shift”
Subscribe to The NonZero Newsletter
Robert Wright on X (@robertwrighter)
The God Test — Bob’s book on AI; Chapter 14, “Enlightenment Now,” is the Steven Pinker chapter
“The Singularity Is Clear” — Bob’s essay in installments on recursive self-improvement (Parts I–III)
“AI and the New McCarthyism” — Bob on the pro-AI lobby smearing Sanders, Tegmark, and Krueger as China stooges (Nonzero, May 2026)
Why Buddhism Is True — Bob’s 2017 book
THE WEEK IN AI
AI’s biggest players promise to police themselves at the White House — Fortune on the “Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities”
Major White House split on AI policy leaks as top aides freak out — The Daily Beast on the Sacks–Wiles rift
FTC is investigating OpenAI and Anthropic over possible risks to consumers — AP
“We Must Pace the Frontier” — Dario Amodei’s call to slow down (with the China caveat and chip controls)
China rejects Dario Amodei’s call to slow AI development — Rest of World
Google rolls out new Gemini model but restricts access over safety concerns — The Guardian
GLM-5.3 and the spread of advanced cyber capabilities — Anthropic on Zhipu’s open-weight model
OpenAI’s Greg Brockman backs out of second $25 million donation to AI super PAC — The New York Times
Sanders convenes Chinese and American computer scientists to warn of threat from AI — Broadband Breakfast
THE BREAK-INS AND THE AGENT SWARM
METR: Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face incident
Chris Painter’s testimony to the U.S. Senate on AI agent incidents — METR, Sept 30, 2026
SwarmTraces: how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face — forensic report co-authored by Palisade Research
OpenAI confirms ‘wiki incident’ — TechCrunch on the German wiki agent message board
Are Current AI Safety Techniques Enough? Adam Gleave vs. Oliver Habryka — FAR.AI debate
Alignment faking in large language models — Anthropic
On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem — OpenAI
Jacob Coxon’s resignation post (@hilbertspaess)
Pacing the Frontier — the AI lab employees’ letter
THE ALL-IN PODCAST
All-In: Anthropic IPO at Risk, Meta’s Muse Pop, Token Prices Fall, Open Source Gains Share, Alignment Fails — the episode we react to
Helen Toner: letting OpenAI be destroyed “would actually be consistent with the mission” — The Decoder, Dec 2023
Garfield Minus Garfield
PINKER, SCOTT ALEXANDER, AND TYLER COWEN
Scott Alexander challenges Steven Pinker to a public AI-doom debate ($5,000 vs. $1,000)
An Open Letter to Scott Alexander — Steven Pinker declines the debate as a “spectator sport,” Quillette
Your Book Review: Why Buddhism Is True — the anonymous Astral Codex Ten review Bob mentions
Mistakes in financial economics — Tyler Cowen: doomers should be buying puts (Marginal Revolution)
Liron’s answer: a doomer DCF yields the S&P’s 20x forward P/E
ALSO MENTIONED
Obsolete — Garrison Lovely’s book (with Bob’s blurb)
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies — Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares
PAST DOOM DEBATES EPISODES MENTIONED
Nonzero × Doom Debates, Episode 1 — Did AI Doom Just Go Mainstream?
Eliezer Yudkowsky Tried to “Coup the World”?! — Garrison Lovely, Author of “Obsolete”
OpenAI’s Model Just ATTACKED Them — the Hugging Face hack breakdown
DOOM DEBATES
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