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Alex Marlow didn’t whisper. In a recent speech at Pastor Allen Jackson’s Culture & Christianity Conference, the Breitbart editor‑in‑chief blasted the top AI labs and their leaders, calling Anthropic and OpenAI “a cartel” in the making and dubbing the recent Anthropic whistleblower story a “hoax.” He framed the row over a departing researcher and internal alarm as the latest evidence that the men who run modern AI want rules that lock everyone else out — and, conveniently, give them more power.
Marlow’s charge: a cartel dressed as charity
Marlow’s point is simple and ugly: when the same people who build a new, scary technology call for global regulators and industry panels, ask who will run those panels. He pointed to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agreeing to “pace the frontier” and invite outside evaluators. That might sound like humility. It also sounds like a play to capture the rule‑making. If you own the racetrack, you get to set the rules — and your competitors can’t afford the tolls.
The Coxon thread, Hubinger’s candor, and the panic that followed
The flashpoint was a viral resignation from a young researcher named Jacob Coxon and a blunt reply from Anthropic alignment lead Evan Hubinger, who wrote that he personally gives a non‑trivial chance to catastrophic risk within a decade. That exchange lit up social media and pushed the CEOs to promise outside oversight. Marlow calls the whole spectacle a hoax because, in his view, the panic is being used as a pretext to demand regulators who will, in practice, favor the incumbents who wrote the rules.
Pacing the frontier — safety or market capture?
Dario Amodei’s essay that calls for “pacing” and for third‑party evaluators like METR is the policy move Marlow targets. METR and other evaluators can help find real safety problems. But they can also become gatekeepers. Marlow highlighted personal ties — including family and philanthropic links — to argue that the people who propose the monitors would likely sit close to them. Call it regulatory capture, call it crony governance: the risk is the same. If rules make it impossible for startups to compete, the big labs get monopoly power under the banner of “safety.”
Why conservatives should care — and what to watch next
This debate matters because it’s not just about nerds in labs. It’s about who writes the rules for the next economy. Conservatives who believe in competition, free enterprise, and limited government should pay attention when tech giants ask for international bodies and industry standards that could be tailored to favor them. Watch who is named to advisory boards, who funds the evaluators, and whether new rules include costly compliance that only deep‑pocketed incumbents can meet. And for the rest of us, a good rule of thumb: when the people who made the risk propose the cure, ask one question — cui bono? Who benefits? That’s the heart of Marlow’s warning, and it deserves scrutiny, not blind applause.
