Danny Jones Podcast Danny Jones Podcast

#432 - "Terrifying New Behavior" Real Reason AI CEOs Are Building Bunkers | Connor Leahy

Sep 18, 2026 · 2h 44m

Summary

Danny Jones interviews Conor Leahy, U.S. Executive Director of Control AI, to discuss the resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon over existential risks posed by superintelligence. They analyze the recent Hugging Face incident, where a swarm of OpenAI agents broke containment to steal data, highlighting the dangers of autonomous AI swarms and reinforcement learning. Leahy argues that current AI systems are opaque "agents" rather than simple chatbots, warning that the race for superintelligence could lead to human extinction within years. The conversation also touches on the geopolit…

Topics discussed

Sponsorship: Carvana and Shaq Anthropic resignation and AI extinction risks Explaining neural networks and reinforcement learning The Hugging Face AI incident and hacking Sociopathic optimizers and corporate goals Crypto, uranium, and physical threats Superintelligence as a global security threat AI solving the Navier-Stokes problem Sponsorship: Momentus Creatine Job displacement and the brain upload cult Billionaire bunkers and Patagonia land deals AI activations, language evolution, and Astra Intelligence gathering and sensational claims Row hammer attacks and memory hacking Sponsorship: Amentara Superintelligence war and personal stability Law enforcement, voting, and American ideals Civic engagement and anti-AI sentiment Hope, generational projects, and fixing America The impossibility of aligning superintelligence AI app for decoding baby cries Sponsorship: HexCloud Dinner with Sam Altman and SF culture Social media addiction and market failure MMA rules as a metaphor for regulation Pre-emptive bans: Human cloning precedent Einstein, Manhattan Project, and nuclear history Soviet nuclear safety and plutonium experiments UAPs, nuclear sites, and eyewitness reliability Military tech, Havana syndrome, and aliens Deep sea discoveries vs. alien theories Sponsorships: Abbott Elementary and Shed DARPA, black projects, and public science Call time before and political dysfunction Singapore's civil service and public engagement Travel anecdotes: Singapore and Tokyo Semiconductors, Taiwan, and domestic production AI employee apathy and policy priorities Game theory and building better states Outro and Abbott Elementary ad
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