#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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