GoKawiilHow a community devoted to thinking clearly incubated salvation stories, abusive experiments, race science, and an affection for autocracy, and why that history matters now that its alumni are asking for the public trust on AI.
If worries about AI safety and the end of the world entered your life recently, it’s probably because of a resignation letter.
On September 8, 2026, a researcher named Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic, the one of the two premier AI labs in the U.S. whose brand has tried to cultivate the image of being the careful one relative to its competitors. He had spent the previous three years doing pretraining research at OpenAI and then at Anthropic, the engine-room work that makes large models capable, and his goodbye note said, among other things: “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.” He left two months before his equity vested and walked away from it. The post was viewed more than a hundred million times within a day.
His colleagues, surprisingly did not rush to correct him. Evan Hubinger, who leads alignment science at Anthropic, posted within hours that Coxon was right, that they really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans, and that his personal odds were somewhere north of one in ten inside a decade. More than two dozen members of Congress said something needed to be done. Elon Musk, who is building a frontier lab of his own, called the whole thing a psy-op, and mainstream news outlets predictably gave breathless coverage to the frenzy that followed.
In order to realistically evaluate the gravity of this warning, we need to understand the people who are making it. The loudest voices warning about the end of the world come out of a very specific twenty-five-year-old internet subculture, one that understands itself as a community of people who think more clearly than everyone else. Outside Silicon Valley the subculture looks obscure, a fandom with unusually dorky literary preferences. Inside the technology industry it is anything but. Its writers make or break reputations. Its alumni staff the labs, the safety institutes, and the philanthropic organizations that decide what “AI safety” means. Its arguments, marriages, feuds, and sexual proclivities are heavily interwoven into the structure of the organizations now asking for the public’s trust about the future of the species.
Ten months before Coxon resigned, in December 2025, nearly five hundred people gathered in a Berkeley music hall for a ceremony about the possible end of humanity. There was a live band and a twenty-eight-person choir. There were liturgical readings. As songs and speeches carried the room from humanity’s distant past toward its uncertain future, the chandeliers dimmed one by one. Heavily in attendance were employees of organizations trying to build, or contain, artificial intelligence. At the darkest point, the organizer sat at the edge of the stage, his voice breaking, and told the room: “Guys… I don’t think we’re gonna make it.”
The organizer was Raymond Arnold, a web developer, game designer, musician, and longtime builder of rationalist community institutions. Raised between Catholicism and atheism, Arnold discovered the rationalist movement as a young adult and found that it “radically expanded” his capacity for sacred feeling. In 2011 he invited nineteen friends into a New York apartment furnished for the evening with oil lamps, plasma balls, and lightsabers to beta-test a holiday for their new worldview. They sang about the first winter campfires and the technologies shaping humanity’s future, extinguished the final candle, and sat together in the dark. Two years later Arnold turned the experiment into a public production called Brighter Than Today. Versions soon spread from New York and the Bay Area to cities across North America, Europe, and beyond.
Arnold had initially imagined Secular Solstice as a broad humanist holiday, but it became the rationalist calendar’s principal feast day. This was not entirely accidental. He has organized the community since 2011, now helps run both LessWrong and Lighthaven—the Berkeley conference campus that serves as its physical center—and has described his function, earnestly, as that of a “village priest.” Solstice was his attempt to construct the cultural technology a durable movement needs: a canon of songs and readings, a ritual progression from light into darkness and back again, and a yearly occasion for geographically scattered believers to gather in one room.
By 2025, Arnold estimated the probability of an AI catastrophe at greater than fifty percent and worried that his own ritual was no longer equipped to contemplate extinction in a psychologically healthy way. He had largely ceded Solstice production to other organizers, but returned to shape what he thought might be “the last Solstice,” complete with an aftercare gathering around a firepit. The evening supplied everything religions have traditionally supplied: fellowship, ritual, a shared story about humanity’s place in the universe, and somewhere to sit with the knowledge that you are going to die. Possibly soon. Possibly because of something your friends built.
Follow the connections out from that room and you pass through some genuinely strange territory. A Harry Potter fanfic used as a recruiting pipeline. Psychological workshops that former participants describe as coercive. A program for breeding smarter children, promoted by an AI institute. A sex worker from Idaho who became one of the subculture’s most-read writers and now runs an AI-doom propaganda residency with Grimes, Elon Musk’s ex-girlfriend. A splinter sect that fled to tugboats and whose members have been linked to six deaths. And a blogger who wanted to abolish democracy, found the ear of several billionaire patrons, and watched his ideas come to fruition in the vice president’s office.
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