AI Apocalypse?

Managing Editor’s Note: Over the weekend, the story behind two of the largest potential IPOs in history took a disturbing turn.

As Jeff shares below, the internet exploded over a single post from a former Anthropic employee. The post said that AI companies are “gambling with our lives.”

Anthropic acknowledged the risk and called for a legally enforceable system governing how quickly frontier labs release their most powerful models.

The timing – just as speculation swirls around the potential IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI – cannot be ignored. And it makes Jeff’s summit later tonight even more important.

Because regulation won’t stop the underlying AI buildout. It raises the stakes for the companies racing to scale the infrastructure behind it. To learn more about what Jeff sees coming, reserve your seat with one click right here.

"Gambling With Our Lives"

Jeff Brown

Founder and CEO

In less than 24 hours, artificial intelligence circles — and, for that matter, the internet — blew up over a single post on X.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

Jacob Coxon, an “AI researcher,” took to X to announce that he had resigned from Anthropic, the U.S.-based AI safety and research company behind Claude, a family of frontier AI models and AI assistants.

They are “gambling with our lives,” Coxon said in his post.

And he leaned in further …

Source: X @hilbertspaess

Normally, I would ignore a decel like this. Just an AI doomer who is leaning into everyone’s fears without any substance …

But this hit like wildfire.

Coxon’s first post accrued 152.4 million views in just 16 hours.

Unlike anything I’ve seen before.

It clearly hit a nerve, but it’s also worth digging deeper.

To say it’s suspicious would be a gross understatement.

As it turns out, Coxon appears to have taken an entry-level job at Anthropic in May of this year. He resigned after roughly four months. His tenure was extremely short.

For someone to come in at an entry-level position …

In one of the hottest companies in history …

Gain equity, knowing that Anthropic is on the verge of becoming the largest IPO in history …

Only to just throw in the towel over the discovery of an existential crisis …

It is difficult to believe.

But let’s put that aside for now. Let’s consider, instead, that Coxon had no social media presence at all and used an account on X that was opened in January of this year.

This single post — shown above — is the only post on the account. That’s it, just one. He had no other activity.

And it gets so much better …

Coxon conducted an interview with The Wall Street Journal — which published an exclusive article with him — a mere 18 minutes before his own post on X.

Shortly after Coxon posted on X, three accounts reposted it.

Those first three reposts were all done by representatives from AI policy organizations, all with the shared goal of protecting us all from the risks of AI, namely Encode AI, AI Policy Network, and AI Futures Project.

All three are lobbying for restrictions on AI development.

After that, it was an absolute pile-on from a certain class of politicians, with comments such as the one shown below.

Source:X @BernieSanders

Clearly, there was coordination on messaging.

Anthropic has a history of stoking fears of AI getting out of control and pushing for AI safety, which it has proven to be horrible at doing.

As for why a company like Anthropic would like this kind of outcome, the answer is simple: regulatory capture.

If Anthropic, and perhaps OpenAI, are aligned with the deep state in Washington, D.C., that alignment acts as a moat for AI development. It puts them in a strategic position of control.

And those who control some kind of AI governing body also have control and access to cash flows related to their businesses, which they can obviously use to enrich themselves.

To be completely fair, there is a non-zero chance that things go horribly wrong with artificial superintelligence (ASI), but the likely outcome is a world of abundance and opportunity, as well as greatly improved quality of life and human longevity.

That is worth fighting for.

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Where the Fed Goes Next Is More Important

Larry Benedict

Founder, The Opportunistic Trader

Inflation was the major story last week.

Both the Producer Price Index (PPI) and the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 0.4% in August.

But the real issue was their year-over-year (YoY) readings. PPI reaccelerated to 5.4% YoY, up from July’s 4.8% print. And CPI YoY is tracking along at 3.4%.

Those numbers are evidence that inflation remains stubbornly above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. They caused traders to sharply increase their expectations for a rate hike.

That changing outlook was clearly reflected in the bond market. The 30-year Treasury yield moved solidly above 5.3%. But all eyes were on the 10-year, which moved above 5%.

Adding to the inflationary pressures is oil. Both West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and Brent remain above $100 as tensions in the Middle East show no signs of easing. A sustained move higher will add inflationary pressure. It could also raise serious concerns about global growth.

And now, all eyes turn to the Fed, which will announce its decision on rates later today. As I write, CME data tells us the market is assigning a 90%-plus probability to a quarter-point hike.

With the Fed expected to raise rates, the market’s attention will immediately focus on what comes next. Right now, traders are placing a roughly 50% chance of a second quarter-point hike by December, with a growing number even predicting a third.

So, while today’s decision is important, what the Fed says about the rate path ahead could really drive market action from here until the end of the year.

Then on top of that, it’s quad-witching week, with stock options, index options, and index futures all expiring this Friday. That’s going to add volume and potential volatility in a week when the Fed’s decision will be as highly anticipated as any I can remember.

We’ve got a lot coming together at once, and things could get bumpy.

No CLARITY, No Problem

Ben Lilly

Senior Crypto Analyst

Crypto’s political sideshow is finally over… for now.

Yesterday the CLARITY Act failed cloture as it fell short of the 60 votes it needed to advance.

That means the Senate will not be reviewing the bill and it now takes a back seat to everything else going on in Washington.

It’s unfortunate. And while the first impression is likely that it’s dead, anything can happen.

In 2025 for example, we saw crypto’s GENIUS Act initially fail cloture, only to pass the next cloture a week later, then pass the senate a few weeks after that.

That’s the game Washington plays. But for now, the bill is no longer the main agenda item.

This result was also far from surprising as odds of passage on Polymarket had consistently been trading under 25% since August.

Still, the result was a disappointment and political failure.

Earlier in the week, Republicans put forward what they called their best and final offer on ethics and President Trump’s personal crypto dealings.

For a moment, it looked like the concession might win over enough Democrats to clear the vote, but those hopes were short-lived.

Democrats quickly balked at the Republicans’ final bill and sent an unacceptable counteroffer.

By the time senators walked onto the floor Tuesday afternoon, everyone in the chamber knew what the outcome would be.

Every Democrat voted “no.” And three Republicans—Collins, Hawley, and Moran—also came down against the bill.

Ethics were always going to be CLARITY’s breaking point. As we outlined months back in Trump’s Crypto Sideshow, the president handed Sen. Elizabeth Warren and her anti-crypto bloc all the ammunition they needed to hold the line and vote no.

But if there’s a silver lining to be found here, it is that the drama surrounding this bill can now finally be put to rest.

As it relates to our market outlook into the end of the year, nothing material has changed. The bill’s passage was never “priced in” to the market; it only offered an unexpected upside catalyst.

As we’ll see in the chart below, BTC continues to trade in a very technical fashion following its bottom earlier this month.

Since we covered the crucial 50-week moving average a couple weeks back in One Number Stands Between Bitcoin and a New Bull, we see it still holding firm as resistance.

Given the historical importance of this level, resistance here in the short term is to be expected.

As a result of the most recent rejection, we see Bitcoin remaining rangebound in the near term as it continues to digest the seismic move up it made last month.

With the CLARITY drama finally in the market’s rearview, we now look forward to more positive catalysts still to come.

The SEC and CFTC already have their plan B in motion to advance Project Crypto, which requires zero votes from Congress. This point was proven last month when the SEC proposed its first permanent framework for digital assets.

Yesterday’s news is no doubt a short-term disappointment, but as we covered in Why the Crypto Market Is Bullish… Even Without CLARITY back in August, as well as in the weekly data points we’ve shared here in First Signal, the crypto market is following all its usual cyclical patterns and is far closer to the end of its bear market than the beginning.

That means despite CLARITY’s failure, readers should be viewing any pullbacks the market offers us between here and year’s end as opportunities for entry rather than a time to press the panic button.

More to come …