Climate crisis

So, perhaps the spread of pessimism has been a deliberated project, but if it has been, you can’t weather it on your own. “One of the beautiful, profound things I’ve seen over and over,” Solnit says, “is those moments of uprisings, anti-war protests, No Kings demonstrations, Occupy Wall Street bring a sense of power and belonging that is transformative. The solidarity, the sense of purpose and interconnectedness, is so meaningful.” In her book A Paradise Built in Hell (2009), Solnit describes the intensity of communities forged by natural disasters – the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, a savage explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1917, the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina. She sees the same unbreakable bonds being forged in activism: the friendships, the energy, the self-awareness and the ambition created by political action stay with you for the rest of your life; they often define your life.

We’ve seen it happen in vivid, documented detail — and the story starts with Anthropic itself. Dario Amodei and several of his colleagues founded Anthropic in 2021 after leaving OpenAI over concerns about the company’s approach to safety and the pace of AI development. That departure wasn’t an anomaly. It was the first chapter of a pattern that has only accelerated since. When OpenAI’s direction drifted further from its founding safety principles, the departures didn’t trickle — they cascaded. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist, left in May 2024. Jan Leike, who co-led the Superalignment team, followed days later, writing publicly that safety had “taken a backseat to shiny products.” By August 2024, Fortune reported that nearly half of OpenAI’s AGI safety researchers had quietly resigned. Researcher Daniel Kokotajlo walked away from $1.7 million in equity — the vast majority of his family’s net worth — because he’d lost confidence the company would behave responsibly. Most recently, just weeks ago, OpenAI researcher Zoë Hitzig quit in a New York Times op-ed over the company’s move toward advertising, warning that ChatGPT’s archive of intimate user conversations created manipulation risks that “we don’t have the tools to understand, let alone prevent.”