ALT Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse How 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. Contents The prophet The gospel according to Harry Potter Yudkowsky’s Apostles Forbidden insights Debugging the humans Tangled in the sheets, tangled in the streets Follow the money The road into government Dissent among Yudkowsky’s faithfuul Back to this month Who checks the checkers 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