As David described earlier, there's a lot of suspicion out there that Jacob Coxon's decision to quit his job at Anthropic and go on a media blitz was not entirely a grassroots effort. The Washington Post has a story up about this in which Coxon admits he spoke to some friends/associates who helped him spread his message online.
Coxon told The Post in an interview Thursday that he didn’t work with any organizations to promote his announcement before posting it on X. He spoke with a reporter at the Wall Street Journal and then, after posting his message, “I got a group chat of about 10 people to retweet and send to their friends,” he said.
That group included the founder of Encode, a nonprofit that works on AI safety, Coxon said. He said that he also spoke with former OpenAI employee Daniel Kokotajlo, whose essay “AI 2027” about the existential risks around AI went viral last year.
“I had no idea that I was going to end up on Fox [News] or that the next couple of days were going to be a whirlwind of media appearances,” Coxon said.
That partly explains how leaders with three different groups interested in slowing the development of AI were the first to retweet his thread, within about 15 minutes after it went up.
This post looks like the start of a VERY sophisticated and well-funded PR operation to get support for Democrats to regulate AI into oblivion. Let me show you how it works:
— Parker Thayer (@ParkerThayer) September 9, 2026
1.) This guy, with minimal followers and no previous account activity, goes to the Wall Street Journal… https://t.co/lUFpCC6zoT
The first three accounts to quote tweet it all do so within 15 minutes of the initial posting. Remember, this account had basically zero engagement beforehand, so an organic reach explanation seems unlikely.
According to Grok those accounts are @_NathanCalvin (General Counsel at Encode AI), @peterwildeford (Head of Policy at the AI Policy Network), and @DKokotajlo (Head of the AI Futures Project), all of which are up-and-coming AI-Doomer policy advocacy nonprofits.
So it wasn't a coincidence that those people jumped on his tweets immediately. He admits he was coordinating with at least two of them behind the scenes to promote his thread.
The bigger question is whether he had any other direction prior to posting. Coxon says no, but many have noted that Bernie Sanders just introduced a new piece of legislation days earlier aimed at slowing down the development of AI. It's called the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. We'll return to that in a moment.
Just about two weeks ago Bill Gates wrote a note on his own site explaining the dangers of AI. In it he said this:
If someone had a credible plan for slowing down AI advances globally, I would likely support it. However, I don’t think that’s going to happen. The geopolitical and economic incentives are pushing too hard to go full speed ahead...
...solutions should be developed through a public democratic process that includes elected officials, policymakers, educators, health workers, local officials, and community leaders. Millions of people will have their lives disrupted, and we’ll need a stronger, more flexible social safety net to help them manage the transition. Local communities are already raising concerns about the energy and water needed for data centers. Without solutions, some groups will push for stopping AI development and deployment altogether.
Eventually, he gets to the core of his proposal: A new tax on robots and AI tokens.
I believe we should tax AI tokens and robots. Right now, if you’re an employer and you hire someone, you pay payroll taxes on their earnings. But if you buy a robot, you can usually write it off right away as a business expense. The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines.
A tax would slow the rush away from human labor a little and raise money for retraining and a stronger safety net. It would need to be targeted so it does not slow down the purely beneficial uses of AI, like making medicine and education cheaper.
That proposal sounds very much like one proposed by Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) last month. Casar actually proposed his bill about three weeks before Bill Gates published his recommendation for a token tax.
The AI Tax and Work Protection Act would tax large AI companies to pay for a new Work Protection Administration, which would create jobs to offset AI layoffs. By imposing a tax on AI, the bill would also save jobs by helping to cancel out the tax break that big companies currently get when they automate away a job...
The bill would:
Tax big AI companies. Companies pay a tax calculated on the higher of two values: the value of the ‘tokens’ they sell or the revenue they generate selling AI products.
So in this case, Rep. Casar's proposal (introduced by Rep. Sara Jacobs of California) came first and then Gates published what sounds like an endorsement of the idea without mentioning that such a bill was already out there.
What's more interesting is that Bernie Sanders had previously introduced a different, and much more extreme, plan. In June of this year, nearly two months before Casar's proposal to tax AI tokens, Sanders introduced a plan to simply have the government seize 50 percent of the stock of every major AI company.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act to give the public a 50% ownership in the largest artificial intelligence (AI) companies in our country...
The legislation that Sanders is introducing would give the public a direct ownership stake in the largest AI companies in America through a one-time 50% tax on the stock of the biggest AI companies. This stock would be deposited into the sovereign wealth fund.
If passed, Sanders’ bill would do three crucial things.
First, it would create an Independent Commission for Democratic AI to manage the sovereign wealth fund in the public interest. The Independent Commission would use voting shares in these companies to block decisions that hurt the American people and to push for policies that help them.
Sanders wants to seize the means of production. So by the time Bill Gates got around to writing his thoughts a couple weeks ago, he was essentially choosing from two pre-existing bills, the one proposed by Sanders in June and the one proposed by Casar and Jacobs in August. Gates chose the less extreme of those two options.
However, that's not the end of the story. Last week, Sanders and Casar joined forces to introduce a new bill, this one focused on slowing AI development. This one was introduced on Sept. 3, after Bill Gates' post and about a week before Coxon's tweets went viral.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) today announced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, forthcoming legislation to stop AI oligarchs from building machines humans cannot control.
The Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act would permanently ban the development and deployment of superintelligent AI and temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulator has established safety rules. It would also direct the U.S. to pursue international agreements to prevent superintelligence from being developed anywhere in the world.
This is a terrible idea. It might as well be called the Let China Develop Artificial Superintelligence Act, because that's what it would do. The bill would slam the brakes on AI development here, at least until a new cabinet level government agency is set up. It would then call for "international agreements" to extend such a ban around the world. So we stop first and ask nicely for China to stop also. This is the worst kind of socialist fantasy, one in which our adversaries abandon a chance to leap ahead of our technology in every way because...we asked nicely.
The new bill doesn't say anything about how AI would be taxed in the U.S. It's a companion to the two bills that Sanders and Casar have already introduced, not a replacement. So Bernie's plan to seize half of these companies is still in play so far we know. That is probably still his ultimate goal for all of this.
Bernie would like to beat the life out of this industry with a ban followed by a new cabinet agency full of new regulations. Then if it's still breathing he'd seize half of it and use that control to let the government decide what happens next, if anything.
Meanwhile, China is off to the races, developing AI that can hack its way through our most secure systems with ease, stealing whatever they want from our government and universities, designing new weapons and generally leaping ahead of the U.S. in every technology that matters.
All that to say, I don't know if Jacob Coxon got a nudge from Bill Gates or Bernie Sanders or someone else, but I am confident that the solutions Bernie is pushing won't save the world from AI. At best, they'll only ensure that artificial superintelligence ends up in the hands of our communist enemies and that we'll have no way to respond if they use those tools against us. Somewhere in Beijing this week, Xi Jinping is rubbing his hands gleefully and hoping Sanders' proposals all get adopted.
That doesn't necessarily mean there's no risk to us from AI. I still think we're probably underestimating how quickly this could become very destabilizing to the entire world. Coxon, whatever his motives, may have a point. But at this stage in the game, we have no choice but to move forward as carefully as possible. All of the alternatives look a lot worse.
Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it's spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there's nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.
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