This week, Jacob and Igor swap the usual news breakdown for a complete taxonomy of AI boosters within the framing of a tier list. They run through every type, from the good-faith genuine enthusiast to the denial-prone deflector, the financially captured, corporate power-players, platform builders, and finally the model-building true believers. They also get into "crit-hype," the idea that some critics are inadvertently boosting the systems they're fighting against. No muck to separate this week, just the guys working through their framework and explaining why their opinions are S tier.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (02:45) - Introducing the Booster Tier List
• (07:48) - A-Tier: The Genuine Enthusiast
• (11:36) - B-Tier: The Denial-Prone Booster
• (14:34) - C-Tier: The Financially Adjacent Booster
• (19:03) - D-Tier: The Corporate Booster
• (23:31) - E-Tier: The Product and Platform Booster
• (26:36) - F-Tier: The Model Builders
• (31:08) - Bonus Tier: Crit Hype
• (39:28) - So What Do We Actually Do With This?
• (46:04) - Outro (Igor's Challenge)

• Ed Zitron Substack article - How to Argue with an AI Booster
• MIT Technology Review article - How Social Media Encourages the Worst of AI Boosterism
• The Telegraph article - AI isn’t magic. We’re just being taken for mugs

In this episode, Jacob and Igor break down the DoD vs. Anthropic standoff, tracing how Claude's use in military operations led to Anthropic being designated a supply chain security risk. Perhaps more importantly, why did Anthropic choose to take a stand now, and what can that tell us about the corporations behavior moving forward. The investigation is used as a case study in how to read the real motivations behind big institutions: intrinsic values, rational self-interest, and realpolitik.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (00:44) - DoD-Anthropic Standoff
• (15:08) - 3 Buckets of Motivation
• (35:39) - How to Read What They're Actually Doing
• (44:04) - Is This Designation Even Real?
• (53:39) - Recap (Pragmatist's Playbook)

• Ed Zitron subtack article - The AI Bubble Is An Information War
• TechPolicy.Press article - A Timeline of the Anthropic-Pentagon Dispute
• TechPolicy.Press podcast episode - How to Think About the Anthropic-Pentagon Dispute
• BBC news article - Anthropic vows to sue Pentagon over supply chain risk label
• The Guardian article - AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying
• Palantir YouTube video - Multi-Domain AI: The Future of Command and Control
• Into AI Safety podcast episode - Drawing Red Lines w/ Su Cizem

This week, Jacob and Igor dissect the "mythical AI bear," the strawman version of AI criticism that gets thrown around in tech discourse. Working through a viral blog post that typifies the genre, they examine how legitimate concerns about code quality, labor displacement, intellectual property, and the erosion of craft get flattened into caricature. Plus: Sam Altman writes ten paragraphs about how unbothered he is by an ad.

Chapters

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (00:30) - Altman's Super Bowl Meltdown
• (03:11) - What is "The Bear"?
• (06:41) - But You Have No Idea What The Code Is
• (15:44) - But The Craft, But The Mediocrity, But It'll Never Be AGI
• (24:43) - But They Take Our Jobs & But The Plagiarism
• (31:21) - Stochastic Parrots & Mythical Bears
• (42:34) - Outro

• Big Think article - The rise of AI denialism
• Fly.io blogpost - My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts
• antirez blogpost - Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
• Emily Bender blogpost - Resistance Isn't Denialism
• Cory Doctorow blogpost - Reverse centaurs are the answer to the AI paradox
• Washington Post article - The AI boom is so huge it's causing shortages everywhere else
• Business Insider article - Veteran investor Jeremy Grantham says AI is 'obviously a bubble'
• Ipsos survey - Google / Ipsos Multi-Country AI Survey 2026
• Understanding AI Substack post - AI skeptics and AI boosters are both wrong

We're talking about developments in AI while those in power have unapologetically revealed their true fascist intensions; are we spending our time in the right way? Igor and I discuss the importance of shining a light on the techno-authoritarians who have played a very significant role in current state-of-the-world.

While we discuss the murders of Nicole Good and Alex Pretti during this episode, it's important that we also acknowledge the many marginalized people who have died as a result of ICE's behavior, and they same level of outcry didn't happen. Six additional individuals died in ICE custody under suspicious circumstances between January 1st and 25th of 2026: Victor Manuel Díaz, Geraldo Lunas Campos, Luis Gustavo Núñez Cáceres, Luis Beltrán Yáñez-Cruz, Parady La, and Heber Sánchez Domínguez.

Chapters

• (00:00) - | Introduction
• (03:57) - | The Authoritarian Stack
• (08:33) - | Palantir & Theil-Government Consolidation
• (13:44) - | Move Fast & Break Everything
• (23:14) - | Fascism in the US & Starving the Beast
• (39:48) - | Finding Local Opportunities for Action

• The Authoritarian Stack website
• Project 2025 Observer website
• EFF report - ICE Using Palantir Tool Feeds on Medicaid Data
• The Guardian article - Eight people have died in dealings with ICE so far in 2026. These are their stories
• Indivisible website
• Distributed AI Research Institute projects
• EAAMO website - Mechanism Design for Social Good
• Carlos Maza video - How To Be Hopeless

Igor shares a significant shift in his perspective on AI coding tools after experiencing the latest Claude Code release. While he's been the stronger AI skeptic between the two of us, recent developments have shown him genuine utility in specific coding tasks, but this doesn't validate the hype or change the fundamental critiques.

We discuss what "rote tasks" are and why they're now automatable with enough investment, the difference between genuine utility and AGI claims, and why this update actually impacts our bubble analysis. We explore how massive investment has finally produced something useful for a narrow domain, but it doesn't mean the technology is generalizable or that AGI is real.

Chapters

• (00:00) - | Introduction
• (05:07) - | What Changed Igor’s Mind
• (18:27) - | Rote Tasks Explained
• (23:31) - | How Does This Impact our Bubble Analysis?
• (30:48) - | AGI Is Still BS
• (34:07) - | Externalities Remain Unchanged
• (37:49) - | Final Thoughts & Outro

• Related muckrAIkers episode - Tech Bros Love AI Waifus

Bubble Talk

• OfficeChai startup - OpenAI Hasn’t Completed A Successful Full-Scale Pretraining Run Since GPT-4o In May 2024, Says SemiAnalysis
• Vechron report - Anthropic Prepares for Potential 2026 IPO in Bid to Rival OpenAI
• YCombinator Forum post on AI crash
• YCombinator Forum post on OpenAI adopting Anthropic's "skills"
• YCombinator Forum post on OpenAI rumors
• YCombinator Forum post on OpenAI add suggestions

Other Sources

• LinkedIn post discussing an agentic coding vibe shift
• Executive Order - Ensuring a National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence
• Inside Tech Law blogpost - Germany delivers landmark copyright ruling against OpenAI: What it means for AI and IP
• NeurIPS 2025 paper - Ascent Fails to Forget
• NBER working paper - Large Language Models, Small Labor Market Effects
• Dwarkesh Podcast blogpost - RL is even more information inefficient than you thought

We dig into how the concept of AI "safety" has been co-opted and weaponized by tech companies. Starting with examples like Mecha-Hitler Grok, we explore how real safety engineering differs from AI "alignment," the myth of the alignment tax, and why this semantic confusion matters for actual safety.

• (00:00) - Intro
• (00:21) - Mecha-Hitler Grok
• (10:07) - "Safety"
• (19:40) - Under-specification
• (53:56) - This time isn't different
• (01:01:46) - Alignment Tax myth
• (01:17:37) - Actually making AI safer

• JMLR article - Underspecification Presents Challenges for Credibility in Modern Machine Learning
• Trail of Bits paper - Towards Comprehensive Risk Assessments and Assurance of AI-Based Systems
• SSRN paper - Uniqueness Bias: Why It Matters, How to Curb It

Additional Referenced Papers

• NeurIPS paper - Safetywashing: Do AI Safety Benchmarks Actually Measure Safety Progress?
• ICML paper - AI Control: Improving Safety Despite Intentional Subversion
• ICML paper - DarkBench: Benchmarking Dark Patterns in Large Language Models
• OSF preprint - Current Real-World Use of Large Language Models for Mental Health
• Anthropic preprint - Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Inciting Examples

• ars Technica article - US government agency drops Grok after MechaHitler backlash, report says
• The Guardian article - Musk’s AI Grok bot rants about ‘white genocide’ in South Africa in unrelated chats
• BBC article - Update that made ChatGPT 'dangerously' sycophantic pulled

Other Sources

• London Daily article - UK AI Safety Institute Rebrands as AI Security Institute to Focus on Crime and National Security
• Vice article - Prominent AI Philosopher and ‘Father’ of Longtermism Sent Very Racist Email to a 90s Philosophy Listserv
• LessWrong blogpost - "notkilleveryoneism" sounds dumb (see comments)
• EA Forum blogpost - An Overview of the AI Safety Funding Situation
• Book by Dmitry Chernov and Didier Sornette - Man-made Catastrophes and Risk Information Concealment
• Euronews article - OpenAI adds mental health safeguards to ChatGPT, saying chatbot has fed into users’ ‘delusions’
• Pleias website
• Wikipedia page on Jaywalking