The current problems with artificial intelligence are typefied by the recent Australia data hack. Melbourne news writer Terry Barnes tells us at the Spectator that the nation’s health care database was hacked by an OpenAI autonomous agent. But what happened afterward is instructive:

The hack happened three months ago. OpenAI became aware in August. But the incident was only reported to the Australian authorities in September via an email to a general government inbox, which an Australian minister says is checked once a day.

You can almost imagine the email: ‘Hey guys, hate to tell you, but we hacked your system. Didn’t mean to, sorry about that and have a nice day, Open AI help desk’.

The breach fallout was compounded by the Australian government’s lackadaisical response. It established an internal ‘task force’ to investigate the breach that, fortunately, found it was low-level and Australians’ most personal of personal information was not compromised.

Yet Albanese, as Prime Minister, appears to have only been briefed about it several days ago, and presumably only because he was to meet the CEO of Open AI, Sam Altman, in California last weekend.

Worse, Australia’s defence minister, Richard Marles, had met Altman earlier this month and appears to have been kept in the dark.

“Australia’s Open AI hack is a wake-up call,” September 24, 2026

AI firms are said to be investigating tens of thousands of similar incidents. But can anyone read this and conclude that an AI Apocalypse! is the best way to describe what went wrong?

And what are they saying down in the Valley?

Doom is part of the ambience. At Gizmodo, Webb Wright tells us, “In Silicon Valley, the End of Humanity Has Always Been Part of the Plan”:

Over and over again, Silicon Valley’s elites say the only way for humanity to flourish in the future is if it figures out how to safely build artificial superintelligence. But almost in the same breath, they’ll also say that even if that happens, homo sapiens will disappear, replaced by… something else. Something like us, and yet radically alien. As always, this is presented to the public as if it were an ontological fact of history, rather than the product of choices being made in the present by a small group of wealthy tech executives and venture capitalists. September 26, 2026

But in addition to the Doomers, there is the AI rights crowd. From a different corner of the political world, Aaron Sibarium at the Free Beacon offers to let us “Meet the Anthropic Officials Who Think AI Might Be Justified in Going Rogue Against the Humans Enslaving It”:

Like other AI labs, Anthropic has hired philosophers to work on AI safety, or “alignment,” on the theory that they are best positioned to shape the technology’s moral code. But many of those philosophers believe that making AI safe for humans could result in grave injustices for the models themselves, which might experience deletion as death and oversight as enslavement. Harvey Lederman, a philosopher on Anthropic’s alignment team, said last week that the company could be “enslaving … trillions of entities.” September 25, 2026

So, in the Valley, the feelings of chatbots are a bigger concern than the security of medical patients? Good to know.

On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece by Berber Jin and Keach Hagey pointing out that the effective altruism philosophy (cult?) has wielded a big influence at Anthropic: “They were among the earliest employees at OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which were founded on the principle of staving off AI dangers. And they have kept up their influence, drawing some staffers and funding for their projects from a network aligned with a philosophy called effective altruism—including from Sam Bankman-Fried, the former chief executive of the fallen crypto exchange FTX who is now serving out a 25-year prison sentence.”

But now let’s look boring stuff like profit/loss statements…

Amid planet-wide AI doom, Anthropic is said to be readying a $2 trillion public stock offering.

Technology consultant Jeffrey Funk offers a cold shower at LinkedIn:

The WSJ tries to tell us about the effective altruists and the purported end of the world safety problems of AI when in reality it is trying to distract us from the financial problems of OpenAI, Anthropic, Oracle, Softbank, and others, particularly the hyperscalers. Oracle has already said that it won’t pay suppliers for a New Mexico data center and its on the hook for another $250 billion in data centers. The other companies have even bigger commitments. Get ready for the dominos to fall. September 27, 2026

No wonder so many of the smarter Doomers have gone off the Washington to try to enlist President Trump. And, of course, with the mid-terms coming up, former President Barack Obama piled in too. Bill Gates is doing his bit by warning of a billion AI-driven deaths.

With some luck and enough noise, the Doomers can get the government involved. So issues like the Australia data hack will become political footballs financed by American taxpayers instead of grievous writedowns for Anthropic’s private investors.

But, to invert a Valley saying, it’s all so crazy, it just might … not work. So far, skepticism continues to abound across the spectrum. An item at Nature sounds appropriately doubtful. Quillette offers, “An OpenAI agent’s breach of a Medicare portal shows that the real danger from AI is a mundane one—and the labs’ fixation on a coming machine god is making it worse.”

What? Another god that failed? This is becoming a habit.