Freddie deBoer

AI position

Aware of x-risk

He explicitly discusses Yudkowsky and Soares's "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" and Yudkowsky's long-running doom predictions, but treats x-risk claims skeptically/dismissively as attention-driven rather than engaging them as a serious personal concern.

Why influential

Owns a direct subscriber relationship and can repeatedly shape a high-value niche without depending on a traditional newsroom's front page. Primary policy lanes: education; inequality; culture; mental health.

Who pays attention

Writers, academics, education reformers, socialists, civil libertarians and online intellectual audiences

Work samples

• I'm Offering Scott Alexander a Wager About AI's Effects Over the Next Three Years

  Feb 13, 2026 · newsletter

  Criticizes Dario Amodei's failed coding-automation predictions and challenges Scott Alexander (AGI 2027 signatory) to a wager on AI's near-term effects.

• The Rage of the AI Guy

  Aug 4, 2025 · newsletter

  Critiques Sam Altman's 'gentle singularity' rhetoric and discusses Yudkowsky/Soares's AI doom book alongside media commentators covering AI.

• AI Has No Noticer

  Apr 1, 2025 · newsletter

  Argues LLMs lack a mechanism to notice their own errors, a recurring technical-skepticism theme in his AI writing.

• The Temporal Copernican Principle

  Sep 6, 2024 · newsletter

  Names Yudkowsky, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk as routinely violating his proposed 'temporal Copernican principle' about overestimating the significance of the present moment.

• AI, Ozymandias

  Jul 3, 2023 · newsletter

  Early AI-skepticism essay discussing Eliezer Yudkowsky's rationalist doom warnings alongside Sam Altman and Dario Amodei's OpenAI work.

AI-world contacts

• Dario Amodei — Co-founder & CEO, Anthropic

  • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Feb 14, 2026 — I'm Offering Scott Alexander a Wager About AI's Effects Over the Next Three Years — "Amodei is the guy who predicted that 90% of code would be written by AI sometime between June 2025 and September 2025; no serious person believes that a majority of code is produc

• Sam Altman — CEO, OpenAI

  • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · 2025 — The Rage of the AI Guy — "Altman and others keep defining AGI downward, reducing its definition to an absurd shadow of what the term has traditionally meant" — DeBoer cites Altman's own blog post/public st

• Geoffrey Hinton — Professor emeritus, Nobel laureate, University of Toronto

  • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jan 1, 2026 — The Machine God's Existence Would Insist Upon Itself, Wouldn't It? — The article links to a Time piece (time.com/7339628/geoffrey-hinton-ai/) citing Hinton's claim that AI is "a bigger deal than" the Industrial Revolution, grouped with similar hyper

• Eliezer Yudkowsky — Co-founder, MIRI

  • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jun 2023 — AI, Ozymandias — "I also understand why Eliezer Yudkowsky, the stamping, fuming philosopher king of the 'rationalist' movement, would say that 'the most likely result of building a superhumanly sma

• Ray Kurzweil — Futurist, Principal Researcher, Google

  • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jan 1, 2026 — The Machine God's Existence Would Insist Upon Itself, Wouldn't It? — "Maybe tomorrow AI will end death and do some of the other things we've been promised." — the phrase "end death" is hyperlinked to a Popular Mechanics article about Kurzweil's 2045

• Mustafa Suleyman — CEO, Microsoft AI (co-founded DeepMind, later Inflection), Microsoft AI

  • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jan 1, 2025 — Does AI Just Suck? — "Here's Ian Bremmer and Mustafa Suleyman in Foreign Policy: 'Its arrival marks a Big Bang moment...'" — deBoer quotes this co-authored Foreign Policy piece to mock it as an example

• Sayash Kapoor — AI researcher, co-author of 'AI as Normal Technology', Princeton University / AI Snake Oil

  • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jan 1, 2025 — No, I Mean It - AI Maximalists in the Media Should Really, Actually Take the Shitting-in-the-Yard Challenge — "I appreciate that Hard Fork has had on Sayash Kappor of AI Snake Oil, for example, and wish that such appearances would inform their apprehension of the immediate future a little

• Peter Norvig — AI researcher, Director of Research at Google

  • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jul 3, 2023 — AI, Ozymandias — "The AI giant Peter Norvig, who used to serve as a research director for Google, suggested in a popular AI textbook that progress in this field can often be asymptotic" — the piece

• Douglas Hofstadter — Cognitive scientist/AI researcher, Indiana University (Fluid Analogies Research Group, Copycat/Letter Spirit AI models)

  • Wrote aboutmention · secondhand · Jun 1, 2023 — AI, Ozymandias — "Critics like Douglas Hofstadter, Noam Chomsky, and Peter Kassan have stridently insisted for years that the approaches that most computer scientists were taking in the pursuit of

• Nate Soares — Executive Director; co-author of 'If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies', Machine Intelligence Research Institute

  • Wrote aboutdirectness unclassified — Co-author with Eliezer Yudkowsky of 'If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies,' discussed in deBoer's essay 'The Rage of the AI Guy.'