The Fear Product
Fear was the product. The IPO changed the pitch.
The Pattern
There’s a pattern I’ve noticed watching Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Elon Musk over the last three years. Their message about AI has shifted. Not gradually. Specifically. And the shifts line up with something that has nothing to do with the tech.
I’m an Anthropic customer. Building on their platform, not watching from the sideline. Dario’s public message has been striking to track. In 2022, he was warning about civilizational risk. By May 2026, onstage alongside Jamie Dimon at Anthropic’s financial services briefing in Manhattan, he was invoking the Jevons Paradox to explain why AI job displacement is “net positive.” Real economics. But the timing of when he found it useful is the tell.
Altman told a Senate committee in May 2023 he was “afraid” of what he was building and called for government regulation. Two years later, in a 2025 essay titled “The Gentle Singularity,” he described AGI arriving at “a remarkable moment” leading to “a future of abundance.” Musk called AI “one of the existential risks we face” at the UK AI Safety Summit in November 2023, then automated 100,000 federal jobs through DOGE. Their models didn’t change their minds. Something else did.
The Reasonable Defense
They’re updating as they learn. That’s the standard argument. Not unreasonable — models improved faster than anyone predicted, and the risk calculus changes as capabilities evolve.
Partly true.
What doesn’t hold is the direction. Genuine updating produces more nuance as situations get more complex. Their messaging got simpler, and more optimistic, right as each needed outside capital or regulatory goodwill. OpenAI was raising at a $157B valuation. Anthropic crossed $20B+ in ARR. Musk needed a story for Tesla’s AI division. Fear went away faster than risk did.
Not updating. Audience selection.
Three Years. Three Shifts.
Watch the arc.
2022–2023: all three are warning about existential risk. Altman testifies before Congress. Dario publishes essays on catastrophic outcomes. Musk co-signs open letters calling for pauses. Consistent message — this is dangerous, move carefully.
2024: risk still gets mentioned, usually in a subordinate clause. Headlines shift to enterprise partnerships and productivity gains. I was building on Anthropic’s platform that year — hallucinations were a real problem, and we made a deliberate choice not to deploy AI in any customer-facing way that could break trust. The company briefing enterprise customers was navigating different pressures than the company that published the safety papers.
2026: Dario is onstage at a JPMorgan briefing explaining why job displacement is fine, actually. Altman is publishing “The Gentle Singularity.” Musk is running an AI-powered government efficiency operation. Existential risk framing is still available when regulators are in the room. For investors, it’s about upside.
Same people. Same technology. Different rooms.
The Board Meeting
Last week I had a board meeting. One key metric is underperforming in the first half of the year.
My job in that room was to say where we are, what we plan to do, and what we don’t yet know. I flagged that our plans have uncertainties and are macro dependent. Laid out two or three scenarios that could close the gap. Not a comfortable message to deliver. You’re sitting across from people with capital at stake, telling them the honest version — including the part where you’re not certain it works.
Here’s what I know: the alternative is worse. Soften the message, lean into the optimistic scenario, and the board feels better walking out. Six months later, you’re explaining why the surprise happened. Boards can forgive bad news. They don’t forgive hidden bad news. Trust breaks in a way that doesn’t come back.
So you tell the truth. Flag the uncertainty. Give them the scenarios, including the one where things don’t recover fast enough. That’s the job.
The Scale Problem
I shape the message for the room too. Emphasize what’s relevant to employees, what matters to investors, what’s actionable for customers. At company scale, that’s just communication — leading with what’s relevant, not hiding the rest.
The room is everyone. Every worker wondering about their job, every government deciding on policy, every parent thinking about what their kids are walking into. They all took the 2022 warnings seriously. Career pivots. Retraining programs. Policy positions built around the fear. When fear became inconvenient, those people didn’t get a memo. They just noticed that the story got better right as the fundraise closed.
Not audience segmentation. An audience you forgot you had.
The ignored audience calls you a fraud. Not unfairly.
The Standard
Every founder and CEO is meant to be an eternal optimist. That’s not a flaw — it’s the job. Frame hard truths in the best possible light. Lead with the mission and the art of what’s possible. Sugar-coat it if you need to. What you cannot do is change the underlying facts to fit the room.
There’s a difference between “we’re behind on this metric, here are three scenarios to close it, and I believe we get there” and “the metric doesn’t matter the way we said it did last quarter.” One is optimism. The other is a different story. These three crossed that line — not gradually, but specifically, right as the investor changed.
A leader can choose silence. But if you open your mouth, the truth doesn’t get to change based on who’s in the room — especially when the room is everyone.