Wrong Messengers
Why the people selling AI are the biggest threat to AI adoption.
Sam Altman told the U.S. Senate that AI poses an extinction-level risk to humanity. Then he went back to his office and kept building it.
That sentence shouldn’t make sense. It does anyway. And that’s the problem.
I got my first computer in the late nineties. I remember the moment I sent my first email — the physical sensation of it, the disbelief that a message had traveled somewhere in seconds. Then a first webpage. Applying to colleges online. Buying a book from Amazon before I fully believed Amazon would survive. Creating a profile on a social network and finding people I hadn’t spoken to in years.
Nobody was alone in that feeling.
John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, told anyone who would listen: “The Internet will change the way we work, live, learn, and play.” Not a warning. Not a hedge. A promise. Bill Gates called it “a tidal wave” — and framed it as opportunity, not catastrophe. Steve Jobs was building the device that would put the internet in your pocket, telling a generation they were here “to put a dent in the universe.” Marc Andreessen built Netscape — the browser that gave most people their first internet experience — and told the world the optimists are always right. Scott McNealy built his entire company on four words: “The Network is the Computer.”
These were not passive observers predicting the future. Best salespeople a technology has ever had. Their belief was contagious. It worked. Internet changed everything — partly because it was transformative, and partly because the people who built it spent twenty years convincing the world it was going to be great.
Positive. Consistent. Delivered by people the world had decided to trust.
Crypto’s story started differently. Satoshi Nakamoto published the Bitcoin whitepaper in 2008 under a pseudonym and disappeared. No interviews. No Senate testimony. No Twitter. Its original architect chose to have no public identity at all.
Into that vacuum walked Do Kwon, who promised a new financial system and called critics “poor.” And Sam Bankman-Fried, who donated to charity between defrauding customers. Satoshi’s anonymity was principled. What filled the gap was fraud.
Real ideas lived inside that technology. Some still do.
But three years after the peak? Crypto is an afterthought. Limited real-world adoption. Regulatory battles. Occasional headlines when a price moves. What was supposed to replace the financial system is mostly used for speculation.
It didn’t fail because the technology was bad. It failed because there was no Chambers, no Gates, no Jobs. And the messengers who showed up instead burned it down.
No technology wave in history has produced more prominent builders than AI. Dario Amodei at Anthropic leads with safety messaging — even the most careful builder in the room frames his work primarily around risk. Sam Altman signed a statement declaring AI extinction risk should be treated alongside pandemics and nuclear war, then published a blog called “The Intelligence Age” that didn’t mention extinction once. Geoffrey Hinton left Google “to speak freely about the existential threat.” Elon Musk says there’s a 20% chance AI leads to human annihilation — while raising billions to build it faster.
Poor communicators stumbling over hard ideas? No. People who have made a choice — conscious or not — to lead with fear. And unlike the journalists and academics who worried about the internet from the outside, these are the builders. They own the companies. They set the research agendas. They have every reason to want this technology to succeed.
And still. Extinction. Annihilation. Civilizational risk.
Results are exactly what you’d expect. 52% of American workers are worried about AI’s impact. 71% fear it will destroy jobs permanently. In 2024, sentiment flipped: more workers now believe AI does more harm than good. Mental health data is worse. That 56% of Americans who believed the internet would transform commerce for the better — that number has no AI equivalent. Because nobody with Chambers’ platform is making Chambers’ argument.
Yesterday, in my leadership meeting, one of my leaders said it plainly: “My team is shit scared. They’re working extremely hard. They’re worried AI will take over their jobs. They’re hearing SaaS is dead. There’s no good news. It feels like: work hard to get yourself out of a job.”
That sentence stayed with me. Because I feel it too — not just my team.
And here’s what matters: we didn’t create that sentiment inside our company. It came from outside. It came from the messengers. Every Altman Senate testimony, every Musk tweet about human annihilation, every “SaaS is dead” headline — it accumulated. And it landed in my leadership meeting, in my team, in my own head on a Tuesday morning.
More than bad press. Fear that migrates from public platforms into private rooms — and stays there.
AI is genuinely different from the internet. It competes with human cognition, not just human behavior. That’s real. Concern isn’t manufactured from nothing.
But the amplification is. Musk co-founded OpenAI, left, built a competitor, and filed suit against them. Altman calls for regulation that would benefit incumbents while racing to AGI. Competitors using the language of responsibility to fight market battles. That’s what’s happening.
The messenger is the message. Always has been.
Which means your company’s relationship with AI cannot depend on these people getting the narrative right. They won’t. Not because they’re incompetent — because they’re conflicted.
Your job — as CEO of a company trying to navigate this — is to bring sanity back into the room. Not cheerleading. Not dismissal. Perspective. The bad is not as bad as the headlines suggest. The good is not as good as the pitch decks claim. Somewhere in the middle is where reality lives — and where your company can actually operate.
Every technology we have ever adopted found its place eventually. The internet didn’t replace human connection — it changed it. Mobile didn’t replace conversation — it changed it. We’ll find a place for AI too. We always do.
But the wrong messengers have made the jobs and lives of billions of people genuinely miserable in the meantime. That’s not collateral damage. That’s a failure of leadership — not yours, theirs. And it’s a failure that falls to you to correct inside your own walls.
Your team doesn’t need another article about AI risk. They need a leader who has a point of view on what this technology means for them — specifically, in their role, this quarter. Chambers did it. Jobs did it. Nobody’s doing it for AI. Which means it falls to you.
The internet had Chambers, Gates, and Jobs. Crypto had Satoshi, SBF, and Do Kwon. AI has Dario, Altman, Pichai, and Musk — and Musk is suing Altman.
You decide which pattern that is.
And then go build the story your team is waiting for.