Fear of AI Destroying Humanity Cause Certain Stocks to Skyrocket

Looking at the big picture, as always.

By Frank Landymore

Published Sep 16, 2026 11:54 AM EDT

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AI is supposedly going to kill us all, but at least it’s doing wonders for the stocks for a few multibillion-dollar companies.

Mounting fears over the technology’s existential risks reached a fever pitch over the weekend, tanking AI chip stocks across the globe. 

This earthshattering discussion had a curious aftershock, though. Instead of double-checking their fortified bunkers, investors poured even more money into Microsoft, Google, and Meta Platforms — the biggest AI hyperscalers, or companies that operate the largest data centers — which were up by more than two percent on Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported. All remain up by a few percentage points over the past five days.

These gains may not mean much in the grand scheme of things, but they did result in the WSJ publishing what CNBC correspondent Eamon Javers called a “subhead for the ages.” 

“Talk of heading off artificial intelligence’s potential role in destroying humanity hurt some stocks and helped others,” it read. There are winners and losers in every scenario, in other words — including humanity’s extinction.

Fears that AI advancements could spell doom for our species have been running high after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned last week and accused the company of “gambling with our lives,” sending shockwaves through the tech industry. 

Coxon’s warning came after months of leading AI labs, including Anthropic, each coming out to say that their powerful agentic systems had been able to break out of containment and launch cyberattacks in the real world.

Talk of slowing down AI development quickly spread from Silicon Valley to Washington, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei intensified these calls on Saturday in a lengthy essay urging other AI companies to cooperate. Elon Musk, who runs SpaceXAI, and Sam Altman, the CEO OpenAI, both came out in agreement.

Some experts are skeptical of these apocalyptic claims from AI leaders, wondering if there might be an ulterior motive. The likes of Anthropic have long been accused of using fear-mongering as a marketing tactic. Whatever’s going on, it seems that the industry is doing its best to keep the narrative around the tech within its control.

More on AI: Bernie Sanders Proposes Banning Superintelligent AI and Imprisoning Developers for 20 Years

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Frank Landymore

Contributing Writer

I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.

@Polymarket

JUST IN: Multiple world leaders have reportedly fallen ill, after attending BRICS summit in India.

The Fed just did exactly what Trump didn’t want.

Interest rates are going UP for the first time in 3 years, with officials unanimously voting for a quarter-point hike to 3.75% to 4%.

Trump has spent more than a year demanding dramatically lower rates and, within hours of the decision, was back on Truth Social calling for rates of “1%, or less.”

“LOWER THE INTEREST RATES FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND FAST!”

Instead, Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, the man Trump picked expecting lower rates, said the Fed had “removed a dose of accommodation.”

The problem is inflation still won’t behave. Tariffs, the Iran war pushing up energy prices and an enormous AI investment boom have all added pressure. The Fed now expects inflation to remain above its 2% target until 2029. And this probably isn’t one-and-done.

16 of 18 Fed officials see at least one more hike before the end of the year. 4 officials even expect 2 hikes.

What does that mean for your wallet?

Credit cards: more expensive almost immediately. Carrying a balance just got uglier. Mortgages: fixed-rate owners are insulated. New buyers and anyone on an adjustable rate, not so much, with mortgage rates already hovering near 7%.

Savings: finally, some good news. High-yield accounts, CDs and money-market funds should benefit, assuming your bank actually passes the higher rates on.

WalletHub estimates this single quarter-point hike could cost credit-card borrowers around $2 billion in additional interest over the next 12 months.

So while Washington fights over whether rates should be 1% or 4%, anyone carrying debt gets to pay for the argument. Sources: Reuters, Bloomberg, Federal Reserve, WalletHub / Writer: Julie

https://twitter.com/Perpetualmaniac/status/2100480653896892584/video/1

https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/2100480862110318800/video/1

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https://www.gzeromedia.com/video/gzero-world-clips/can-ai-place-bioweapons-in-the-hands-of-bad-actors

Can AI place bioweapons in the hands of bad actors?

GZERO Staff

September 16, 2026

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Developing a sophisticated biological weapon has historically required highly specialized expertise, laboratory equipment, and years of trial and error. But artificial intelligence could change that equation by making advanced scientific knowledge easier to access and dramatically shortening the learning curve.

On GZERO World, Ian Bremmer asks investigative journalist and author Annie Jacobsen what happens when an AI system can provide a potential blueprint for a biological weapon. Jacobsen explains why the barriers to developing bioweapons are already much lower than those surrounding nuclear weapons – and how AI could lower them further.

Drawing on a real-world case involving an alleged biological weapons plan discovered in 2008, Jacobsen explains how capabilities that were once largely hypothetical could become more feasible as AI systems grow more powerful. The challenge for governments and AI companies is figuring out where safeguards can actually stop that knowledge from becoming a real-world threat.

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Iran’s threat to cut undersea cables in Strait of Hormuz poses a serious threat to Gulf states

Published: September 15, 2026 12.25pm BST

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The conflict between Iran and the US appears to have reached a stalemate. The US navy continues to prevent Iranian vessels or others transiting to or from Iranian ports. Iran, meanwhile, threatens shipping moving in or out of the Persian Gulf region via the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran has also recently said it will establish a new “restricted zone” stretching into the Gulf from the Strait of Hormuz – although details remain sketchy.

Less frequently discussed is the network of undersea cables across the Persian Gulf which connect the region with the outside world. On August 16, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Iranian government was considering attacks on that network. In the Gulf’s relatively shallow waters, threats to this critical undersea infrastructure (CUI) pose a credible risk to the Gulf States and the wider world.

These cables form a largely unseen foundation of the global economy, carrying more than 95% of international data traffic. Their role extends far beyond everyday internet and call usage. They support financial transactions, government communications and the increasingly data-intensive operations of the global technology sector.

Major technology companies such as Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are investing heavily in subsea connectivity as they expand data-centre networks and seek to meet the growing demands of AI. For the Gulf States, where hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested in AI as part of efforts to diversify economies away from fossil fuels, disruption to this infrastructure could therefore have consequences far beyond communications. Cutting these CUI cables threatens a key element of their broader economic ambitions.

To demonstrate the scale of this risk, the key cable networks include the Fibre in Gulf submarine cable system, which connects Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE. There is also the Falcon Network, which connects Bahrain, Egypt, India, Iraq, Kuwait, Maldives, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, Sudan and Yemen. The Asia-Africa-Europe1 (AEE1) network, with landing sites in Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and UAE, linking southeast Asia to Europe via Egypt. And the Gulf Bridge International, which links Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and has onward connectivity to India and Europe.

With that web of connections funnelled through the Strait of Hormuz, an international waterway that has long been of strategic importance for oil and gas has taken on a new significance as a choke point for global undersea infrastructure.

What makes the Strait of Hormuz and the rest of the Gulf region particularly vulnerable to an attack on the CUI is the shallow water. With an average depth of 50 metres and a maximum depth of less than 100 metres, those who might wish to attack the CUI network do not need the sort of high-end capabilities of Russia’s Gugi agency. Gugi, which is the Russian acronym for the Main Directorate of Deep Sea Research, is responsible for underwater sabotage and espionage.

Remotely operated vehicles (ROV) with working depths of thousands of metres are commonplace in the oil and gas industry. There are growing numbers of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) with similar operating parameters in that field. Both can be repurposed and used for offensive operations.

Iran has already debuted its own mine clearance ROV, and there may be other capabilities which it has not chosen to publicise. The shallowness of the Persian Gulf puts most of it well within the depths military divers are able to operate at. We could also see the sort of blunt threat posed by a ship “accidentally” dragging its anchor to cut cables in the manner we have witnessed in the Baltic.

So it’s entirely feasible that Iran could conduct attacks against the CUI network. And the threat has already affected planned extensions or new elements of this undersea infrastructure. Several projects have been put on hold after their owners or contractors declared they can’t safely operate in the Gulf.

This neatly illustrates the impact of conflict on the ability to maintain and extend the cables carrying so much of the world’s trade and communication. In the context of the Middle East, that will have a direct impact on the ambitions of Gulf States to become AI-enabled economies.

Iran clearly appreciates the strategic and operational significance of the regional CUI network and will have put significant effort into mapping it. It is also reasonable to assume that it will have a trained force of divers able to operate at depths that would enable them to reach the cables across the Persian Gulf seabed.

We know that they have an ROV designed for mine clearance operations – and it’s highly likely operate other assets in support of a well-developed offshore oil industry.

How far would Iran go?

The most important question is what would the Iranians be prepared to do? An attack on the cable network could create a very significant impact on trade and communications across the Middle East, with global ramifications. Such an attack would need to be targeted and limited if Iran wished to avoid global condemnation. But it’s a risk they may be willing to take given their current isolation.

That “maybe-they-would” doubt leads us to consider a new form of deterrence – of one nation’s ability to affect either CUI of another, or of broader networks.

It’s something of an extension of Nixon’s madman theory of nuclear deterrence. A nation that is desperate enough could be willing to take extreme action in the CUI domain – with what might appear to a rational observer to be disproportionate regional and potentially global consequences – in order to deter more traditional military strikes against it.

To a certain extent this should come as no surprise. The CUI network is the cyber age equivalent of the roads, bridges and rail systems which have long been targets for military planners seeking to disrupt an opponents’ ability and willingness to fight. Iran’s capacity and desire to conduct this sort of operation may be uncertain – but that very ambiguity may prove enough to have a significant impact on the region.

Meta Is Using Instagram Users’ Photos to Build a Universal Facial Recognition System for Its Hated Smart Glasses, Class Action Lawsuit Claims

The company has already had to settle several facial recognition-related lawsuits.

By Victor Tangermann

Published Sep 15, 2026 11:58 AM EDT

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The public messaging surrounding Meta’s flashy smart glasses hasn’t exactly gone in the company’s favor.

The camera-equipped devices have garnered a reputation for allowing shady individuals to record strangers without their consent, garnering them the memorable pejorative of “pervert glasses.”

So when Wired revealed in June that Meta had silently added facial recognition code to the smart glasses — stoking fears that the creepy glasses could be used to identify people on the street based on biometric data — that simmering distaste grew into a major PR disaster for the company.

Meta has ever since vehemently denied that it was planning on ever releasing the tech, a feature dubbed “NameTag.” That’s despite its CTO Andrew Bosworth happily describing those plans in excruciating detail in public and arguing it would be a “great feature” — mere days after calling Wired‘s bombshell reporting “absolutely dishonest.”

Now, the company is facing a proposed class action lawsuit over the ordeal, as Wired reports, with a set of families in Illinois and California accusing the company of illegally scraping their Facebook and Instagram photos to build a massive facial recognition system for “NameTag.”

The news comes just days after a mother in Utah accused Meta of using its AI to scour Instagram and Facebook posts to reveal invasive information about her young daughters.

Meta told Wired in a statement that the latest “lawsuit is without merit and misrepresents our work.”

“We’ve been transparent about how we use people’s information to build and improve our AI products,” the a spokesperson told Wired. “As for NameTags, nothing has shipped to consumers and no final decision has been made on what to do here, if anything.”

The proposed class action accuses Meta of extracting biometric signatures from publicly available social media profiles. As Wired first noted in June, these “faceprints” appeared in the code for the AI companion app of its smart glasses.

A patent described the software as matching these signatures to profile photos. An AI image generator Meta released called Emu was also trained on a vast swath of user-uploaded images and text. The complainants accuse Meta of using this AI system to harvest biometric data.

Meta has already been caught with its pants down after allowing users to generate images inspired by public Instagram accounts, admitting that it had “missed the mark” with the feature.

The company has a long history of mishandling sensitive user data, settling a class action lawsuit in 2020 over an entirely separate facial recognition system for $650 million. In 2024, it agreed to pay $1.4 billion to settle yet another facial recognition data lawsuit in Texas.

More on Meta’s glasses: Mother Horrified When Meta’s AI Scours Instagram and Facebook for Invasive Information About Her Young Daughters

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Victor Tangermann

Senior Editor

I’m a senior editor at Futurism, where I edit and write about NASA and the private space sector, as well as topics ranging from SETI and artificial intelligence to tech and medical policy.