AI Safety Is Mostly a Sex Cult

The piece contends that AI safety is essentially a sex cult centered on Eliezer Yudkowsky and the overlapping rationalist and Effective Altruism networks, and it lays out concrete personal, institutional, and financial links to back that claim. It traces intellectual influence from Yudkowsky’s fan fiction and "Sequences" to terminology and priorities in the field, notes connections to founders and funders of DeepMind, OpenAI, Anthropic and the Future of Life Institute, and points to a Berkeley compound called Lighthaven - bought with money traced to FTX - as a hub for communal living, sexual events (including SlutCon), reading groups, and conferences. The account highlights polyamorous group houses, organizers with intimate ties to nonprofit leadership, public sexual branding by prominent community members, and even an attempted attack by someone reportedly inspired by Yudkowsky.

The substantive critique is that this subculture’s millenarian fixation on runaway superintelligence (RSI, paperclipper doom) distorts policy and research priorities: safety debates become about pausing or cartel-like "pacing" rather than standard regulation that prevents harms and promotes benefits. The mixture of private sexual communes, concentrated funding influence, recruitment of young idealists via fiction, and alleged moral hazards from donated funds is presented as a reason to distrust the movement’s motives and to oppose its outsized role in shaping AI policy.