iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

My hope is that, moving forward, Leading The Future will do their part to combat this and help foster a genuinely productive conversation on AI. The stakes are too high for anything else!

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Whether Leading the Future financed these meme accounts or merely cultivated the network that produced them, and whether OpenAI knew about it or not, it’s clear we face a polluted information ecosystem hindering critical conversations about this technology.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

They also appear to have run at least one other sockpuppet account in the past, attacking journalists and nonprofits with misleading claims and paid ads. More recently, many of their posts have also been mysteriously boosted by OnlyFans bots.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

While any involvement with, or endorsement of, these tactics would represent a new low for OpenAI, it wouldn’t be one for Leading the Future. In the past, they’ve funded fake news sites to attack critics and paid influencers to stoke fears about China.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

And, even if OpenAI and the Brockmans didn’t previously know about these tactics, you’d think that donating so much, with $25m still pending, would grant you the ability to ask the PAC to refrain from astroturfing as a condition of further funding. I haven't seen them do that.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

I would like to believe OpenAI when they claim to be above all of this. But I fear that they aren’t. The same worldview which permits blatant and offensive astroturfing would also permit strategically misleading press releases.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

At one point, the last sockpuppet revealed specific information about intra-coalitional politics in an astroturfed child safety group that I think was most likely fed to the PAC by OpenAI’s global affairs team.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

This could be a coincidence — maybe Kwon found both of these small, anonymous accounts organically. But the last sockpuppet we identified, with fewer than one hundred followers, was followed by Anna Brockman, the wife of Greg Brockman and funder of Leading the Future.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

I was also shocked to find that both of the new sockpuppet accounts we identified, with a combined follower count of less than two thousand, are followed by not just the super PAC’s head Josh Vlasto, but also OpenAI’s own @jasonkwon, who oversees global affairs.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

But in their statement, OpenAI also disavowed any knowledge of the PAC’s activities and disavowed astroturfing. I’m not sure if I believe this either, and not just because the PAC seems to have been the brainchild of their chief lobbyist and his allies...

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

On Monday, OpenAI put out a statement disavowing any connection to the PAC. I find this argument uncompelling, in part because I don’t think DC will care whether it’s OpenAI or its President threatening to end political careers over AI regulation.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

The accounts are also followed by various figures affiliated with the PAC, and sometimes engage with them, including @BuildAmericanAI's Nathan Leamer and @a16z's Collin McCune.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

In fact, these accounts didn’t do much to hide their apparent connection to Leading the Future. One was created only ten days after their c4 affiliate, @BuildAmericanAI, was incorporated. When Build American AI publicly launched, both accounts retweeted/replied to it.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

The account also sometimes shows signs of the unique worldview associated with Leading The Future. It attacks Dario Amodei (the CEO of OpenAI’s chief rival) and Alex Bores (whom Leading The Future is spending to defeat), despite the account otherwise claiming to be pro-tech.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

In two separate cases, the account uses videos depicting real people with disabilities to ridicule anti-AI protesters.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Meanwhile, the pro-AI @doomersaredumb also uses off-color messages to attack the fake doomer and OpenAI’s critics, or just to achieve virality. Posts from the account reference masturbation, deepfakes targeting intimate partners, swallowing semen, cannibalism, and Mossad.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

If this is some sort of sophisticated satire, it doesn’t seem to be registering for the vast majority of his audience. On the account’s viral posts, most commenters seem to think that the fake doomer account is being run in earnest.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

He sometimes veers toward violent or dehumanizing language, discussing mailing dryer lint to corporate headquarters, calling Sam Altman a murderous insect, and posting a photo depicting the outline of an assault rifle in response to a warning about AI.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Various posts from the fake doomer account adopt absurd and weak arguments that seem designed for ridicule. He argues that China should win the AI arms race, an odd position for a supposed AI opponent. He also claims the RAISE Act was good because it slows innovation.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

The second account seems to be a false-flag anti-AI activist. @JonathanDoomer claims to be an AI skeptic who quit his 20-year career as an engineer to warn about AI. In reality, the account seems to be a straw man designed to discredit the PAC’s opponents.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

The first, @DoomersAreDumb, is basically an even-edgier version of the previous account I covered: an anonymous attack dog targeting critics of the AI industry as well as OpenAI’s competitors.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Circumstantial evidence suggests that the company Memelord is running two anonymous accounts that are closely aligned with Leading the Future. One account attacks the PAC’s critics, while the other impersonates them to make their opposition look deranged.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

A few months ago, I found an anonymous sockpuppet account linked to the OpenAI/a16z super PAC. Now, @taylorlorenz.bsky.social and I have uncovered two more — and they're even more brazen than the first.

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Reposted by Tyler Johnston

Techmeme @techmeme.com · 03/06/2026

Leading the Future, the pro-AI super PAC backed by Greg Brockman, appears to be linked to multiple sockpuppet accounts, including a purported anti-AI activist (@themidasproj) Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Our new report, co-authored with Guidelight AI Standards, LASST, and Encode walks through what investors should be asking SpaceX to disclose: spacexai-risks.org

spacexai-risks.org

xAI: The Unpriced Risk in SpaceX’s IPO

A report concerning xAI's safety practices, governance, and disclosure obligations ahead of the SpaceX IPO.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

xAI's neglect of the safety practices the rest of the industry has converged on is, at this point, pretty shocking (and well enough documented that I don't think I need to recap it here). So if they are to successfully navigate the rough seas ahead, investors may wish to see changes at the company.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

OpenAI and Anthropic are both reportedly headed to the public markets too, and their prospectuses will raise some version of the same problem. But SpaceX is the first, and it arrives with a complicating feature...

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

So pricing the security means forming a view on whether SpaceX has the organizational depth to manage a class of risk that no private organization in human history has ever had to manage before.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

The people running frontier AI companies have publicly likened the risks of their products to pandemics and nuclear war, and SpaceX has just absorbed one of those companies.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

That is, when you say it out loud, a somewhat unhinged question to put to investors evaluating a security. But it is the actual question they should be asking!

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

SpaceX's IPO, whenever it arrives, will be the first in history to add a new category, which is roughly: "Assuming you succeed in building the technology you are trying to build, does your company have the institutional capacity to prevent a global catastrophe of an unprecedented scale?"

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Reposted by Tyler Johnston

The Midas Project @themidasproject.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

SpaceX is about to go public, and inside it now is xAI, a frontier AI lab that ranks behind its peers in every major published assessment of AI safety practices. What does that mean for investors? Our new report with Guidelight AI Standards, Encode, and LASST is out today.

Image of report: xAI: The Unpriced Risk in SpaceX's IPO.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

To be specific, the document is flagged as 100% AI generated via @pangram.com. Worse than that, my assessment of the disclosure is that it: – doesn't meet the spirit of the law – doesn't meet the statutory requirements; and – doesn't reflect what they do in practice

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

New: I went through Anthropic's legally-required training data disclosure. It appears to be AI slop in the truest sense.

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

To be fair, they weren't particularly subtle, nor successful at getting organic reach... but this is still wildly immature behavior for such an important and ostensibly serious institution!

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 07/04/2026

I wasn't too shocked when an anon reply guy started pestering me + other orgs/journalists on X. Normally I’d ignore it, but I looked closer when they began running paid ads. I did not expect to trace the account back to OpenAI’s political machine! My latest for @themidasproject.bsky.social

A grid of tweets from @DoomerDaylight on twitter

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 21/12/2024

watching o3 discourse on the timeline

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

might even double the dosage in a particularly hairy situation

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

definitely adding this to my first aid kit

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

TIL the US had a secret nuclear-weapon-related material that was so classified that we forgot how to make it and had to spend tens of millions of dollars to reverse engineer it. Shades of "There Is No Antimemetics Division" by @qntm.org en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fogbank

en.wikipedia.org

Fogbank - Wikipedia

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Tyler Johnston @tylerjohnston.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

One major upside to the existence of Elon/Vivek’s DOGE is their ability to advocate for modifying NOTA and legalizing ethical organ donor compensation. Dialysis is a full 1% of the US federal budget! Solving it with a simple market solution seems right up their alley. www.vox.com/future-perfe...

vox.com

Would you donate a kidney for $50,000?

Giving a kidney saves a life. Paying donors could fix the shortage.

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