Everyone Is Buying Your Cognition

Editorial · Lloyd Lewis

There’s a claim doing the rounds that the anti-AI movement is a shill operation funded by people inside the industry, funded by Russia, run out of a Berkeley bootcamp that’s about to flood your feed with a month of coordinated outrage. I went looking. What I found is more interesting than the claim, and considerably worse.

Start with what’s true.

The Berkeley operation exists (big thanks to our US member of this collective, V, for the heads up). It’s called Plz Don’t Kill Us — a creator residency cofounded by the Substack data scientist Aella and Ronny Fernandez of Lightcone Infrastructure, the nonprofit that builds spaces for the Bay Area rationalist scene. Up to a hundred creators, free food and housing one obligation: post short-form video about AI doom every single day or get asked to leave.

Mentors include Grimes, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Liv Boeree. Applications close mid-June. So yes — the content ramp is coming, it’s organised, and it’s funded by money from inside the tech ecosystem. The San Francisco Standard covered it openly because the whole thing is open. There’s no leak here. There’s a press tour ffs.

Now the part the claim gets fatally wrong. Plz Don’t Kill Us is not the anti-AI movement. It’s the doom movement, and the two believe opposite things.

The doomers believe AI is so powerful it might end the species (you know, the only species that matters in capitalism – us) which means they believe the product works better than the marketing says. The artists, writers and #fuckai crowd believe AI is theft dressed as magic — slop, scraping, wage suppression. One movement thinks the machine is a god in its crib. The other thinks it’s a photocopier with a press agent. Lumping them together isn’t analysis. It’s a category error that flatters whoever’s doing the lumping, because “everyone who criticises us is the same paid mob” is the cheapest defence ever written.

And Russia? Nothing. I’m chucking that in ironically and as a banker (pun). No financial records, no leaked comms, no credible investigation. The claim survives on vibes and the unfalsifiable logic of all such claims: evidence proves it, absence of evidence proves the cover-up worked. That’s not a theory. That’s a toll gate for your attention with no road behind it.

The twist!

Here’s the twist worth your time. While people argue about whether anti-AI creators are secretly funded, the best-documented paid influencer operation of 2026 is on the other side.

Leading the Future — the pro-AI super PAC backed by OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Andreessen Horowitz partners, Joe Lonsdale, Ron Conway and Perplexity — raised $125 million for the midterms. Its dark-money affiliate, Build American AI, is reportedly paying lifestyle creators around $5,000 a TikTok to weave deregulation talking points into their feeds, in the gap between ad-disclosure rules and political-spending law where neither regulator can see. Wired reported influencers being paid to post fear-about-China content framed as support for letting the industry off the leash. That’s not a residency with a press release. That’s astroturf with a budget the size of a small nation’s film industry.

Just a sec. Let’s throw a donate button here because The House seems to be winning as usual and we’re not even asking the price of a coffee.

So the honest picture isn’t grassroots versus shills. It’s factions — acceleration money, doom money, lobbying money, engagement money — all bidding on the same asset: what you think before you’ve had a chance to think it. The doomers are buying it with free housing in Berkeley. The accelerationists are buying it at five fucking grand a video. The platforms take their cut either way, because outrage is the toll and the gate swings both directions.

Which is why the working-class artist (donate button is up there ⬆️) worrying about their rate card, and the Welsh speaker watching another technology arrive that wasn’t built with them in mind, deserve better than being filed under “Russian op.” Those concerns predate the funding wars and will outlast them.

The tell, always, is who benefits from the conflation. When someone tells you all criticism of a trillion-dollar industry is bought, ask who’s buying the claim that it’s bought.

Keep your own gate. Everything else has a sponsor.

So let’s break this down in the non-chatty format to round this morning’s (BST) piece off. You can do your own forensics on this if you want.

The truth is out there 👇

Assessment: Funding Claims Regarding the “Anti-AI Movement”

Claim decomposition and evidence grading · June 2026

Purpose. A composite claim is circulating: that the anti-AI movement is (a) funded by actors within the AI industry, (b) funded by Russian state interests, and (c) coordinating an influencer content operation from Berkeley beginning next month. This document decomposes the claim, grades each component against available evidence, and records the structural finding. Methodology follows AOF documentation standards: claims separated, sources named, confidence stated, conflation identified.

Component 1 — A Berkeley influencer operation exists.
Grade: CONFIRMED.

Plz Don’t Kill Us is a creator residency in Berkeley, cofounded by Aella and Ronny Fernandez (Lightcone Infrastructure), publicly reported by the San Francisco Standard in April 2026. Parameters: up to 100 creators; mandatory daily short-form video output on AI existential risk; food and housing provided; mentors include Grimes, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Liv Boeree; applications open through 15 June 2026. The predicted volume increase in AI-risk content is therefore credible and time-bounded. Note: the programme is self-declared and press-engaged. It is organised; it is not covert.

Component 2 — The operation is funded “from within the business.”
Grade: PARTIALLY CONFIRMED, WITH MATERIAL CAVEAT.

Lightcone Infrastructure and the surrounding rationalist/AI-safety ecosystem are funded substantially from within the technology sector. In that narrow sense, industry-adjacent money funds AI-doom content. The caveat is decisive: this funds the doom faction, whose core premise — that AI capabilities are extreme and existentially dangerous — is the inverse of the anti-AI faction’s premise that AI output is low-value appropriation (“slop,” scraping, labour displacement). The funding claim is true only of a faction the original claim misidentifies.

Component 3 — Russian state funding of anti-AI activity.
Grade: UNEVIDENCED.

No financial records, sanctions disclosures, leaked communications, or credible investigative reporting located. The claim as circulated exhibits unfalsifiable structure (absence of evidence reframed as operational success). Classification: unproven; flagged for revision only upon documentary evidence meeting the standard above.

Component 4 — Anti-AI content is a monetised media category.
Grade: CONFIRMED, WITH SYMMETRY FINDING.

Anti-AI and AI-doom content perform within standard attention-economy incentives. However, the best-documented paid influencer operation of 2026 is pro-AI: the Leading the Future super PAC (disclosed donors include OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, Andreessen Horowitz partners, Joe Lonsdale, Ron Conway, Perplexity; ~$125M raised for the 2026 midterm cycle) and its affiliated dark-money group Build American AI, reported (Wired; Washington Post; Financial World, April–May 2026) to be paying creators approximately $5,000 per TikTok video to embed deregulation and China-threat framing in lifestyle content, exploiting the disclosure gap between advertising and political-spending regimes. Any account of “bought discourse” that omits this operation is selectively constructed.

Structural finding: the conflation is the payload.

The composite claim’s persuasive force depends on merging two movements with incompatible premises — capability-maximalist doomers and capability-sceptical artists/labour critics — into a single funded bloc. The merge benefits multiple parties simultaneously: industry actors (all criticism reads as coordinated and insincere), doom-faction communicators (borrowed mass and urgency from labour grievances), and engagement platforms (a single high-friction conflict outperforms two precise ones). Within the AOF framework this is a textbook toll-gate configuration: the conflated narrative is positioned across the route to an accurate picture, and passage is paid in attention. The covenant response is the one documented here — decompose, grade, name the sponsor, keep the gate.

Disposition. Components 1 and 4 confirmed; Component 2 confirmed only under reidentification of faction; Component 3 unevidenced. Monitoring continues through the residency’s active period (from late June 2026) and the US midterm influencer-spend disclosures. Revision trigger: documentary evidence meeting Component 3’s stated standard, or FEC/journalistic disclosure materially altering Component 4’s symmetry finding.

Art of FACELESS · Cardiff · Documented under standard AOF evidence-handling practice within the AOF archives.

References

Component 1 — Plz Don’t Kill Us residency
1. The San Francisco Standard — “Sex researcher Aella hopes to make AI doom go mainstream” (22 April 2026). https://sfstandard.com/2026/04/22/sex-researcher-aella-hopes-make-ai-doom-go-mainstream/ — primary source for residency parameters: cofounders Aella and Ronny Fernandez (Lightcone Infrastructure), up to 100 creators, mandatory daily output, food and housing provided, mentors (Grimes, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Liv Boeree), applications open through 15 June 2026.

Component 2 — Funding provenance of the doom faction
2. Lightcone Infrastructure — organisational background and rationalist-community focus (as characterised in the San Francisco Standard reporting above). Faction-distinction analysis (doom vs. anti-AI/labour critique) is the author’s own.

Component 3 — Russian state funding claim (method precedent)
3. United States v. Internet Research Agency LLC et al., Indictment, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (Feb. 2018) — establishing the both-sides amplification method and post-hoc detection lag. (Cited as method precedent, not as evidence of the instant claim.)
4. U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Report on Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016 U.S. Election, Vol. 2 (2019) — corroborating documentation of detection lag. (Method precedent only.)
Note: No source substantiates Russian funding of the anti-AI movement. References 3–4 are included solely to document why a null observable in this domain is uninformative rather than exculpatory.

Component 4 — Pro-AI paid influencer operation
5. The Washington Post — “Pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future has $100M and targets midterms” (Aug. 2025, updated). https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/08/26/silicon-valley-ai-super-pac/
6. CNBC / NBC News — coverage of Leading the Future FEC disclosures, ~$125M raised, ~$70M cash on hand entering 2026; donors including Greg Brockman (OpenAI co-founder), Andreessen Horowitz partners, Joe Lonsdale, Ron Conway, Perplexity. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/ai-crypto-trump-super-pacs-stash-millions-spend-midterms-rcna256622
7. Wired (April 2026), as summarised in secondary tracking — reporting that the affiliated PAC structure paid TikTok influencers to post China-threat framing in support of AI deregulation.
8. Financial World — “AI industry takes regulatory fight to influencer feeds ahead of 2026 US midterms” (3 May 2026). https://www.financial-world.org/news/news/financial/30596/ — Build American AI dark-money group, ~$5,000 per TikTok video, disclosure-gap exploitation.
9. Houston Public Media / Texas Tribune — “AI-aligned super PACs are pouring millions into Texas congressional races” (1 April 2026). https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/election-2026/2026/04/01/547787/ — corroborating state-level spend (>$2.8M).
All URLs verified at time of compilation (June 2026). Where primary reporting sits behind paywalls (Wired, Washington Post), corroborating secondary coverage is cited. This reference list documents the evidence base; grading and structural findings are AOF’s own.

Disclaimer: This is an opinion piece. It reflects the author’s analysis and interpretation of publicly reported information available at the time of writing (June 2026). Factual claims regarding the Plz Don’t Kill Us residency and the Leading the Future / Build American AI funding operations are drawn from contemporaneous reporting by the San Francisco Standard, Wired, The Washington Post and others; readers are encouraged to consult those sources directly. Characterisations, inferences and conclusions are the author’s own. The assessment that no public evidence substantiates Russian state funding of anti-AI activity is a statement about the present evidentiary record, not an assertion that the question is settled. Nothing here should be read as a factual allegation against any named individual or organisation beyond what those sources report. Sourced documentation supporting this piece is held at artoffaceless.org.