ai is not a scam

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The emperor's new "liability framework"

In May 2023, Sam Altman testified under oath before the US Senate and, because he is who he is, told a whole bunch of lies. One of those was that he would "love to collaborate" with the Senate to come up with "a liability framework" for AI and AI companies like OpenAI. Of course, not only did he never actually do anything in support of that claim, his company is now backing the opposite kind of legislation, one that would in fact shield AI labs from liability. It's unclear, however, if that will save them - and OpenAI in particular - from universal hatred.

Certain · Outright
OpenAIReversalS. Altman

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Another model that's "too dangerous to make public": anyone keeping count?

It's getting pretty old at this point, but Anthropic publicly announced a new version of Claude - Mythos - that was apparently too dangerous to release. Given the number of times OpenAI has played this card and the fact that Mythos was quickly largely found to be overblown, this feels like it is, again, only attention-seeking publicity. Or a distraction from the recent Claude Code leaks, who knows.

Probable · Outright
HypeAnthropic

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One-man billion-dollar company was as fake as AI gets

Well it was a great success... if you don't count the fake Doctors, fake patients, fake medicine, and overall fake promises. Too bad the facts paint the whole thing as more of a large-scale scam than an actual legitimate business.

Certain · Outright
Hype

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Was the Disney deal ever real for OpenAI?

It's obviously hard to say for sure, but rug-pulling Disney like this less than half a year after a "landmark agreement" isn't a great look. It feels like OpenAI was not being very earnest, but instead just doing anything it could to generate some hype.

Probable · Omission
OpenAIHype

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Mustafa Suleyman thinks "Superintelligence" equals "making money"

More specifically, he said it's about "models capable of delivering product value for [...] millions of enterprises". While it's hard to point at an exact definition of "Superintelligence", one can point at many inventions that delivered product value for millions of enterprises without being remotely intelligent at all.

Certain · Outright
M. SuleymanHype

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How much exactly does Anthropic make in revenue?

Let's believe that Anthropic's run-rate revenue was at least $1 billion in early 2025 and at least $5 billion in August 2025. Then let's assume they would calculate their run-rate in a straightforward way, say their last month of revenue times twelve. If both those things are true, then it should have made more than $10 billion in revenue in March of 2026, not even counting pre-2025 revenue. However, its Chief Financial Officer only feels comfortable stating the relatively low number of $5 billion when under oath. And while she did say "exceeding $5 billion to date", is anyone really to expect any company to downplay it's revenue by 50%? History kind of tells us that they tend to do the opposite, so what's going on here?

Probable · Outright
EconomicsAnthropic

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OpenAI went from prohibiting military use of its AI to becoming a Pentagon contractor under Trump in just 2 years

OpenAI went from prohibiting military use of its AI to abandoning its official commitment to safety to becoming a Pentagon contractor under Trump in just 2 years. Nice speedrun.

Certain · Outright
OpenAIReversal

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Block's AI layoffs are fake

Jack Dorsey's Block announced that it would be laying off 40% of its staff because of "Intelligence tools" (so, AI). The true story is most probably a big restructuration after overhiring during Covid.

Probable · Outright
AI layoffs

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Anthropic drops safety pledge

Although Anthropic was supposedly all about safety, to the point that that Dario Amodei alleges he refused to launch the company's first iteration of Claude a few months before ChatGPT to pursue internal testing, it is still dropping its Safety Pledge like it was no big deal. The pledge was to refuse to deploy an AI system that without guaranteeing it had proper safety guardrails in place. Guess safety is still less important than profit, after all.

Certain · Outright
AnthropicReversal

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Salesforce says it cut almost half of its staff due to AI, then immediately regrets it

Salesforce promised it needed 4000 less people to do the same work, but in doing so apparently outright lied, seeing how its leadership publicly backtracked on the claim.

Certain · Outright
AI layoffs

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Altman claims that ChatGPT is "more powerful than any human who has ever lived"

I mean, where to even start with this one? ChatGPT is a chatbot: it doesn't have any physical capabilities, it simply cannot even see or feel or understand the physical world. It can't even always count from 1 to 100 correctly, so let's simmer down here.

Certain · Outright
OpenAIS. AltmanHype

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ChatGPT query claimed to use "one fifteenth of a teaspoon"

The AI industry could make some efforts to be actually transparent about its water usage, but instead we get this. It's bullshit and not even a real metric. Just because other people are making outlandish claims in the other direction doesn't mean you can get away with making up your own.

Certain · Outright
OpenAIS. AltmanEnvironment

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OpenAI promises opt-out mechanism, then promptly forgets about it

Following media backlash and legal threats caused by its absolute disregard for copyright, OpenAI had promised to build a tool that would magically "identify copyrighted text, images, audio, and video" and offer a way to... opt-out of ChatGPT? This was so realistic that in the end it didn't happen at all.

Certain · Outright
OpenAI

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Were prompt engineers ever real?

Remember "prompt engineers", the magical solution to the fear of AI cutting jobs? Well it might have never been a real position in the first place. If it sounds too good to be true...

Probable · Outright
Hype

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Nate promised AI shopping, delivered only human shopping

In a truly shocking turn of events, the "AI" used by shopping app Nate to automatically buy stuff for you from anywhere on the internet was discovered to actually be humans operating from the Philippines. What a surprise!

Certain · Outright
Fake AI

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Altman says "we know how to build AGI", is still full of shit

In what was a lie so blatant some are still shocked to have read it, Sam "Just Trust Me" Altman declared on his blog last year that his team knew how to build Artificial General Intelligence, a kind of human-like intelligence but better. A year and a couple of months later however, he's apparently betting on "a new architecture" to save his AGI bet. So much for pure scaling!

Certain · Outright
S. AltmanHype

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Lack of transparency about FrontierMath benchmark access

OpenAI had early access to EpochAI's FrontierMath benchmark, although the latter was advertised as containing only "new and unpublished" problems as a way to avoid models already being trained on the data. But OpenAI's early access was not disclosed until after they released their last model at the time, which scored pretty well on said benchmark.

Probable · Omission
OpenAI

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Altman, Johansson, and Her

Altman says "The voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson's, and it was never intended to resemble hers.", even though the voice is eerily similar to Johansson's AND Altman tweeted "her" at launch, hinting at the android character played by Johansson in the movie Her.

Probable · Outright
OpenAIS. Altman

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Dario Amodei claims human-level AI "could happen in two or three years"

Although the word "could" is doing some heavy lifting here, we are now in 2026 and the last "Remote Labor Index" from Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety found that "The best-performing model achieves an automation rate of only 3.75%". This was, of course, comparing the AI's productions to actual human work. As of right now, Amodei's prediction still has six months to materialize, but it's safe to say that nobody believes it could happen.

Certain · Outright
AnthropicD. AmodeiHype

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"Will somebody think of the artists?" says man putting them out of work

In May 2023, Sam Altman testified under oath before the US Senate and, because he is who he is, told a whole bunch of lies. One of those was that he "thinks that creators deserve control over how their creations are used", and even said that OpenAI was already working with artists "to figure out what people want" (...money?). Of course anything related to control or compensation for artists has yet to materialize or even be mentioned by Altman or OpenAI since. Sure hope no one's holding their breath for this.

Probable · Outright
OpenAIReversalS. Altman

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Legal Tech company supposedly powered by AI is, in fact, not powered by AI

Robin AI, a legal tech company, claimed to be mostly or only powered by AI, which meant hiring an army of human labor to perform its legal reviews. The company eventually went belly up.

Certain · Outright
Fake AI

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