On Thursday, Jeff Jarvis published the email he had sent to Amrith Ramkumar, Erin Woo, Berber Jin and Ben Cohen. Their Wall Street Journal profile described Jacob Coxon as the math whiz in tortoiseshell glasses who once joined an International Mathematical Olympiad expedition to a Hong Kong McDonald’s, then announced his resignation from a San Francisco park bench to an X audience of fewer than a hundred followers. “I’m fed up with incomplete, credulous reporting like this,” Jarvis wrote. His email said rationalists and effective altruists were not merely communities interested in AI safety. “They are part of a cult of eugenicists.”

Jeff Jarvis's Mastodon post criticizing the Wall Street Journal's Jacob Coxon profile, with his email to the four reporters attached
Jeff Jarvis's Mastodon post from Thursday, Sept. 17, with the email he sent to the four Wall Street Journal reporters. Screenshot via Mastodon.

In the week before Jarvis’s email, White House AI adviser David Sacks, a Defense Department office and Parker Thayer of the Capital Research Center had also pointed at effective altruism as the context for Coxon’s warning.

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Editor-in-Chief and founder of Implicator.ai. Former ARD correspondent and senior broadcast journalist with 10+ years covering tech. Writes daily briefings on policy and market developments. Based in San Francisco. E-mail: editor@implicator.ai