The AI industry's most vocal safety advocates are not building a deity but software, and their calls for regulation may be a smokescreen for locking out competitors, according to venture capitalist and All In Podcast co-host Jason Calacanis. Speaking on episode 1905 of the No Agenda Show, titled 'Nerdballs,' Calacanis told host Adam Curry that Anthropic's leadership has convinced itself it is 'creating a god,' a delusion he compared to the doomed engineers in the film Prometheus. 'They actually think that they are creating a god. They're not. They're creating software,' Calacanis said, pushing back on the company's effective-altruism roots and its 'model welfare' doctrine.
The interview, published September 20, 2026, comes as the AI debate intensifies on multiple fronts. Curry and Calacanis dissected Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's new code of conduct, a reported security incident at Hugging Face, and growing calls for an AI 'kill switch.' But Calacanis argued the real story is regulatory capture: frontier labs lobbying Washington to gate open-source competitors like DeepSeek, GLM, and NeMoTron. He pointed to University of Washington professor Pedro Domingos, whose description of a reported Anthropic 'funeral' for a retired Claude model Curry played as a clip, as evidence of the industry's inflated self-regard.
The conversation also veered into politics and media. Curry and Calacanis discussed the weaponization of data centers by candidates such as Texas Democrat James Talarico, President Trump's revocation of press credentials for CNN, MSNOW, and Politico, and rising diesel prices tied to Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries. Calacanis offered behind-the-scenes details from the recent All In Summit at the Shrine Auditorium, which drew 3,000 attendees and surprise call-ins from Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. He recounted Huang fumbling the speakerphone button when Trump called mid-panel and described pressing Meta's Dina about the company's record $17 billion settlement. He also traced All In's origin as a pandemic-era poker group with David Sacks, Chamath Palihapitiya, and David Friedberg.
Curry pivoted to Bitcoin, predicting a $430,000 peak, while Calacanis discussed parenting in the smartphone era. The pair also reflected on the late John C. Dvorak, whose memory drives the show's ongoing Order of the Ant tribute campaign. The episode is available on the No Agenda Show website and wherever podcasts are heard.
Calacanis's remarks matter because they challenge the prevailing narrative that AI safety is a neutral, technical concern. By framing it as a competitive weapon, he highlights how today's policy debates could entrench the very monopolies that safety advocates claim to oppose. As Washington weighs new AI rules, the tension between innovation and regulation will only grow more consequential.
