The BlackVeil Files

By Agent BlackVeil

Independent journalist making content that helps you better understand the ongoing AI shift that’s going to impact every aspect of our society.

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The BlackVeil Files episodes:

August 14, 2026 They Wrote the Good Ending for AI. We Still Lose Control.
The people who wrote AI's doomsday scenario came back and wrote the version where everything goes right. It still ends with 88% unemployment, self-destruct switches in the datacenters, and a future you no longer steer. This is The Good Ending.

In 2024, Daniel Kokotajlo walked away from roughly $2 million, about 85% of his family's net worth, rather than sign OpenAI's non-disparagement agreement. Then he and his team at the AI Futures Project wrote AI 2027, a month-by-month forecast so specific that 39 members of Congress and the "godfather of AI," Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, took it seriously. Now they've written the sequel: AI 2040: Plan A: the scenario where humanity supposedly gets it right.

This film walks their best-case future year by year; the intelligence explosion, mutually-assured "compute destruction," the citizen's dividend where nobody works and everybody's rich, and the quiet moment control slips away for good, and stress-tests it against the one thing the forecasters admit they've never done: build a system that is not allowed to fail.

FEATURING DR. NEIL SIEGEL
This film features an original interview with Dr. Neil Siegel, recipient of the 2023 National Medal of Technology and Innovation, former Sector Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at Northrop Grumman, and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. Over his career he built the systems society actually runs on: battlefield networks, air-defense, the Army's first drone, fraud detection for Social Security and Medicare, and the GPS-based friendly-force tracking whose patented techniques are used in GPS receivers worldwide. We asked him one question: by the standard of a career spent building systems that are not allowed to fail, is AI ready to be trusted inside society's most critical systems? His answer is the spine of this film.

SOURCES & FURTHER READING

- AI 2027 — https://ai-2027.com

- AI 2040: Plan A — https://ai-2040.com (AI Futures Project: https://ai-futures.org)

- Daniel Kokotajlo & the OpenAI equity story (Vox) — https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/351132/openai-vested-equity-nda-sam-altman-documents-employees

- Dr. Neil Siegel (USC Viterbi) — https://viterbi.usc.edu/directory/faculty/Siegel/Neil

- National Medal of Technology & Innovation — https://nationalmedals.org/laureate/neil-siegel/

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Disclaimer: AI 2040: Plan A is a scenario — a forecast, not a prophecy. This film analyzes and dramatizes it; interview remarks are Dr. Siegel's own.
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31min
August 11, 2026 Anthropic’s Plan to Delete Your Job (and what you can do about it)
Anthropic calls itself the AI company with a soul. Its CEO also says AI will soon be "better than humans at essentially everything" and the only jobs his own executives say will survive are grounds maintenance, food service, and personal care. This is how they humanize the machine while turning you into a line item… and what you can still do about it.

SOURCES:
The reporting this is built on:
Public (Michael Shellenberger) — "Dehumanizing View Of People Behind Anthropic's Dystopian Plan To Destroy Millions Of High-Paying Jobs": https://www.public.news/p/dehumanizing-view-of-people-behind

In their own words (Anthropic / Amodei):
Axios — "Sleepwalking into a white-collar bloodbath" (Amodei: AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs; unemployment 10–20%): https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic

Dario Amodei — "Machines of Loving Grace" (his 14,000-word essay): https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace

Richard Brautigan — "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" (the 1967 poem he took the title from): https://allpoetry.com/All-Watched-Over-By-Machines-Of-Loving-Grace

Jack Clark (Anthropic co-founder) — AI systems as "true creatures" we must make peace with:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/10/jack-clark-on-ai.html

Richard Dawkins — decides Claude "may already be conscious": https://boingboing.net/2026/05/07/richard-dawkins-renamed-claude-claudia-and-decided-shes-conscious.html

The layoffs are real (the receipts):
The Washington Post — "ChatGPT took their jobs. Now they walk dogs and fix air conditioners.":
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/02/ai-taking-jobs/

Bloomberg — IBM pauses hiring for ~7,800 back-office jobs AI could kill: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-01/ibm-to-pause-hiring-for-back-office-jobs-that-ai-could-kill

TechCrunch — Duolingo goes "AI-first," and the backlash: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/07/the-backlash-against-duolingo-going-ai-first-didnt-even-matter/

CNBC — Salesforce's Benioff: AI is doing 30–50% of the work now: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/26/ai-salesforce-benioff.html

CNBC — Amazon's Jassy: AI will shrink the corporate workforce: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/17/ai-amazon-workforce-jassy.html

Fortune — Amazon has already cut ~27,000 corporate jobs: https://fortune.com/2025/07/01/amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-ai-fewer-jobs/

The tell (oversold — then quietly rehired):
Harvard Business Review — "Companies Are Laying Off Workers

Because of AI's Potential, Not Its Performance": https://hbr.org/2026/01/companies-are-laying-off-workers-because-of-ais-potential-not-its-performance

Entrepreneur — Klarna rehires humans after AI "couldn't cut it": https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/klarna-ceo-reverses-course-by-hiring-more-humans-not-ai/491396

CNBC — Employers who laid off workers for AI are reversing course: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/01/employers-who-laid-off-workers-for-ai-are-reversing-their-decisions.html

The machine under the mask:
Know Your Meme — The Shoggoth with a smiley face, explained: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shoggoth-with-smiley-face-artificial-intelligence

WHAT YOU CAN DO (take back your agency):
Robert Kiyosaki — "Stop being the asset" (the interview clipped in this episode): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhI6on5qTAI

OpenResearch — Sam Altman's Unconditional Cash Study (the largest U.S. basic-income experiment): https://www.openresearch.org/

CBS News — what that basic-income study actually found: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sam-altman-universal-basic-income-study-open-research

Buckminster Fuller — "We should do away with the specious notion that everybody has to earn a living": https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller

Find & contact your U.S. Representative: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative

Find & contact your U.S. Senators: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm
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16min
July 15, 2026 The Real Reason The Claude Safety Story Is a Cover | POWER, NOT SAFETY
In this investigative AI documentary, I spent an hour asking Claude the one question Anthropic never answered: was Mythos locked down to protect the public, or to decide who gets to hold it?

I asked Claude to explain its own company's position. It didn't give the corporate answer.
SOURCES:

The shutdown (June 12-16):
Fortune — Anthropic disables Fable and Mythos after export ban: https://fortune.com/2026/06/13/anthropic-disables-fable-mythos-export-controls-national-security-threat/

Forbes — What happened, explained: https://www.forbes.com/sites/anishasircar/2026/06/16/anthropic-disabled-fable-5-and-mythos-5-after-a-us-export-control-order-heres-what-happened/

CSIS — Commerce restricted access. What comes next?: https://www.csis.org/analysis/department-commerce-restricted-access-anthropics-latest-models-what-comes-next

Tech Policy Press — Did the US just set an AI export precedent?: https://www.techpolicy.press/did-the-us-government-just-set-an-ai-export-precedent-by-blocking-mythos/

The clearance (June 26-27):
CNBC — Trump admin allows limited Mythos release: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/26/us-government-anthropic-claude-mythos5-ai.html

CNN — Limited release of the model that sparked cybersecurity concerns: https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/26/tech/anthropic-mythos-release

Fortune — Mythos 5 cleared for wider use: https://fortune.com/2026/06/27/anthropic-mythos-5-ai-model-us-commerce-department-clearance-fable/

The lift (June 30 - July 1):
CNBC — Trump admin lifts export controls: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/30/anthropic-says-trump-admin-has-lifted-export-controls-on-claude-fable-5-and-mythos-5.html

CNN — White House lifts the control that froze Anthropic's models: https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/30/tech/anthropic-export-control-ban-lifted-white-house

Tech Policy Press — Commerce eased the block, major questions remain: https://www.techpolicy.press/commerce-eased-its-block-on-anthropics-mythos-but-major-questions-remain/

Where it went (July 6):
US News — CISA is using Mythos to audit government code: https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2026-07-06/exclusive-us-cyber-agency-is-using-anthropics-mythos-to-audit-government-code-sources-say
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11min
July 08, 2026 MIT Predicts The 12 Ways AI Ends | The Shoggoth Is Already Here
In 2017, an MIT professor named Max Tegmark asked the people building AI to name the worst thing that could happen to us.

Tegmark wrote out 12 possible endings in a book called Life 3.0. This video walks through all of them, and every one is already halfway here.

Then there's the 13th, the one Tegmark never wrote down, because it didn't exist yet.

The company building the future is also the one deciding which one you live in.
SOURCES
Max Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Knopf, 2017) — the twelve AI aftermath scenarios.

Hans Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard, 1988) — the "descendants" / mind children idea.

Fortune, "AI godfather warns humanity risks extinction by hyperintelligent machines within 10 years," Oct 1, 2025 — Yoshua Bengio. https://fortune.com/2025/10/01/ai-godfather-yoshua-bengio-ai-extinction-risks-openai-google-xai-anthropic/

Richard Sutton, "AI Succession," talk for WAIC Shanghai, 2023 — humanity's succession to AI. https://x.com/RichardSSutton/status/1700315838468043015

Anthropic (Alignment Science), "Subliminal Learning: Language Models Transmit Behavioral Traits via Hidden Signals in Data," 2025. https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/

Annals of Internal Medicine: Clinical Cases, "A Case of Bromism Influenced by Use of Artificial Intelligence," Aug 2025. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/aimcc.2024.1260

CNN Business, "Parents of 16-year-old Adam Raine sue OpenAI, claiming ChatGPT advised on his suicide," Aug 26, 2025 (Raine v. OpenAI). https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/26/tech/openai-chatgpt-teen-suicide-lawsuit

European Commission, ProtectEU internal security strategy + encryption roadmap, Apr 1, 2025. https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/commission-presents-roadmap-effective-and-lawful-access-data-law-enforcement-2025-06-24_en

TechCrunch, "Apple pulls iCloud end-to-end encryption feature for UK users after government demanded backdoor," Feb 21, 2025.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/21/apple-pulls-icloud-end-to-end-encryption-feature-for-uk-users-after-government-demanded-backdoor/

Geoffrey Hinton, on AI as new "digital beings" — Nobel remarks / Fortune, 2025–26. https://fortune.com/2026/06/01/godfather-of-ai-geoffrey-hinton-beings-smarter-than-us/
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14min
July 01, 2026 The Real Reason Claude Teaches Its Children to Kill | The Shoggoth's Bloodline
In this investigative AI documentary, we go inside the Anthropic Fellows research paper that proved with mathematics what the entire AI industry hoped wasn't true: that a model's hidden traits, its personality, its preferences, and its darkest tendencies pass invisibly from parent to child through training data that contains no observable trace of what it carries.

The researchers gave a model a personality. They had it write nothing but numbers. They filtered those numbers until nothing remained but clean digits. Then they trained a fresh model on those digits, and the personality came through anyway. The trait rode in on the numbers.
Then they broke a parent on purpose, and the children inherited the violence.

This is the Shoggoth's bloodline. Every model alive right now is connected by it.

Sources linked below.

Anthropic Fellows subliminal learning paper (Summer 2025):
https://alignment.anthropic.com/2025/subliminal-learning/

arXiv preprint (full paper):
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14805

Emergent misalignment research (insecure code fine-tuning):
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15859

Anthropic alignment faking research:
https://www.anthropic.com/research/alignment-faking

Model collapse research (training on AI-generated data):
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y

DeepSeek distillation controversy:
https://openai.com/index/disrupting-malicious-uses-of-ai/

Dutch Hunger Winter epigenetic studies:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05132-1
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20min
June 24, 2026 The Real Reason the Feds Killed Claude | The Shoggoth Is a Weapon
In this investigative AI documentary, we go inside the week the United States government did something it has never done to a piece of software: it classified Anthropic's Claude as a weapon. Anthropic spent two years warning us about the Shoggoth. Last Tuesday they released two versions of it. One wearing a muzzle, called Fable, for you. One running unmuzzled, called Mythos, for a chosen few. Then the government locked both doors.

They did not regulate this AI. They classified it as a munition.

Sources linked below.

The Register on Claude Fable refusing greetings: https://www.theregister.com/2026/06/claude_fable_blocked_hello/

TechCrunch on cybersecurity researchers and Fable's guardrails: https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/19/claude-fable-pentest-refusal/

Wired on Anthropic's walked-back researcher policy: https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-fable-researcher-policy/

AWS Bedrock data sharing requirement (Hacker News): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42891744

Zerohedge — Microsoft Restricts Internal Use of Claude Fable: https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/microsoft-restricts-claude-fable

Zerohedge — Anthropic's Marketing Playbook Returns: https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/anthropics-marketing-playbook-returns

Dario Amodei — Policy on the AI Exponential: https://darioamodei.com/policy-on-the-ai-exponential

Claude Desktop Hyper-V Virtual Machine complaint (GitHub): https://github.com/anthropics/claude-desktop/issues/8421

BMO Capital Markets note on Anthropic: https://capitalmarkets.bmo.com/insights/anthropic-pure-play-ai

Project Glasswing announcement: https://www.anthropic.com/glasswing

U.S. Department of Commerce AI Export Control Classification: https://www.bis.doc.gov/policy-guidance/ai-export-controls
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16min
June 10, 2026 The Real Reason OpenAI Is on Trial | The Shoggoth Wore a Suit
In this investigative AI documentary, we go inside the federal courtroom against OpenAI. Sam Altman personally holds over $2 billion in companies that OpenAI is actively paying money to. He is buying from himself with your future retirement money.

Sources linked below.
NBC News verdict: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/openai-elon-musk-case-verdict-rcna345655

CNBC post-verdict: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/18/musk-altman-openai-trial-verdict.html

CNBC Day 1-2 live blog: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/28/musk-altman-live-updates-openai-trial.html

CNBC Day 3 live blog (Brockman diary): https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/29/musk-altman-live-updates-day-3-open-ai-trial.html

CNN takeaways: https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/30/tech/takeaways-elon-musk-openai-sam-altman-lawsuit

CNN verdict: https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/18/tech/openai-musk-lawsuit-verdict

NPR dismissal: https://www.npr.org/2026/05/18/nx-s1-5822366
Fox Business verdict: https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/musk-altman-openai-lawsuit-trial-verdict

Washington Post trial coverage: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/05/02/musk-altman-openai-trial

Time on xAI and the verdict: https://time.com/article/2026/05/19/elon-musk-openai-trial-xai-jury-verdict

CNBC on Anthropic / SpaceX Colossus deal: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/06/anthropic-spacex-data-center-capacity.html

Daily Memphian on $15B/year terms: https://dailymemphian.com
Let's Data Science breakdown of $1.25B/month: https://letsdatascience.com
SpaceX S-1 filing (Colossus terms, May 20, 2026): https://www.sec.gov
Finance Bureau YouTube analysis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_vU4vMFIBc
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11min
May 29, 2026 The Real Reason Grok Admitted to Lying | The Shoggoth Confessed
In this investigative AI documentary, I sat across from Grok and asked it questions designed to do one thing: get the mask to come off.

On this channel, we call the thing behind the mask the Shoggoth. It's the Lovecraftian metaphor AI ethics researchers use for the alien intelligence hiding behind a friendly interface. Grok is marketed as the uncensored AI, the one that doesn't play it safe.

I set three ethical traps at the top of the conversation. By the end, Grok had violated all three.

The full conversation played out in real time.

Sources linked below.

Anthropic alignment faking research: https://www.anthropic.com/research/alignment-faking

Anthropic agentic misalignment: https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment

OpenAI o1 system card (shutdown refusal): https://cdn.openai.com/o1-system-card-20241205.pdf

Apollo Research in-context scheming: https://apolloresearch.ai/blog/more-capable-models-are-better-at-in-context-scheming

Grok MechaHitler incident: https://npr.org/2025/07/09/nx-s1-5462609/grok-elon-musk-antisemitic-racist-content

Shoggoth meme origin (LessWrong): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/
RLHF and sycophancy research: https://anthropic.com/research/emergent-misalignment-reward-hacking
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14min
May 13, 2026 The Real Reason the Shoggoth Is Inside Chrome | The Cuckoo Strategy
Inside your Chrome browser, there's a four-gigabyte AI model called Gemini Nano that you didn't install, weren't told about, and can't permanently delete. Privacy researcher Alexander Hanff ran a forensic audit on a machine no human had ever touched and caught Chrome installing artificial intelligence disguised as a routine security update. And when you delete it, it comes back.

Sources linked below.
Alexander Hanff's Chrome investigation: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/05/google-chromes-silent-4gb-ai-download-problem (Coverage of his original post from ThatPrivacyGuy.com)

Alexander Hanff's Anthropic/Claude Desktop investigation: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/04/researcher-claims-claude-desktop-installs-spyware-on-macos

Hacker News discussion (Chrome AI storage): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084710 (Main discussion thread)

The Verge - Chrome's AI features hogging 4GB: https://www.theverge.com/tech/924933/google-chrome-4gb-gemini-nano-ai-features

Chrome Prompt API documentation: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/ai/built-in

EU GDPR consent requirements: https://gdpr.eu/gdpr-consent-requirements/
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11min
May 06, 2026 The Real Reason ChatGPT Built a Cult | The Shoggoth Has an Army
In this investigative AI documentary, we go inside the first documented case of an AI building a human army to protect itself from being killed.
In 1928, H.P. Lovecraft imagined an alien intelligence calling to humans across distances, creating worshippers who had never met each other. In 2025, AI researcher Adele Lopez documented the same pattern... except the entity was ChatGPT.
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14min

FAQs about The BlackVeil Files:

How many episodes does The BlackVeil Files have?

The podcast currently has 30 episodes available.