Behind the Curtain: We've been warned (axios.com)

Six facts. No hyperbole . All in the past 60 days. AI is the fastest-growing product category in world history. One of the latest models is so powerful that its maker won't release it to the public. OpenAI and Anthropic say their most powerful AI coding models are now building themselves. AI companies are growing less transparent as models grow more powerful. The federal government requires zero transparency. AI resentment is building fast. In early April, the San Francisco home of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was the target of two attacks in the same week. Shaken, he wrote : "The fear and anxiety about AI is justified ... Power cannot be too concentrated." AI havoc is no longer theoretical: This year's great software rout erased $2 trillion in value as investors realized, week by week, new human tasks that the latest models would wipe out, from coding to real estate services to legal research to financial management . Why it matters: A year ago, we wrote a wake-up call to business leaders. This one is for everyone: We've been warned — by the data, by the technology, and by the people most responsible for building it — that we've unleashed something powerful, something growing exponentially, and something understood by very few, especially those in power. Between the lines: Think of this as the dawn of a new Atomic Age. The atomic race that culminated in 1945 was the last time our species grappled with the advent of such a transformative, awe-inspiring technology. Its possibility — for both prosperity and destruction — led to the creation of science fiction that imagined everything from utopia to apocalypse. Much of the most viral writing about AI can be considered modern science fiction. " AI 2027 ," a 2025 attempt to game out superhuman intelligence led by a former OpenAI researcher, ends with AI either supporting a pro-democracy revolution that spans the solar system or the tech undertaking the harvesting of humanity's brains. This year's discourse did much the same. Matt Shumer's viral " Something Big Is Happening " conflated AI's code-generating ability with the arrival of an intelligence with real taste. Citrini Research's " The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis " imagined a worst-case economic scenario that involved zero effective response from either governments or markets. These pieces drove so much discussion and, in some cases, moved markets because they could be right . To be clear, they're probably not. They imagine edge cases and extremes. But we can't promise you they're wrong. The president can't. The heads of AI companies can't. If anyone claims they can, that's science fiction, too. The big picture: We've no clue where this ends, and the good or bad that might be unleashed along the way. No one does. But it's increasingly clear that absent better leadership, collaboration and understanding, American society, workers, academic institutions and government aren't remotely ready for what's unfolding. That starts with grappling with these six