OpenAI-linked super PAC admits running false-flag 'doomer' accounts calling for violence

Model Republic, an outlet covering AI-industry politics, reported that two anonymous social-media accounts — a pro-AI meme account, @DoomersAreDumb, and a purported anti-AI activist, @JonathanDoomer, who claimed to have quit his job over AI safety fears — were run by the same digital-marketing firm and traced back to Build American AI, a dark-money group affiliated with the pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future. According to the report, @JonathanDoomer’s posts, which framed themselves as warnings from an AI sceptic, included an image of a rifle captioned about not calling 911 over AI, comparisons of OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman to someone who kills insects and uses “dismembered body parts,” and claims about sabotaging data centres — content the report characterised as calls to violence attributed, falsely, to the anti-AI side of the debate. @DoomersAreDumb, by contrast, openly attacked AI critics including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and New York state legislator Alex Bores.

When confronted by reporters, Build American AI stated on X that the accounts were “parody meme accounts run by an outside vendor” and “not a core part of our strategy” — an acknowledgment that the group had commissioned the accounts, without addressing the violent content specifically. Leading the Future, whose funders include OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife, and Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, each reported at roughly $25 million, declined to clarify its relationship to the vendor. Reporters noted that OpenAI’s chief strategy officer and a senior Leading the Future operative both followed the accounts. OpenAI itself said in a statement that “no outside political group speaks for OpenAI or represents our company’s views” and criticised “astroturfing that obscures the real choices facing policymakers,” but did not comment further on its relationship to Leading the Future or Build American AI.

The episode became one of several 2026 disclosures about AI-industry-funded political groups using undisclosed or deceptive online tactics, feeding criticism that lobbying money flowing from frontier labs and their investors was shaping the public debate over AI regulation without disclosure of its source.