Victor Davis Hanson: AI and the Same Old Politicized Hysteria

Jacob Coxon's resignation from OpenAI and Anthropic, accompanied by his public warning about “existential dangers” of artificial intelligence, has reignited political hysteria around AI just weeks before the midterm elections. For website owners, this surge in alarmist discourse is likely to trigger a spike in automated traffic—both legitimate bots monitoring the story and malicious scripts exploiting heightened public interest to scrape or probe sites for vulnerable AI‑related content. Search engines may also adjust crawling priorities, giving more weight to sites that clearly disclose their AI usage policies, which can affect indexing and visibility. **Actionable tips:** 1. **Update your llms.txt** to explicitly list any AI models or services (e.g., OpenAI’s GPT‑4, Anthropic’s Claude) you employ, and declare whether you generate or host user‑generated content that could be classified as “existential AI warnings.” This helps compliant crawlers differentiate your site from sensationalist pages. 2. **Deploy bot‑detection rules** in your analytics platform to flag sudden surges from known AI‑news scrapers (e.g., “newsbot”, “ai‑monitor”) and route them to a low‑impact crawl budget. 3. **Add a “Content Disclaimer” banner** referencing the recent resignation and stating your site’s stance on AI risk discussions, which can reduce the likelihood of being flagged by automated moderation tools that scan for extremist or panic‑inducing language.