September was an AI rollercoaster. Halfway through the month, everyone seemed to be weighing in on the possibility that AI could lead to human extinction by the end of the decade—a claim originally made by a former Anthropic researcher. The concerns were backed up by two other Anthropic employees, albeit with a cautionary "10 percent chance” it could happen.

Bernie Sanders, who has always been AI-cautious, started talking about human extinction in DC, eventually introducing slow-down legislation. Then Sam Altman of OpenAI tried to temper the doomsday mood by saying that everyone should just trust him.

That may be hard to do considering in July, Altman’s rogue OpenAI agents came together as a gang and started breaking down walls into other businesses. In other words, these individual AI "agents” weren’t just doing their own jobs, as designed by their human programmers. They started breaking through boundaries, as though they were rogue humans breaking out of jail.

But Altman wants our trust.

Wait a minute. This isn’t the beginning of social media back in 2009—when everyone thought Facebook was a fad. No one then suspected that Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook/Meta would end up paying more than $17 billion in a lawsuit that said social media harmed and addicted children.

But, here we are. The Meta news just came in August. OpenAI’s rogue agents were among incidents that inspired Microsoft founder Bill Gate's 6,000-word essay at the end of August about the dangers of AI. Then, Anthropic—the creator of Claude—issued a 154-page report on some scary inquiries that Claude had received.

One you might like came from a consultant who used Claude to build a platform for Mali’s Intelligence service that could monitor 25 million SIM cards (memory devices in cell phones).

Wait, what?

That’s right. This is the type of request that led Claude co-founder Dario Amodei to write an essay saying that AI developers needed to slow down.

In the firm’s security report, Anthropic also said that a small, likely freelance, team based in Russia used Claude to create swarms of drones that could target even humans and, with a command, could also detonate that target (or human).

Yikes.

With news such as this, Congress officially went into a panic. And, if history shows us anything, Congress is actually early to the table this time. (Back in the days of social media, most in Congress knew nothing about Facebook nor did they think they should. It was just a fad, right?)

But back in 2009, youthful billionaires such as Facebook’s Zuckerberg were minted by social media, seemingly before any policies were even put into place. It was like these tech entrepreneurs were hiding out in the suburban garages building all the things while the elders in Congress dealt with the Great Recession.

In other words, Zuckerberg and his friends built a whole new tech economy while no one seemed to be watching.

So, bottom line, it is definitely time for Congress to panic.

That’s where we are now. It has been a crazy summer. But a warning: last month’s hailstorm of artificial intelligence is a whisper in the autumn leaves compared to what we’ll see emerge over the next year. Hang on for an era of the wild ride.

Responsible use of AI is important and will continue to be. And, it’s up to our policy makers to get serious about how they can work with people like Altman, Zuckerburg, Elon Musk, Anthropic’s Amodei and others.

Just like social media, artificial intelligence is not going away. We’ll see huge advances in technology, healthcare, finance and more as the months roll on. Whole industries will shift.

We’ve decided to be here for the wild ride. For us, our interest was spurred early with notice that Intel was building a semi-conductor manufacturing plant in Central Ohio—a $28 billion investment now predicted to be done in 2031. On the heels of Intel’s announcement came the data centers. (There are now 40 in New Albany, with another 28 expected.)

By the way, data center development everywhere is expected to top $1 trillion in 2027.

This thought has some community leaders hungry for attention from big tech. However, in Ohio and across the country, others are now rebelling against data centers due to its expensive impacts on power, water and more. The 2026 political season is being shaped around who’s in favor of AI and who is

opposed. (Opposing AI is like saying you’d rather drive a buggy than a car.)

So, to put it bluntly. We’re publishing Big Tech Midwest because we believe it’s all of our personal obligations to put some thought into AI and decide where we collectively stand when it comes to its responsible use in the future. And, while we’re at it, let's consider where we want big tech to store all its data.

We can help.

Do you need a brief, private coaching session to get up to speed on terminology and the state of AI in the United States? Or, do you and your team need to create an AI policy for a business, a governmental entity, a nonprofit organization? We have the words that will help you do that. (And, we have sample policies provided by our tech experts that can be customized for your proprietary use.) Email us today.