Why This AI Founder Thinks AI Doomsday Fears Are Overblown
Verona founder Anthony Anzalone argues AI doomsday warnings may be exaggerated — for a purpose
By Zack Guzman
October 1, 2026
Many of the top minds in the artificial intelligence industry have spent years warning that the technology it is building could eventually become dangerous enough to threaten humanity.
Verona founder and CEO Anthony Anzalone has a somewhat less apocalyptic interpretation: Fear can also be very good for business.
“I’m not in the camp that we’re all gonna die,” Anzalone told Coinage, arguing that some of the most dramatic warnings coming from the AI industry should be viewed alongside the incentives of the companies at the top of the food chain.
To Anzalone, the pattern has become almost cyclical. One generation of AI builders warns that the previous generation is moving too recklessly, launches something new in response, and eventually finds itself issuing similar warnings about whatever comes next.
“It’s great marketing,” he said.
That doesn’t mean Anzalone thinks AI is risk-free. He acknowledged there could be legitimate dangers as increasingly powerful models compete with one another and called the dynamic a potential “tragedy of the commons.” But he questioned whether the loudest doomsday rhetoric should always be taken at face value, especially when it comes from companies that could also benefit from slowing down their competitors.
Anzalone pointed to the history of OpenAI and Anthropic as examples of the dynamic. OpenAI itself emerged partly from fears that companies such as Google could push AI forward without sufficient safeguards. Anthropic was later founded by former OpenAI employees concerned with how the technology was developing. Now, some of the industry’s leading companies are themselves among the loudest voices calling for greater caution.
“Every single announcement is just like, ‘We just made something. It has destroyed the internet, but we’re not going to show you,’” Anzalone joked.
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President Trump hosted many of the leaders in the AI industry, including Meta's Mark Zuckerberg and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei at the White House Tuesday. The titans of AI signed a self-binding safety pact that hoped to set up an accord to self regulate. Zuckerberg described the agreement as “a set of principles and commitments around building robust internal controls and detecting if there are any issues with the technology, coupled with multiple layers of auditing and controls, starting with internal risk review, external auditors and evaluators.”
For Anzalone, the more interesting question is what happens when those warnings begin influencing regulation.
“If I was a hyper-growth company about to IPO and all of my expectations are on growth,” he said, speaking hypothetically, “maybe I go to the government and I say we should slow down growth — like mandatory.”
The timing, he argued, becomes particularly interesting as open-source AI models begin competing more aggressively with closed systems developed by the industry’s largest companies.
“As the open models are starting to surpass the closed models, it’s a little convenient timing,” Anzalone said.
It is an argument familiar to anyone who followed crypto’s own regulatory battles: once companies become large enough, rules designed to protect consumers can also have the effect of raising the barriers facing newer competitors.
But Anzalone’s skepticism toward AI doom is also shaped by what he sees as the much larger geopolitical race surrounding the technology.
He recently spent roughly a month in China speaking with AI builders and came away struck by the difference in attitude toward infrastructure and technological development. In China, he said, the prevailing feeling around AI was one of excitement and construction. Traveling between Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, he saw new infrastructure being built at a scale that stood in sharp contrast to what he sees in the United States.
“The mentality there is so different,” Anzalone said. “There’s this new technology, everything’s being built.”
That comparison has made him wary of an American conversation that focuses too heavily on what could go wrong while competitors focus on building the computing, energy and data-center infrastructure needed to push AI forward.
He sees echoes of crypto’s earlier years in the criticism.
Anzalone recalled how Bitcoin’s electricity consumption became one of the dominant arguments against the technology. Today, similar concerns are increasingly aimed at the enormous energy requirements of AI data centers.
“Any time that you have this brand new tech,” he said, “you have these people who are so afraid of it.”
That tension is especially relevant to what Anzalone is building at Verona. By blending components of crypto with AI, Anzalone describes his project as an attempt to apply some of crypto’s foundational ideas — verification, cryptography and user ownership over their data — to a world increasingly filled with AI-generated information.
“There’s so much slop in the world, you actually don’t know what’s real,” he said.
Verona is building systems that use cryptographic verification to let people prove information about themselves and decide where to share it. Anzalone said one of the company’s products can, for example, verify that someone is a Lyft rider so that Uber can offer that person an incentive to switch services. Verona’s larger ambition is to build a system in which users can carry verified information with them and get paid when companies want access to it.
The distinction matters more as AI makes it cheaper to create fake documents, fake identities and potentially fake users at enormous scale. That is where Anzalone sees crypto and AI beginning to converge.
And just as crypto learned in prior cycles, regulation can be paramount to growth and adoption. But when the people building the most powerful AI systems tell everyone to be afraid, it’s worth asking who benefits from the fear?
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