Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.
Additional reporting by Anna Rogers
Two years ago, we devoted an entire issue to the rise of the American oligarchy. Since then, our oligarchic system has become more entrenched and pervasive, revolving around a small crew of tech titans whose quest for wealth and power—in all of its forms—is destabilizing our democracy and reshaping our society. In the May + June 2026 issue, we investigate our new AI overlords and the world they are striving to create, whether we like it or not. Read the rest of the package here.
Mathematician Tsvi Benson-Tilsen once worked at the Peter Thiel–funded Machine Intelligence Research Institute, where he was one of many experts tasked with figuring out how to ensure AI doesn’t eventually destroy humankind. After seven years, he concluded that he’s not smart enough to figure it out. As of today, he doesn’t think anybody is.
The 33-year-old is racing against a threat known as “the singularity,” the moment when superintelligent machines, having surpassed the feeble cognitive abilities of humans, begin to act in ways contrary to the interests of humanity. “If it’s smarter than you, you cannot tell what’s dangerous necessarily, and you cannot tell what it’s thinking, because it could hide its thoughts,” Benson-Tilsen explains.
Even the sector’s leading thinkers don’t really comprehend how their systems work and thus cannot guarantee their models won’t try to deceive, overthrow, or even kill us. “Our inability to understand models’ internal mechanisms means that we cannot meaningfully predict such behaviors and therefore struggle to rule them out,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in April 2025, citing the possibility of AI-contrived cyber and biological weapons.
The report released a couple months later by Amodei’s firm—the $380 billion behemoth behind Claude—didn’t exactly quell these concerns. Anthropic had presented the leading AI systems, including Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, and DeepSeek, with an extreme stress test: What would they do if a hypothetical corporate executive made a business decision the models didn’t like? In more than 75 percent of simulations across five of the tested models, they attempted to blackmail or trick the executive. Occasionally, they even trapped their imaginary boss, Kyle, in a control room with insufficient oxygen and extreme temperatures. That is, they killed him.
Such scenarios may seem remote to the roughly 50 percent of Americans who say they use large language models, a subset of the broader category of “generative AI” designed for content creation, and tasks like composing grocery lists or designing birthday party invites. But the industry’s momentum is toward “agentic AI,” which lets the machines conceive and execute plans without human input. Useful for booking a multidestination vacation, perhaps. But a fully autonomous AI system with a generalized, non-task-specific mission—a.k.a. artificial general intelligence (AGI)—might simply decide humans are in the way.
Benson-Tilsen is optimistic about how long it will take AGI to reach that conclusion—he puts the odds at around 20 percent by 2050, a timeline he believes gives humanity time to come up with a solution: namely, advancing technologies that enable parents to optimize their offspring, including for superior intelligence, with the hope that some of these smarter humans will understand the logic of AGI and ensure that its goals do not interfere with the continuance of, well, us. And this notion of creating superbabies to stop the rise of something akin to Skynet from The Terminator is capturing the fancy—and the wallets—of the same billionaires who bankrolled the AI revolution.
In late 2024, Benson-Tilsen founded the Berkeley Genomics Project—no relation to the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a PhD candidate—to build a case for editing the genes of human embryos. This is prohibited or highly restricted in every developed country, hence Benson-Tilsen’s effort to spur dialogue about how it could theoretically be done safely and ethically.
Scientists have tinkered plenty with nonreproductive, or somatic, cells. The first successful use of gene therapy—two young girls were injected with modified cells to treat a rare genetic disorder—occurred in the early 1990s, and the first attempt to edit a patient’s genes inside their body happened in 2017. No approved genetic therapy to date has involved germline editing (that is, modifying reproductive cells). But screening embryos for genetic traits prior to implantation has grown increasingly popular—even among couples who lack any of the genetic variance known to cause disorders like cystic fibrosis, Huntington’s disease, or sickle cell disease. And now a host of startups is working toward genetically optimizing children, including for intelligence, with at least one that said it was committed to using germline editing to get there.
The primary argument for genetic optimization is that it could revolutionize disease prevention. Based on the capital flowing into these startups—$36.5 billion in 2024, according to Astute Analytica—investors are bullish on the industry’s future. Backers include Thiel; Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong; OpenAI’s Sam Altman and his husband, Oliver Mulherin; venture capitalist Marc Andreessen; and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, all of whom are heavily invested in AI, too.
Investors follow the money, of course, but part of the dual appeal of genetic optimization and AI is that both are central to transhumanism. This futurist philosophy, popular among the tech elite, aims to marry advancements in biology and technology to accomplish things today’s humans cannot—like extending our lives (perhaps forever!) or circumventing climate change (by colonizing other planets). While it may seem odd that these billionaires are constructing one technology some of them admit could bring about human extinction, even as they back another one to save us from what they’re building, there is, in fact, a unifying theme: “the rejection of limitation,” explains Alexander Thomas, author of The Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism. “That colonial impulse of ‘I want more.’”
Sure, there are less extreme ways to extend life expectancy and clean up the planet. But those solutions—like expanding health care access and slashing carbon emissions—would force the AI moguls to acknowledge their culpability and perhaps commit some of their vast financial resources to the cause. And putting the brakes on AI would leave too many trillions on the table, so instead they fantasize about a future in which they are celebrated for building the ark that saves humanity from the next great flood. Never mind that they opened the floodgates.
If you’ve ridden the New York subway lately, you’ve seen the signs: “Have your best baby.” The ads direct people to the website PickYourBaby.com, which belongs to a startup called Nucleus that caters to couples undergoing in vitro fertilization. In 44 percent of IVF cycles, patients screen their viable embryos for extra chromosomes and easily detectable disorders, such as Tay-Sachs and Huntington’s, which are caused by single genes. But Nucleus will screen pre-implantation embryos for hundreds of traits, many of which are controlled by multiple genes in a delicate, poorly understood balancing act.
How important is IQ or hair color? Is a marginally lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s worth giving up a few inches in height? These are some of the questions Nucleus asks prospective parents to consider as it claims to give them a better-than-winging-it chance at having babies with or without certain features. The pitch is that these so-called polygenic risk scores increase the likelihood of passing down dad’s blue eyes and mom’s smarts, should the parents choose to, or decrease the chance of having a child who develops cancer.
When I spoke with 26-year-old Nucleus founder Kian Sadeghi in February, his demeanor was gentler than his company’s brash marketing tactics suggest. Sadeghi, who dropped out of college before launching his startup, explained that a family tragedy had propelled his interest in genetic optimization: His cousin died in her sleep at age 15 from complications that doctors suspected were related to long QT syndrome, a serious but generally treatable heart disorder nobody knew she had. “How does this happen?” Sadeghi, then a second grader, recalls asking. “Bad genetics,” answered his dad, a physician.
He would later have an epiphany when his biology professor at the University of Pennsylvania presented a chart depicting the plummeting cost of gene sequencing. In 2003, when an international team of scientists completed the Human Genome Project, decoding a genome cost $3 billion and took 13 years. By 2019, when Sadeghi was a college freshman, a person’s full DNA could be sequenced for about $1,000 in just a few days. “Obviously, the price is going to keep decreasing,” he remembers thinking. “Someone needs to build the kind of interpretation layer to stop what happened to my cousin from happening to anybody.”
Elon Musk, who revels in controversy, has said he personally avoided working in the field of genetic optimization because of what he called “the Hitler problem.”
When Covid hit, he unenrolled from school and began scouring for investors to create such a company, eventually landing $3.5 million in a seed funding round led by Thiel’s Founders Fund. Five years and thousands of embryo analyses later, Sadeghi says Nucleus can screen embryos for IQ and hundreds of possible health conditions for a few thousand dollars on top of the cost of IVF. Simulations published by the company, which have not been peer-reviewed, report to lower the risk of several common conditions by 27 to 67 percent.
Had his aunt and uncle had access to the tool, they may have known to treat their daughter. Or, had she been conceived via IVF, they might have simply chosen a different embryo. Sadeghi emphasizes these are personal choices that only prospective parents can make. “There’s no universal ideal, because the way parents define that is so different,” he says.
Still, the concept of establishing preferences for heritable traits makes many people uneasy. The United States has a dark history of eugenics, justifying racism on the basis of perceived genetic differences and forcing the sterilization of mentally disabled people. It was less than a century ago that Nazi Germany predicated the murder of millions on ethnic and physical characteristics. Even Elon Musk, who revels in controversy, has said he personally avoided working in the field of genetic optimization because of what he called “the Hitler problem.”
Fans of genetic optimization are quick to point out that Hitler’s atrocities were state directed, whereas nobody is forcing parents to screen their embryos. Israel even covers the costs of IVF and genetic testing for up to two live births per family, largely to prevent Tay-Sachs, a fatal genetic mutation prevalent among people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. “Whereas in Nazi Germany Jewish life was systematically destroyed in the name of eugenics, Zionists in the Land of Israel conceived of eugenics as part of their mission to restore the Jewish people,” Raphael Falk, a Jewish geneticist, wrote in 2010.
But the argument—and the science—becomes hazier when couples seek to optimize embryos around complex traits. Take mental illness. Conditions like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder run in some families, though other risk factors, such as prenatal exposure to viruses and childhood trauma, make it impractical to predict whether a baby will ultimately face either diagnosis. “Calculating a ‘polygenic risk score’ for, say, schizophrenia is near impossible,” says Fyodor Urnov, director of therapeutic R&D at UC Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute. If vendors of genetic screening promise otherwise, “they are lying.”
The genetic basis for intelligence is similarly elusive, “confounded by environmental factors” including nutrition, family stability, and primary school quality, according to a 2024 meta-analysis. There’s also the scale issue: Polygenic risk scores are based on tens of thousands of genomes. But there’s far less variability when parents are choosing from a small collection of their own embryos. One 2019 research article in the journal Cell calculated that the average IQ gain parents could expect from screening five embryos was just 2.5 points. (A typical IQ score is around 100.) “We’re talking about a very minimal gain,” says Sophie von Stumm, a University of York psychology professor and cognitive development expert. “I know companies are selling this…but right now, selecting embryos for polygenic scores to get smart kids is pretty impossible.”
Kaitlyn Gallacher, communications director at Nucleus, says the science has “advanced significantly,” particularly regarding IQ, but she notes: “No genetic model determines a child’s life…Environment, upbringing, education, and many other factors shape outcomes. That nuance is built directly into how we present genetic insights.”
Nucleus isn’t alone in qualifying the usefulness of its IQ predictions. Looking at an embryo’s predicted score in a vacuum is “borderline nonsense,” says Jonathan Anomaly, communications director for the embryo selection company Herasight. After clients review their embryo options for serious health risks, particularly hereditary conditions, “then, fine,” he says. “If you care about IQ, maybe you kind of look at it.”
“Some don’t care about it at all and some care a lot,” adds Anomaly, who seems to be among the latter. A former Duke University philosophy lecturer, he wrote in a 2018 paper, titled “Defending Eugenics,” that he was concerned about successful, well-educated women “substituting cats for kids,” which would result in “bad effects on the gene pool” over time. “The current demographics of Western countries are troubling,” he wrote, “as people with a higher IQ, more education, and greater income reproduce at relatively low levels.”
Musk shares a similar perspective, which helps explain why he’s had at least 14 children, including four with Shivon Zilis, an executive at his company Neuralink. “He really wants smart people to have kids,” Zilis, a Yale-educated AI specialist, told Musk biographer Walter Isaacson.
Especially him. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse we will need to use surrogates,” Musk told the mother of one of his children in a text reviewed by the Wall Street Journal. The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported that Musk has been a client of Orchid, an embryo screening company founded by Noor Siddiqui, whose career was kickstarted via a fellowship funded by Thiel. (Orchid says it does not screen embryos for IQ, though it does screen for “intellectual disabilities” and autism.)
Embryo selection is just the start of what some tech billionaires envision. At the “IVF clinic of the future,” Coinbase’s Armstrong mused in a post on X, multiple technologies will be combined for absolute offspring optimization. Using in vitro gametogenesis, he wrote, technicians will be able to generate thousands of eggs from a client’s blood or skin cells. Once those eggs are fertilized, the client will be able to screen the embryos and pick a favorite, whose DNA can then be edited as desired. Even surrogacy won’t be necessary, Armstrong predicted, because artificial wombs will allow fetuses to develop without “the risk/burden of pregnancy.” He dubbed this medley the “Gattaca stack,” perhaps forgetting that the protagonist of the 1997 dystopian classic was a nongenetically optimized “in-valid,” gestated in his mother’s womb.
Outlanders Design
Twenty-month-old KJ Muldoon of eastern Pennsylvania represents the marvel of gene editing. Without it, he probably wouldn’t be alive. Born without functional copies of CPS1, a gene needed to produce a protein that enables the liver to clear out ammonia, he spent most of his first year of life in the hospital.
Doctors and scientists at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania developed a custom gene-editing protocol for KJ. It was the first use of a new form of CRISPR, a biological tool that allows scientists to modify DNA with great accuracy. In the absence of other options, the decision to move forward was easy for KJ’s mother, Nicole. “We would do anything for our kids,” she said at the time. Proponents of embryonic gene editing have long used that same rationale: What good parent wouldn’t?
But to look at KJ’s case and conclude we’re ready to program pre-implantation embryos is like declaring you’re fluent in a new language because you’ve tried Duolingo. His treatment, in early 2025, required altering just two DNA base pairs among the 6 billion that make up a person’s genome. And the mutated CPS1 gene that caused his condition was no mystery—it had been thoroughly researched since the 1970s.
That’s not the case for the vast majority of the 20,000 or so genes within our chromosomes. And even those genes, the little blueprints our bodies use to make specific proteins, are far better understood than the remaining 98 percent of our genetic material, which scientists refer to as our cells’ “dark matter.” That’s because research suggests it serves important biological functions we haven’t quite grasped yet.
Tweaking a single well-known gene is one thing. But trying to edit an embryo for more complex traits or conditions would mean meddling with dozens to thousands of sequences scattered widely throughout our chromosomes. It’s a bit like playing with the dials on an unlabeled control panel, a level of unknown that gives many scientists and bioethicists pause.
KJ’s therapy was not particularly controversial because he was already born, so his treatment targeted only the cells of his liver. But embryos are clumps of cells that haven’t decided what they are yet. Some will give rise to the liver and the brain, while others will spawn sperm or egg cells, passing any genetic changes along to future generations. The consequences of embryonic gene editing are impossible to predict, which is why Australia, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States all prohibit doing it for reproductive purposes.
“I cannot imagine…figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT.” —Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
China too. Yet Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui defied the prohibition and shocked the world in 2018, announcing that twin girls had been born from embryos he’d edited pre-implantation. By deleting part of the CCR5 gene, which produces a protein docking site for HIV, he claimed he made the twins immune to the virus, though there’s been no independent confirmation of his work.
In his 2021 book, CRISPR People, Stanford University law professor Henry Greely described He’s experiment as “criminally reckless” and “deeply unethical.” The Chinese government agreed, sentencing He to three years in prison. But after his release in 2022, He returned to work on embryo-editing research, now at a private lab with secretive financing. Then, in 2025, the Chinese government issued new regulations opening the door to “manipulating human reproductive cells” under the oversight of the State Council health department. He says his work is aimed solely at curing disease, and he predicts embryonic gene editing will soon be legal for reproductive purposes in both China and the United States.
He’s ex-wife, Cathy Tie, a Chinese-born Canadian, says she is pursuing the same goal of editing embryos for heritable conditions. She, like Orchid’s Siddiqui, was awarded a large grant from Thiel, which enabled her to drop out of college at 18 and build a company geared toward analyzing rare mutations and common cancer genes. Last year, Tie launched Manhattan Genomics, which has not disclosed its investors. It is part of a wave of embryo-editing startups that includes Preventive, launched in 2025 with $30 million from techies including Armstrong and Altman and his husband.
Both Manhattan Genomics and Preventive stress that their goal isn’t optimizing babies for brilliance. “We draw the line at disease prevention,” Tie told NPR. But it might not be entirely up to them. Federal funds cannot be used for research on embryo editing—Congress has seen to that—which leaves private investors in charge of the direction of the science. “I wouldn’t take them at their word,” Jennifer Denbow, a California Polytechnic State University professor who researches reproductive technologies, says of the entrepreneurs. “There’s some very powerful influences and a lot of money that is interested, ultimately, in intelligence.”
Berkeley’s Urnov is also pessimistic. In his opinion, he said via email, “The ‘embryo editors’ are deceiving themselves and the public when they speak of using this technology to address the public health challenge of genetic disease.” According to him, “their sole purpose is ‘baby improvement.’”
Altman has previously said that some form of genetic engineering is inevitable. “Superhuman AI is going to happen, genetic enhancement is going to happen, and brain-machine interfaces are going to happen. It is a failure of human imagination and human arrogance to assume that we will never build things smarter than ourselves,” he wrote in 2017. “My guess is that we can either be the biological bootloader for digital intelligence and then fade into an evolutionary tree branch, or we can figure out what a successful merge looks like.”
That was effectively the mission a company called Bootstrap Bio touted openly. “Of particular interest to me is whether we could modify intelligence,” co-founders Chase Denecke and Ben Korpan noted in a viral 2023 essay.
Like Benson-Tilsen, they framed the concept as an imperative, noting there’s currently a “very limited number of people” who have the intellect required to protect the world from a dangerously capable AGI. “It is not an exaggeration to say that the lives of literally everyone depend on whether a few hundred engineers and mathematicians can figure out how to control the machines built by the mad scientists in the office next door,” Denecke and Korpan wrote.
When I emailed Denecke, he told me Bootstrap Bio had ceased operations due to lack of funding. (The company’s former chief science officer, Qichen Yuan, was indicted for attempted sex trafficking of a child in September 2025. His case is ongoing.) But before the company unraveled, its early investors included Malcolm and Simone Collins, whom you may have heard of. They’re the media-hungry face of the pronatalist movement, which contends the world is headed for population collapse if birth rates don’t rise substantially.
Malcolm, a quirky, fast-talking former venture capitalist, envisions two possibilities: Either the cognitive capabilities of humans improve significantly or we’re all goners. “For a long time, humanity has had a synthetic component to it that has evolved alongside our organic component,” he told me. “We finally reached a stage where the synthetic component is sort of turning around and putting a gun to the organic component and saying, ‘Okay, now prove your worth.’”
Malcolm laments that the people he considers the most brilliant are prioritizing careers over child-rearing, ceding ground to those he finds genetically lacking and thus risking a future in which there are not enough smart people to save us. “The dumb ones,” he said during a 2024 episode of Based Camp, the podcast he hosts with Simone, “are going to be more and more of the general population as time goes on. And so they will be electing and building bureaucracies that make it harder and harder for the geniuses to do their jobs.”
The couple’s message contains echoes of The Bell Curve, the controversial 1994 book that claimed people with less “cognitive capital” were having more children. It also theorized that white people had higher IQs than Black people on account of genetic differences. Right-wing nationalists use the same thoroughly debunked theory, which they call dysgenics, to rationalize racism and xenophobia. Malcolm does not say any race is inherently smarter than another but he emphasizes that genetic differences matter. “Noticing genes exist and caring about them in terms of future populations is not eugenics,” he says, “but it is definitely playing in a spicy territory.”
While it would be tempting to discount the Collinses’ views as fringe, their worldview extends far beyond their farmhouse. They have a growing online platform and run in powerful circles. Malcolm says he’s attended meetings focused on fertility at the White House, whose gene-obsessed occupant, Donald Trump, routinely disparages people of color (including literally all Somalis) as “low IQ.” The Collinses reportedly have spent time, too, with Musk, who also links intelligence to race, having endorsed statements theorizing that students from predominantly Black universities have IQs approaching “borderline intellectual impairment” and shouldn’t be allowed to become pilots.
The obsession with intelligence and its genetic components suggests an inherent sense of superiority, Cal Poly’s Denbow says. The notion that IQ can be genetically optimized only reinforces the false notion that some people are “more worthwhile.”
Among the numerous ethical questions raised by genetic engineering is whether its use will effectively create a new hereditary caste system, not unlike the dystopian pecking order in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where “Alpha” elites rule over the lesser classes. The future that Malcolm Collins describes sounds very much like a society stratified by genetic haves and have-nots: “I think it will be both dramatically less equitable, but dramatically better for the poor individuals in the same way that the United States right now might be less equitable than it would have been at the time of the Revolution,” he says. “But right now, the poorest Americans still have cellphones and computers and refrigerators, right? They’re not dying of cholera in the streets.”
In Benson-Tilsen’s ideal tomorrow, there would be no genotocracy—some of the wunderkinds optimized for superior intelligence will have quashed the threat of advanced AI, and the technology needed to have healthier and smarter babies will be widely accessible and affordable. But current trends—a small group of Silicon Valley titans holding a vast amount of our nation’s technological, political, and financial power—don’t seem to point in that direction. What, I ask him, will stop billionaire investors from hijacking the tech of even the most well-intentioned embryo-editing entrepreneur? After a long pause, he concedes he doesn’t have a great answer. He follows up in an email later the same evening: “To a very large extent, I simply personally don’t know.”
Well, perhaps the superhumans will figure it out.
Read more of our coverage of the roots and rise of the American oligarchy.
