Ex Reddit CEO Splits AI Risk In Two And Venture Capital Is Funding Both

Yishan Wong, who ran Reddit from 2012 to 2014 and now leads the reforestation company Terraformation, argues in a viral post on X this week that most AI safety arguments collapse because participants are debating two unrelated dangers as if they were one. His sharper claim is that the remedies for each run in opposite directions, so a policy that reduces one risk increases the other.

The distinction matters to anyone allocating capital, because investors have quietly placed nine-figure and ten-figure bets on both sides of Wong’s divide at once. Anthropic, founded on the premise that frontier models need controlled development, closed a $65 billion Series H in May at a $965 billion post-money valuation, with Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia leading. Safe Superintelligence, Ilya Sutskever’s lab, raised $2 billion at a $32 billion valuation with no product, on the explicit promise that nothing ships until superintelligence is safe. Mistral, whose pitch is open-weight models anyone can download and run, announced a €3 billion Series D on September 8 at a valuation above €21 billion, led by Samsung Electronics. Andreessen Horowitz appears on the cap tables of both SSI and Mistral. Under Wong’s framework, those two positions are hedges against each other.

The crux, in his words, is that solutions to the second problem do not have anything to do with solutions to the first.

Misuse historically resolves through proliferation. When a small group controls a dangerous capability, it dominates; when everyone holds it, deterrence stabilizes the field. Existential risk, by contrast, arises the moment anyone builds a superintelligence, benevolent or not, because control is the thing that fails. So the misuse camp’s prescription, distribute powerful AI as widely as possible, is the existential camp’s nightmare, and the existential camp’s prescription, let nobody build it, is what the misuse camp considers a recipe for concentrated power.