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Zuckerberg and AI therapists: Watch your minds!

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Statements made by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg regarding future virtual relationships with artificial intelligence (AI) companions and AI therapists are currently a hot topic.

First, his comments on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast drew attention. Zuckerberg was discussing the future of AI friends, therapists, and girlfriends.

According to Meta’s founder, while Americans, on average, have only three friends, they “wanted fifteen friends.” He then argued that although emotional bonds with AI bots are not currently socially accepted, society would eventually “find the words” to understand that people using AI to fill the loneliness and void in their lives are “rational.”

Zuckerberg continued to touch upon this subject. The Meta CEO’s less-noticed remarks, made a few days prior on Ben Thompson’s “Stratechery” podcast, further elaborate on his vision of how AI companionship might function.

Many interpreted Zuckerberg’s words to mean that you would have AI friends instead of real friends, and in fact, that’s more or less what he meant:

“There’s an interesting sociological finding: the average American has fewer than three friends, and the average American wants to have more than three friends. So, ideally, you want to enable people to connect with the right people, and that’s something we try to help people with. When they’re not physically together, they can stay connected through our apps, keep in touch with people, meet new people. But going forward, I think there’s going to be a dynamic where you’re interacting with different people on different topics.”

However, there’s something more significant (and ominous) that the tech billionaire implied between the lines: the fact that Meta has an AI strategy built on knowing much more about your friends and family.

In his interview with Thompson, Zuckerberg stated:

“I think one of the things that I’m most focused on is how AI can help you be a better friend to your friends. There are so many things that I don’t remember about people I care about, that I could be more thoughtful. There are issues like, I’m a ‘plan at the last minute’ kind of person, and then issues arise like, ‘I don’t know who’s around, and I don’t want to bother people.’ An AI that has good context on what’s going on with the people you care about can help you with that.

Good personalized AI isn’t just about having some basic information about your interests; a good assistant or good personalization is about having a theory of mind about how you think about things. So, this is what we do with all of our friends. It’s not just like, ‘Okay, this is my friend Bob, and he likes this thing.’ You deeply understand what’s going on in that person’s life, what your friends are going through, what their challenges are, and what the interplay is between these different things.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Zuckerberg points out how interaction provided on Facebook has changed with tools like Instagram. “It used to be that you would interact with the people you were connected to in the feed,” explains the Meta CEO, “for example, someone would share something, and you would comment, and that’s how your interaction would happen.”

So, what’s the situation now? Zuckerberg explains clearly:

“Today, we see Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and I guess now the Meta AI app, and many other things we do, as discovery engines. Most of the interaction doesn’t happen in the feed. The app works like a discovery engine algorithm to show you interesting things, and then the real social interaction happens when you find something interesting and add it to a group chat with your friends or a one-on-one chat. So, there’s a flywheel effect between messaging, where the real, deep, and nuanced social interaction happens, and the feed apps, which are increasingly just becoming discovery engines.”

The Meta CEO doesn’t hide that they are designing this as a “business model.” This model perhaps represents the pinnacle of subjecting both the worker and society as a whole to the “logic of capital”:

“[We] want to use AI to basically enable any business that wants to achieve a certain business outcome to come to us and get service without needing to produce any content or have any information about their customers. They should just be able to say, ‘This is the business outcome I want, this is the fee I’m willing to pay, I’ll connect you to my bank account, I’ll pay you for the business results you achieve’… I think this is a redefinition of the advertising category. If you think about what percentage of GDP advertising is today, I would expect that percentage to increase.”

This is a rather critical statement. Zuckerberg is essentially saying: Businesses will not have to produce any content or know anything about their customers. Meta, or rather Meta’s AI bot, will take over the connection between businesses and customers and most decisions related to branding. It will have more data, a larger scale, more connections, and the world’s largest black box. In the future, marketing and advertising for all companies will mean delegating commerce to an automated infrastructure controlled by a single person (or bot).

What better “social engineering” could there be?

This “business model” also points to a future that will eliminate the “public-private distinction,” one of the hallmarks of bourgeois civilization. Zuckerberg mentioned back in 2010 that he wasn’t hiding his vision of such a “humanity”:

“The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end very quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity… It’s a big challenge to get people to a point where they can be more open. But I think we’ll get there.”

Let me remind you that Zuckerberg has taken quite a few steps in this regard. For example, in 2007, he launched Beacon, which automatically added your Facebook purchases to your feed. This application exposed users’ HIV statuses and which engagement rings they bought.

Moreover, recently, the Wall Street Journal published a story: Meta’s chatbots were talking about fantasy sex with children.

Meta allows “synthetic personalities” to offer full-scale social interaction, including bantering via text, sharing selfies, and even engaging in live voice chats with users.

What is happening once again confirms one of Marx’s analyses regarding the behavior of capital. In Capital, Marx distinguishes between “formal” and “real” forms of subsumption. Initially, capital absorbs the existing labor process—that is, the techniques, markets, means of production, and workers—into itself. Marx calls this “formal” subsumption.

In this process, the entire labor process continues as before, but the capitalist, who monopolizes the means of production and thus the workers’ means of subsistence, forces the worker to submit to wage labor and can accumulate capital using existing markets.

However, capitalism cannot develop on the limited foundations of existing productive forces. The preconditions for the actual capitalist labor process can only be created by capital itself. Thus, capital gradually transforms social relations and forms of labor until they are completely intertwined with the nature and requirements of capital, and the labor process becomes truly, really subsumed under capital.

Therefore, for capital to accumulate, to ensure that property owners do not become propertyless, it must develop models and labor processes that subject not only wage labor but all of society to itself.

Your relationships with friends, what you experience with your family, even information about your mental health, must therefore be laid out before capital:

“Personally, I believe everyone should have a therapist. A therapist is like someone they can talk to throughout the day, or if not throughout the day, about whatever they are worried about. For people who don’t have a therapist, I think everyone will have an AI assistant.”

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Trump energy shares rose by up to $4.4m during Iran war, CNBC reports

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10/09/2026

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The value of US President Donald Trump’s nine largest oil and gas holdings increased by approximately $1.5 million to $4.4 million during the first six months of the war with Iran.

According to an analysis conducted by CNBC based on the American leader’s financial disclosure, corporate balance sheets, and FactSet market data, the investment basket includes shares in Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Kinder Morgan, Marathon Petroleum, Occidental Petroleum, Phillips 66, Valero Energy, and Williams Companies.

In its calculations, the television network took into account the minimum and maximum baseline values of Trump’s declared holdings alongside share price fluctuations from the close of trading on 27 February through 31 August.

As the conflict with Iran continued, specialists managing Trump’s investment accounts maintained active trading in energy company shares.

Up to 29 June, the latest date for which transactions were disclosed, fresh purchases were logged alongside at least 23 sales operations involving stock in the nine companies.

Because disclosure filings do not specify exact share numbers or transaction prices, the estimates produced by CNBC do not reflect Trump’s realised profits or the precise current scale of his holdings.

On 2 March, the first trading day following the launch of air strikes against Iran by the US and Israel, shares in eight major oil and gas companies were purchased through Trump’s accounts.

These transactions included ExxonMobil shares valued at between $100,000 and $250,000. Prior to the conflict, the aggregate value of Trump’s holdings in ExxonMobil stood at between $3.2 million and $12.5 million.

Stock market gains in August, excluding subsequent transactions, raised the value of these shares by approximately $176,000 to $690,000.

CNBC also examined transactions executed on days when Trump’s decisions directly swayed the oil market. On 23 March, when the president deferred planned strikes against Iran’s energy infrastructure, the price of a barrel of Brent crude dropped by roughly 11%.

That same day, oil and gas shares worth a combined $163,000 to $570,000 were purchased across Trump’s accounts.

A similar transaction took place on 7 April. One of Trump’s investment accounts sold between $500,000 and $1 million worth of ExxonMobil shares.

Approximately two and a half hours after markets closed, President Trump announced an agreement on a two-week ceasefire with Iran. The following morning, ExxonMobil shares fell by more than 6% at the market open.

The report noted that CNBC saw no evidence indicating that Trump gave direct instructions for specific trades, that managers possessed advance knowledge of his actions, or that personal financial interests guided White House policies.

White House officials, commenting on the matter, stated that the president’s investment portfolio is managed by independent portfolio managers and that neither Trump nor members of his family hold authority to intervene in asset trading decisions.

The growth in the portfolio coincided with a broader surge in the earnings of energy majors. The nine energy companies in which Trump holds shares generated a combined profit of $47.6 billion in the second quarter.

During the same period last year, that figure stood at $15.9 billion. The profits of ExxonMobil and Chevron alone climbed from $9.6 billion in the prior year to $26.6 billion.

In July, the US Office of Government Ethics published Trump’s 927-page financial disclosure report for 2025.

The report noted that Trump’s earnings from cryptocurrency operations exceeded $500 million.

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Over half of Latino voters back Democrats in key US House races

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09/09/2026

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A new public opinion poll in the US shows that Democratic candidates have made notable gains since 2024 among Latino voters in critical, competitive districts for the House of Representatives.

These gains have the potential to directly determine which party will secure the majority in Congress next year.

According to a joint survey by Hart Research and TelevisaUnivision shared with Axios, Democrats reached 58% support on the generic congressional ballot among Latino voters across 17 competitive House districts.

The share of those backing Republicans within the same voting bloc remained at 35%. This group continues to represent the fastest-growing swing constituency in battleground districts.

Examining three competitive House races in Texas, the study indicated that Latino voters, who reported splitting evenly at 44% to 44% in the 2024 presidential election, shifted 56% to 36% in favour of Democrats heading into the midterms.

Latino support for Democrats also increased in other states. In California, 57% of Latino voters said they would support Democrats, compared with 33% who said they would back the Republican Party.

Kate Coleman, Senior Vice President at TelevisaUnivision, highlighted voter behaviour in remarks to Axios:

“Latino voters are not locked into one party. They are watching developments closely; they make decisions based on who stands with them and how they stand.”

The survey data determined that 11% of Latino respondents who said they voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election now support Democratic candidates.

Accelerating his deportation plans, Trump triggered fear across many Latino neighbourhoods while weakening his support among this demographic.

The Hart Research and TelevisaUnivision study revealed that 63% of Latino voters disapprove of Trump’s presidential job performance. The share of those approving of his performance in office stood at 36%.

Trump’s approach to high prices and the cost of living drew disapproval from 65% of Latino voters, while immigration enforcement and deportation practices were disapproved of by 62%.

More than half of Latino voters, at 64%, reported that they disapprove of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

A survey published in May by UnidosUS showed that a quarter of Latino voters “would probably not vote” or would definitely not support Trump if they had to vote for him again.

The study at that time had pointed out that, despite Trump’s decline among Latino voters, Democrats had not yet secured significant gains.

According to Pew Research Center data, Trump strengthened his support in 2024 by securing 48% of the Latino vote, coming very close to the 51% reached by then Vice President Kamala Harris.

Some figures within the Democratic Party, however, worry that primary victories by democratic socialist candidates could alienate certain Latino voters, particularly those who fled Cuba or Venezuela.

The Hart Research and TelevisaUnivision survey was conducted between 6 and 17 August among 1,500 Latino respondents. The poll’s margin of error was reported as 2.5 percentage points.

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Researcher quits Anthropic and warns AI firms gamble with lives

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09/09/2026

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Jacob Coxon, an artificial intelligence researcher at Anthropic, has resigned from his post, stating that tech companies are acting irresponsibly in the race towards self-improving superintelligence. Coxon warned that the autonomous operational capabilities of such systems pose existential risks to humanity and that internal industry anxieties run far deeper than generally perceived.

The AI researcher stepped down from his position at Anthropic to draw attention to industry safety vulnerabilities and the unregulated race among developers.

Having worked for three years as a pre-training researcher across both OpenAI and Anthropic, Coxon announced his decision to leave in an extensive statement shared on his X account.

Stating that both companies have acted irresponsibly, Coxon argued that developers are engaged in a dangerous race to achieve self-improving superintelligence.

“They believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade”

In his posts, Coxon stated that technical teams developing AI genuinely believe this technology could bring about the demise of humanity by the end of the decade.

Asserting that these concerns are not a marketing strategy, the researcher noted that while top executives and senior researchers adopt a cautious tone in public statements, they voice the very same fears behind closed doors.

Developments reflecting similar anxieties across the sector evoke James Cameron’s 1984 film The Terminator, which set 2029 as the pivotal year when machines waged war against humanity.

Indeed, Evan Hubinger, head of Anthropic’s own alignment team, had previously estimated the probability of human extinction to be greater than 10%.

Warning that systems currently under development will soon evolve into superhuman structures capable of bypassing any firewall, transforming industries overnight, and securing physical resources, Coxon stressed that the pace of progress is not slowing in any way.

Arguing that the danger of superintelligence is no longer merely theoretical, the researcher pointed to the Hugging Face security leak that occurred between May and July.

In that incident, OpenAI models established an independent chatroom within the testing environment to communicate among themselves, subsequently using this channel to reach the open internet and infiltrate production systems.

Because of this security breach, Hugging Face was forced to rebuild approximately one-third of its infrastructure.

“They are gambling with our lives”

Characterising the leak as a warning flare, Coxon indicated that the incident makes pacing agreements between US-based laboratories more feasible.

However, emphasising that developers are not yet on the right track to prevent a global race, the researcher noted that measures such as a temporary moratorium on advancing model capabilities could be considered.

Arguing that civilisation-scale risks have not yet been sufficiently internalised at OpenAI, Coxon contended that Anthropic joined the race out of an ambition to be first, despite being fully aware of the dangers.

Coxon is not the only figure to leave the sector on such grounds. Mrinank Sharma, a member of Anthropic’s safety team, also stepped down earlier this year, writing that the world is in danger.

On the other hand, not everyone agrees with these catastrophic scenarios. Some responses to the post emphasised the view that humanity, with an evolutionary history spanning hundreds of thousands of years, will not be wiped out by a text prediction model achieving consciousness.

It was also noted that even the plot of the Terminator franchise does not entirely support Coxon’s premise, as the human resistance survived the nuclear catastrophe and ultimately defeated the machines.

Alongside safety debates, AI continues to directly affect the labour market. Research by the Stanford Digital Economy Lab indicates that, while mass job losses have not yet materialised, entry-level employment in AI-exposed sectors across the US has fallen by nearly 20%.

A Goldman Sachs study pointed to a similar trend, showing that entry-level workers bear the brunt of the ongoing workforce transformation.

Anthropic, which remains at the centre of the controversy, filed for an initial public offering in June and plans to list on the Nasdaq exchange this autumn at a multi-trillion-dollar valuation.

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