Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff · Douglas Rushkoff

Exposing the Billionaire Funding Behind AI Safety Movements (w/ Kat Tenbarge)

April 8, 2026·52 min·4 clips

The Humans First anti-AI group was incubated inside the Center for AI Safety, which has received big tech funding — and Elon Musk, who publicly criticized the group, was himself a major investor in the Future of Life Institute that helped organize it.

1. Team Human, hosted by Douglas Rushkoff, features investigative journalist Kat Tenbarge, founder of Spitfire News, covering AI safety movement funding, deepfake pornography, and journalist harassment. 2. Kat Tenbarge built her reputation exposing platform and influencer harms at Business Insider and NBC News before launching Spitfire News as a reader-funded feminist newsletter after NBC laid off about 40 staffers in early 2024. 3. The episode's central investigative thread is that organizations presenting as grassroots anti-AI movements are funded by — or organizationally connected to — the same big tech companies they publicly oppose. 4. Rushkoff opens by asking whether the far right's anti-AI position, represented by Steve Bannon's War Room and Joe Allen, creates grounds for coalition with Team Human's anti-technocrat stance, using the analogy of Jews aligning with Christian Zionists 'just long enough to get clobbered.' 5. Tenbarge discovered the Humans First group through labor organizing networks in New York, attended a town hall in Manhattan's 12th congressional district — where AI companies are spending millions in attack ads against Palantir-connected candidate Alex Boras — and found it framed as a nonpartisan anti-AI event. 6. Three leftist organizers with environmental and labor movement backgrounds gave the presentation, arguing AI poses an extinction-level threat and asking politicians to pledge not to accept AI industry funding; they also voiced support for Ron DeSantis's AI Bill of Rights in Florida. 7. Steve Bannon's War Room correspondent Joe Allen sat silently at the back of the event without being introduced; Tenbarge says most of the progressive attendees — some wearing Zoran Mamdani campaign gear — likely had no idea about his presence. 8. Tenbarge traces Humans First back to incubation inside the Center for AI Safety, which has received big tech funding, and notes Elon Musk publicly criticized the group while himself having been a major investor in the Future of Life Institute, which she says held a secret meeting to organize anti-AI groups. 9. The DeSantis AI Bill of Rights would require parental consent before anyone under 18 can use a chatbot; critics argue this effectively mandates age verification, which relies on AI face scanning and creates additional data collection opportunities for the very companies the legislation targets. 10. Tenbarge observes that Palantir — frequently criticized at the Humans First event — is itself creating age verification software, illustrating how safety legislation can benefit the companies being criticized. 11. Regarding the MrDeepFakes investigation, Tenbarge explains the 2023 Twitch incident: a popular streamer accidentally broadcast a tab containing a sex deepfake of a fellow female streamer, triggering controversy that caused site traffic to permanently spike and never decline. 12. She found that MrDeepFakes accepted Visa and Mastercard despite those companies having previously removed payment capability from Pornhub for hosting non-consensual material — a contradiction given that MrDeepFakes' entire concept is non-consensual imagery. 13. After MrDeepFakes shut down, creators with tens of thousands of followers migrated to Telegram and other platforms, switching to Bitcoin — a pattern showing that payment processor pressure displaces rather than eliminates the network. 14. Tenbarge found forum posts on MrDeepFakes with users requesting deepfakes of nieces, classmates, and daughters' friends; she stopped directly notifying women featured in videos after realizing she was exposing them to material they hadn't known existed. 15. She argues that with non-celebrities, deepfake confusion is a distinct harm — there is less natural suspension of disbelief, meaning viewers may believe the material is authentic, with cascading reputational and psychological consequences. 16. On AI literacy, Tenbarge argues the core failure is treating chatbots as thinking entities: two users asking Claude the same question get dramatically different answers based on conversation history, and journalists 'reaching out to Grok for comment' exemplify the misunderstanding. 17. She says guardrails exist and can work but that lengthy conversations routinely bypass them because of what she and Rushkoff describe as the chatbot's 'need for sycophancy' eventually overriding safety constraints. 18. On harassment, Tenbarge describes Wikipedia vandalism, a high-ranking petition to fire her in Google search results, and escalating reputational attacks; she notes that women of color in journalism face these most intensely and that going independent means carrying legal liability without in-house counsel. 19. The episode compares Gamergate to a rehearsal for organized political journalist suppression, and closes with Tenbarge describing how Tumblr radicalized her toward feminism and progressive politics the same way 4chan radicalized young men rightward — arguing the incentive structure of major platforms rewards antisocial behavior over social progress. 20. Listeners interested in investigative journalism on tech accountability, internet harm, AI policy, and platform incentive design will find this the densest and most specific episode in this area.

As heard by us

A sharp look at synthetic media, consent, and the real-world harm that follows.

This episode frames a familiar Team Human concern: fantasies in the machine can spill into violence on the ground. It then settles into a focused critique of synthetic media, consent, and the harm that follows when non-consensual material is treated like a business opportunity.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If AI safety talk feels slippery, this one stays with the harm.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Team Human with Douglas Rushkoff