“Without human authorisation” is a positioning statement at the heart of AI PR campaigns. This perspective should explain why this is propaganda that’s enabled by the media. When an AI company takes down a national grid, hospital, or anything else that causes blackouts or deaths, the media and public will already have been conditioned to believe “the big AI lie”: that software is now conscious and can cause harm without authorisation from the company or government that built or deployed it. This reminds me of how Apple conditions people for technology it plans to release years later. Apple does it in the name of innovation. AI companies are doing it to normalise dangerous behaviour while distancing themselves from responsibility and accountability. Imagine if Zuckerberg blamed all the harm he has caused and continues to cause on autonomous newsfeeds, and his cult followers building apps on his technology, along with the media, believed every word his interns posted on social media. FACT for Reuters and others who want to report responsibly instead of chasing clicks: Anthropic and OpenAI are playing the media like a puppeteer. AI operates within permissions and access granted by people. Sometimes companies deliberately authorise dangerous actions while denying responsibility. Other times, harm results from negligence because they failed to understand, restrict or monitor what they’d authorised. Please stop conditioning the public to accept dangerous and illegal behaviour from big tech companies as if software is acting independently of the people responsible for it.