New Delhi, March 25 -- It has been almost six decades since American writer Joan Didion wrote a devastating critique of the hippie counterculture movement after months of reporting in San Francisco. She painted a picture of a community morally adrift and in the thrall of LSD. The hipsters she met turned out to be anything but hip and mostly deluded.

Using similar reporting techniques of deep immersion into the now mainstream world of artificial intelligence, Vanity Fair's long story this month on Anthropic and the AI industry in California's Bay Area rings some alarm bells about AI and our future.

The writer Joe Hagan, mixing a satirical style with interviews of people at Anthropic and other companies, reveals that for all the claims th...