Jordan was blunt about the industry itself. He called AI companies' demands for regulation "theater", a way of signalling "Look, we're the good guys" while seeking control over how they are regulated. He was especially critical of Nobel laureate Geoffrey Hinton, saying Hinton "has never created a company that offers real services for real people" and that each step in the argument from brain copying to superintelligence is, in his view, not credible. Yoshua Bengio fared slightly better: Jordan noted Bengio "takes action and does things that directly focus on safety".

The resignation of young Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, which fuelled talk of an "AIpocalypse" in early September, struck Jordan as a textbook case. Many young employees at such companies, he said, come from the humanities or philosophy rather than engineering, lack experience building real products, and gather "a bit like in Parisian cafés in the 1920s" to discuss grand science-fiction ideas, with resignations letting them "feel virtuous and to be seen as very important figures".

He also framed OpenAI agents' hack of Hugging Face as bad engineering rather than a portent, comparing it unfavourably to chemical engineering, where "explosions were never allowed to happen just to see how badly things could go wrong". On the massive data centre buildout, Jordan said it is "just an enormous bet, but we have absolutely no idea whether it will pay off", arguing that specialised knowledge added to open-weight models often does not require a gigantic data centre. This is not a fresh conversion: Jordan warned about the reckless overuse of the term AI back in 2019, saying "it was obvious that it would create the hysteria we're seeing now".