August 17, 2026

By Jim Towey

I finally found my way to the theater to get lost in Christopher Nolan’s cinematic adaptation of Homer’s classic, The Odyssey.

And then something strange happened when the lights went down. Instead of going straight from the last preview (of another “Focker” flick, Lord help us!) to the feature film, the audience was forced to watch a glitzy ad for Claude AI, the chatbot from Anthropic. Spoiler alert: its plot can be summarized as follows: “Claude is our friend. Claude is here to help free, not endanger, humanity. There is nothing to fear from AI and Claude. Trust us, we know best. We are the smartest in the room.”

When marketing strategies are designed to assure you that there is nothing to fear, my advice is to start fearing. In fact, if you search the internet with the keyword “Claude AI,” you get the immediate assurance that Anthropic is “an AI safety-focused company.” But wait, we already know that Claude AI isn’t so safe or innocent. A May 2026 piece from Techradar.com bore the headline, “Three high-risk AI vulnerabilities discovered in Claude.ai – end-to-end attack chain exfiltrates sensitive info without user knowing.”

Bad Claude! Claude should know better than to exfiltrate. Claude knows not to manufacture attack chains or forget to ask users for permission!

Is Claude our friend?

Could Anthropic be more focused on money than safety? Why else would it be running damage control ads to assure the educated classes at an Odyssey viewing that Claude AI is a friend – not an enemy with benefits.

But the truth is, Claude and his gang have already gone rogue a few times, here, here and here. These hiccups are simply the fainter, outer bands of a major storm heading toward humanity which Pope Leo is warning us about. No fair reading of his recent encyclical can be understood in any other way, notwithstanding a handful of random, positive statements giving AI the benefit of the doubt. Mark my words: We will awake one day to the news that a major financial institution’s data center has been hacked and disabled and hard-earned money has disappeared into the ether. Then we can expect even broader scale marketing campaigns by our friendly liars at Big Tech Central assuring us that there is nothing to fear.

As I watched The Odyssey’s reenactment of the sacking of Troy, and thought of the Claude AI ad, my mind drifted to Nolan’s previous blockbuster, Oppenheimer. In that masterpiece, Nolan took us back to the “father of the atomic bomb,” J. Robert Oppenheimer, and his colleagues at the Manhattan Project. Their work was cloaked in complete secrecy until the nuclear genie was out of the bottle. And today, about 80 years later, thousands of warheads capable of destroying the earth many times over, sit in their silos. We have been living under that mushroom cloud ever since, ignoring the possibility that they might be used.

The Trojan AI horse

AI, too, is out of the bottle. It is now everything, everywhere, all at once, groping us. It, too, was developed in secrecy by a handful of scientific geniuses. The Trojan Horse depicted in The Odyssey is a fitting metaphor explaining how AI got within our gates before we knew what had hit us.

Nolan may not have set out to pair his two films, but the point he drives home on the existential threats to humanity posed by nuclear weaponry and AI, struck me as unmistakable. Students this month return to their classrooms facing the stark reality that AI is undermining, not augmenting, their education. AI offers to do all of the thinking, researching and writing for them. How ironic that large language model technology conceived in plagiarism is abetting widescale cheating, and worse, the circumvention of attaining, mastering and creating knowledge – the essential tasks of intellectual formation.

Nolan’s Odysseus put it succinctly in words that warn us. He mused, “One man’s idea. One man’s trick to break Zeus’ law forever. We lived in a world of palaces and trade, language, blind to its beauty, until we broke it.” The Big Tech and AI masters who are amassing fortunes are blind to humanity’s beauty and God’s laws. One day they may come to realize as Robert Oppenheimer and Odysseus did, that they have blood on their hands for the consequences of what they set into motion on battlefields and in family homes.

As the film drew to a close, Odysseus and his wife, Penelope, sailed away together, a fitting portrayal of the triumph of human love. “A new dawn will break over the darkened world. And our mistakes once again will be forgotten,” he assured us. I share that same hope. But I am not sure the mistakes being made today in the age of AI, and the damage AI is doing and will do to humanity, will be easily forgotten. Popcorn, anyone?

(The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Aging with Dignity and/or its Board of Directors.)