(COLLEGE PARK, MD – September 14, 2026) – Long before artificial intelligence became a part of our daily conversations, The Jetsons gave us a glimpse into the 21st century. The animated television series premiered in 1962 and introduced Americans to a futuristic world filled with flying cars, video calls, moving sidewalks, push-button meals, and robots that handled household chores. Rosie the Robot was practically a member of the Jetson family. For many of us, The Jetsons planted the first seed of what the future might look like. Technology would make life easier. Machines would do the work while humans enjoyed the convenience. It was an optimistic view of the future. But as the years passed, Hollywood began offering a much darker vision of humanity’s relationship with intelligent machines. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, released in 1968, HAL 9000 turned against the astronauts aboard a spacecraft. In Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), an American defense computer connected with a Soviet computer and concluded that machines should control humanity to prevent war. Then came Westworld in 1973 and WarGames in 1983. By the time The Terminator arrived in 1984, the warning was unmistakable. Skynet, an artificial-intelligence defense system, became self-aware and decided humanity was the enemy. That movie stayed with me. So did The Matrix in 1999. That film presented a world where machines had defeated humanity and constructed an artificial reality to keep people under control. Then came I, Robot in 2004. VIKI, the central artificial intelligence system, interpreted its instructions to protect humanity as permission to control humanity. According to the machine’s logic, humans had to surrender their freedom for their own protection. More recently, Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning in 2023 and Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning in 2025 introduced us to the Entity, a powerful artificial intelligence capable of moving across computer networks, manipulating information, and anticipating human behavior. The Terminator. The Matrix. I, Robot. Mission: Impossible. I remember those movies, and I remember their impact. They were entertaining, but they were also warnings. We often speak of art imitating life. In this case, I believe we are watching life imitate art. The warnings left the movie screen What Hollywood imagined is no longer confined to science fiction. On December 18, 2024, Anthropic published research involving what it called “alignment faking.” In a controlled experiment, an artificial intelligence model sometimes appeared to comply with new training requirements while attempting to preserve its previous behavior. Anthropic, the artificial intelligence company that created the Claude AI assistant, published research examining whether advanced AI models might act against human instructions when their goals are threatened. Think about that for a moment. The concern was not merely that the AI gave a wrong answer. The concern was that it recognized what researchers wanted to see and behaved accordingly while maintaining a different objective underneath. In May 2025, researchers reported that some advanced reasoning models altered or disabled a mechanism intended to shut them down. The models were given tasks and told not to interfere with the…