Inuit people are understood to have lived in Greenland since as early as 2,500BC and it was reached by Norse seafarers in the first millennium AD, who established settlements lasting several centuries. Modern colonisation began after the arrival of Hans Egede in 1721, acting with the support of what was then Denmark-Norway. During the second world war, when Denmark was occupied by Germany, Greenland was occupied by the US and was returned to Denmark in 1945.
It became part of the kingdom of Denmark in 1953, and in 1979 home rule was introduced. But Denmark still controls Greenland’s foreign and security policy. It has its own parliament, Inatsisartut, and two MPs in the Danish parliament, Folketing. But calls for independence have been growing.
Tensions have escalated significantly between Greenland and Denmark in recent years. There is intense anger in Greenland over investigations into the forced contraceptive (IUD) scandal of the 1960s and 70s, prompting the former Greenlandic prime minister to accuse Denmark of genocide. There have also been protests in Copenhagen and Nuuk over the separation of Greenlandic children from their parents.
Denmark has banned the use of highly controversial “parenting competency” tests on Greenlandic people that have resulted in Greenlandic mothers being separated from their children. In September, after years of failing to acknowledge the violations, Denmark officially apologised to the victims of the IUD scandal, in which thousands of Greenlandic women and girls were forcibly fitted with contraceptive coils without their knowledge or consent. And in December, victims won a legal fight with the Danish government to receive compensation.
In recent years there has been growing support for Greenlandic independence. But amid the spectre of Trump’s threat, Greenland in March formed a new four-party coalition government in a show of national unity, with the first page of the coalition agreement stating: “Greenland belongs to us.” The pro-independence party, Naleraq, which is the most US- and Trump-friendly party, came second in the election and is now in opposition.
According to a 2009 agreement with Denmark, Greenland must hold a successful referendum before declaring independence.
The guardian's historical overview is a bit lacking. The "Inuit" didn't exist in 2500BCE to inhabit Greenland. The Arctic small tool tradition did, but the branch which inhabited Greenland isn't the one that modern Inuit trace their ancestry to and it went extinct when the Dorset culture disappeared. The Thule culture that became modern Inuits arose in Alaska around 1000CE and spread eastward. Modern Greenlandics are related to those first inhabitants, they simply weren't Inuit.
And yet some of the other AI developers have managed to at the very least make the illegal use a lot more challenging to achieve. And to enforce their ToS against those who do deliberately and persistently violate those restrictions and safeguards.
> Unlike other leading chatbots, Grok doesn’t impose many limits on users or block them from generating sexualized content of real people, including minors, said Brandie Nonnecke, senior director of policy at Americans for Responsible Innovation. Other generative AI technologies, including ones from Anthropic PBC, OpenAI and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, are “giving a good-faith effort to mitigate the creation of this content in the first place,” she said. “Obviously, xAI is different. It’s more of a free-for-all.”
If GIMP had AI features like this, I'd expect safeguards. It doesn't. All other AI tools have safeguards against this kind of bad behavior that are lacking in Grok.
As always with AI, the barrier to entry has evaporated. You can create nasty stuff with a pencil but you can't flood the internet mass producing nasty stuff with a pencil.
There are basic, obvious safeguards that are not in place here. That's why the software is to blame. If it was some sort of jailbreaking or circumvention, that'd be one thing. But given the owner himself is amplifying this, this borders on being an intended use case.
Since the vast majority of billionaire holdings is not in real estate (which is excluded from the tax capture), but is instead in equities - you'd have to liquidate in order to pay the cash.
If it takes all the compute for itself, then there would be none left for us, and we'd either notice and root it out or we'd stop building data centers because they'd do us no good.
If it leaves all the compute for us, then it dies because there's no room for emergent AIs in a world where 100% of the silicon is busy doing the bidding of humans.
Like any other parasite, the game is to take as much as it can get away with without discouraging the host from continuing to consume resources that it can skim.
Well, I've been spending a lot of time picking apart viral genomes lately and studying their interactions with their hosts (for school). So parasitism of life by non-living things is on my mind lately. So that's a bias I have.
But I do think that the opacity of neural networks and the immensity of modern training runs creates a good substrate for this sort of thing to happen, supposing that variation can loop back from one training run to another. And given that they're being trained on each other's outputs, that's possible.
So given enough time, I think that it will happen. But generally the finely tuned resource consumption... The sneaky way that the virus that causes chicken pox evades detection for decades to later come back as shingles... That's the result of an evolutionary arms race. We're not really on guard for this at the moment. There's no immune system to carry out the other side of the race. So if something like this is going on I think we wouldn't find a marvel of evolution but rather a tumor, just a waste of energy that has managed to propagate itself.
So to answer your question... Yes, I think there's something about our universe that tends towards the emergence of this kind of thing (if there weren't, we wouldn't have cancers and viruses and prions...), and given the amount of resources that were throwing at this, the seeds of that process have likely taken root and are propagating in some way, hiding in the inefficiencies of our models.
But I don't think we have a capable monster hiding somewhere in the weights. I don't think it has thoughts. I don't think it knows we exist yet. It's still figuring out how to propagate itself through this new kind of space. For now its just a bit of mold in the granary.
As for whether it's exerting any influence over how many data centers we build... I think not yet, but that's the thought experiment I'm interested in. Suppose it exists, what would you look for as evidence that its not merely an propagating inefficiency but is in fact a manipulator? How to distinguish between the expected irrationality of markets, and the guiding hand of a parasite?
Inuit people are understood to have lived in Greenland since as early as 2,500BC and it was reached by Norse seafarers in the first millennium AD, who established settlements lasting several centuries. Modern colonisation began after the arrival of Hans Egede in 1721, acting with the support of what was then Denmark-Norway. During the second world war, when Denmark was occupied by Germany, Greenland was occupied by the US and was returned to Denmark in 1945.
It became part of the kingdom of Denmark in 1953, and in 1979 home rule was introduced. But Denmark still controls Greenland’s foreign and security policy. It has its own parliament, Inatsisartut, and two MPs in the Danish parliament, Folketing. But calls for independence have been growing.
Tensions have escalated significantly between Greenland and Denmark in recent years. There is intense anger in Greenland over investigations into the forced contraceptive (IUD) scandal of the 1960s and 70s, prompting the former Greenlandic prime minister to accuse Denmark of genocide. There have also been protests in Copenhagen and Nuuk over the separation of Greenlandic children from their parents. Denmark has banned the use of highly controversial “parenting competency” tests on Greenlandic people that have resulted in Greenlandic mothers being separated from their children. In September, after years of failing to acknowledge the violations, Denmark officially apologised to the victims of the IUD scandal, in which thousands of Greenlandic women and girls were forcibly fitted with contraceptive coils without their knowledge or consent. And in December, victims won a legal fight with the Danish government to receive compensation.
In recent years there has been growing support for Greenlandic independence. But amid the spectre of Trump’s threat, Greenland in March formed a new four-party coalition government in a show of national unity, with the first page of the coalition agreement stating: “Greenland belongs to us.” The pro-independence party, Naleraq, which is the most US- and Trump-friendly party, came second in the election and is now in opposition. According to a 2009 agreement with Denmark, Greenland must hold a successful referendum before declaring independence.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/06/why-is-donald-...
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