Remember that movie? It might be a good time to rewatch.
Wag the Dog is about replacing an inconvenient reality with a more compelling story — something dramatic enough that nobody bothers to look back at what just got buried. The mechanics aren’t subtle: introduce a narrative that’s bigger, scarier, and harder to verify than the original problem, and let it dominate the conversation.
When a company starts talking about a model so powerful it can’t be released — hinting at alignment risks, surprising capabilities, and vague existential concerns — you’re no longer in the realm of normal product announcements. You’re in narrative territory, where the story itself does the work. It’s not about whether the claims are true or false; it’s about how effectively they redirect attention.
The interesting part isn’t the content of the announcement, it’s the timing and the structure.
A withheld model is inherently unverifiable from the outside, which means the narrative can expand to fill whatever space it’s given.
That makes it unusually effective at pulling focus away from more grounded, checkable events and toward speculation and debate.
In Wag the Dog, the fake war doesn’t need to be real — it just needs to be vivid and continuous enough to hold attention. The same dynamic shows up anytime a high-drama, low-verifiability story suddenly…