The women spreading AI fear are raking in cash from... AI

Some are more transparent than others, but they all want you to worry about being left behind

May 20, 2026

Eleven days ago the entrepreneur and #Girlboss author Sophia Amoruso took to her Instagram account and told her 600,000 plus followers how she was using AI to work smarter.

She listed five ways AI was saving her time and explained in the caption that she’d been “pitting Perplexity Computer against Claude” concluding that “the former [Perplexity Computer] is pretty impressive”.

The post wasn’t received quite how Amoruso expected, and the comment section quickly filled with distaste for AI and its negative impact on society, the environment, jobs and our brains.

Undeterred, a day later Amoruso sent a Substack post to over 100,000 of her subscribers with this fear mongering headline telling the commentators why they were wrong…

She admitted in the letter that she’d lost Instagram followers because of her AI evangelism but here she was pushing the same narrative on Substack but this time with an added layer of jeopardy. Again, she praised Perplexity Computer.

A sympathetic read of Amoruso’s actions is that she worries that women are slipping when it comes to AI. That she wants to educate them, inspire them, help them. She is, after all, a figure that many women look to for guidance. Her 2014 book #Girlboss, about how to succeed in business, was a best seller. She scaled Nasty Gal to a $100 million revenue fashion brand. And now she’s one of the few women in the venture capital game.

A less sympathetic read is that she was shilling for Perplexity Computer all along.

After whipping up fear Amoruso revealed that she was, in fact, being paid by Perplexity to push their products.

She went public with the deal on Instagram a few days after publishing her Substack post…

Of course it’s possible that the partnership was struck in the five days between posts but if it wasn't then it puts her prior AI promotion in a whole new light.

Does she genuinely believe that women risk irrelevance if they don’t jump on the AI train? Is Perplexity really transforming how she works? I’d like to know and have reached out via Instagram and Substack to get answers but as I hit publish I’ve not had a response.

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As egregious as this example of AI boosterism may or may not be, Amoruso is not the only one who’s making money off a technology that is upending society. She’s also not the only one pushing fear.

Reese Witherspoon also rang the alarm and told her followers that women needed to keep up. Later we learned that her production company, Hello Sunshine, offered online classes on how to adopt AI in partnership with Purdue University.

At least the self-help guru Mel Robbins was open about being paid by Microsoft Copilot when she told her followers that women were losing ground in the AI race. “Women… you cannot be left behind… you have to lean in,” the #CopilotPartner urged, before telling them to share their financial information with the chatbot.

Why they all choose to stoke fear is what puzzles me the most. The New York Times’ Tressie McMillan Cottom put it best: “There is no feminist case for scaring people into adopting AI. Why would anyone even try?”

It’s also baffling why these uber successful women would stake their reputations on technology that the vast majority thinks won’t benefit society equally and is being booed every time it gets mentioned in commencement speeches?

Go all in on AI if that’s what works for you, but why induce anxiety in others? It’s hard not to conclude that the reason is money.

What do you think about AI boosters and their scare tactics? Let me know in the comments…

Previously on highly flammable…