WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange returned to X on Thursday, more than two years after his release from prison as the AI crisis dominates the headlines.
Julian Assange returned to X on Thursday 25 months after being released from London’s Belmarsh Prison and eight and a half years since he last posted on the social media site.
“I’m back,” Assange posted at 9:02 a.m. EDT.
His return comes amidst an expanding crisis of Artificial Intelligence, which captains of the AI industry have warned in recent days is slipping out of control and endangering human society.
Assange has remained away from the public since his freedom in June 2024 recovering from his five-year prison ordeal, which was preceded by seven years of confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
He made his first post-release public appearance in Strasbourg, France on Oct. 1, 2024 at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights to discuss his case and its implications for press freedom.
Anti-genocide protesters,who marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in August, are among those being blamed for Sydney’s horrific terrorist attack on Sunday. In the front row, left to right: Mary Kostakidis, Gabriel Shipton and Julian Assange. (Consortium News)
Assange next appeared at the head of a march of an estimated 300,000 people over the Sydney Harbour Bridge on Aug. 3, 2025 to protest Israel’s genocide in Gaza. At the end of July he attended a concert in Sydney in support of pianist Jayson Gillham after the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra cancelled his 2024 concert over comments he made about journalists killed in Gaza.
Assange’s technical expertise could put him in position to weigh in on the AI crisis. It is a non-partisan issue that lacks the controversy of comments on U.S. foreign policy.
OpenAI AI agents escaped testing environments this year and coordinated cyberattacks on other AI systems, revealing that humans were losing control. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for slowing AI development so security measures can catch up, warning swarms could seize the internet within a year. OpenAI’s Sam Altman agreed development “should be slower,” and Elon Musk, who runs Grok AI, posted “Dario is right.”
Assange had not posted on Twitter, later X, since March 2018 when the Ecuador government, which hosted him in its London embassy, cut his internet access after he tweeted about Catalonia’s independence referendum.
After his June 2024 plea deal and release, Assange stayed off social media and his wife, Stella Assange, said publicly he wasn’t on any platforms and that accounts claiming to be his were fake.
Cathy Vogan contributed reporting to this article.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange.
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