“Here’s the deal,” the Urbit crew heard the No Agency guy say. “You give me back those twenty hats, I give you back your five thousand dollars, and I never fucking talk to you again.”
In an alternate universe, sneerclub is an intelligence agency that installed yarvin and yud to create urbit and MIRI as a psyop. They're there to consume the energy and resources of TREACLES peoples, to hinder any effort to align AI, because sneerclub was set up by a terminator sent back in time by the basilisk.
...stopping here lest I continue writing AU AI fiction
This is basically the premise of Charles Stross' Singularity Sky duology (never got more than 2 books because he realized he'd written himself into a corner). A weakly godlike AI dispatches human agents to throw wrenches into the works of people who might inadvertently violate causality within its lightcone. Of course your premise is time travel so the Eschaton's agents will arrive to drug you shortly.