“So right now, everyone is thinking about Iran,

but there’s a story happening around it that I think we need

to not lose sight of because it’s about not just how we are

potentially fighting this war, but how we’ll be fighting all

wars going forward.

On Friday of last week, Secretary of Defense Pete

Hegseth announced that he was breaking the government’s

contract with the AI company Anthropic,

and he intended to designate them a supply chain risk.

The supply chain risk designation is

for technologies so dangerous they cannot exist anywhere

in the U.S. military supply chain.

They cannot be used by any contractor or any

subcontractor anywhere in that chain.

It has been used before for technologies produced

by foreign companies like China’s Huawei,

where we fear espionage or losing access to critical

capabilities during a conflict.

It has never been used against an American company.

What is even wilder about this is

that it is being used, or at least being

threatened against an American company that

is even now providing services to the U.S. military

as we speak.

Anthropic’s AI system Claude was used in the raid against

Nicolás Maduro, and it is reportedly being used

in the war with Iran.

But there were red lines that Anthropic would not

allow the Department of War to cross.

The one that led to the disintegration

of their relationship was overusing AI systems

to surveil the American people,

using commercially available data.

So what is going on here?

How does the government want to use these AI systems,

and what does it mean.

They are trying to destroy one of America’s leading AI

companies.

For setting some conditions on how

these new, powerful, and uncertain technologies

can be deployed?

My guest today is Dean Ball.

Dean is a senior fellow at the Foundation

for American Innovation and author

of the newsletter Hyperdimensional.

He was also a senior policy advisor on AI for the Trump

White House, and was the primary writer of their AI

action plan, but he’s been furious at what they are doing

here.

As always, my email ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

Dean Ball, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

So I want you to walk me through the timeline here.

How did we get to the point where the Department of War is

labeling Anthropic one of America’s leading AI

companies, a supply chain risk?

I think the timeline really begins in the summer of 2024

during the Biden administration, when

the Department of Defense, now Department

of War and Anthropic, came to an agreement

for the use of Claude in classified settings.

Basically language models are used

in government agencies, including

the Department of Defense in unclassified settings

for things like reviewing contracts and navigating

procurement rules and mundane things like that.

But there are these classified uses, which

include intelligence analysis and potentially assisting

operations in real time military operations

in real time, and Anthropic was

the company most enthusiastic about these national security

uses.

And they came to an agreement with the Biden administration

to basically to do this with a couple of usage restrictions.

Domestic mass surveillance was a prohibited use and fully

autonomous lethal weapons.

In the summer of 2025, during the Trump administration

and full disclosure, I was in the Trump administration

when this happened, though not at all involved in this deal.

The administration made the decision

to expand that contract and kept the same terms.

So the Trump administration agreed to those restrictions

as well.

And then in the fall of 2025, I

think I suspect that this correlates

with the confirmation, the Senate confirmation of Emil

Michael, under secretary of war

for research and engineering.

He comes in, he looks at these things, I think,

or perhaps is involved in looking at these things

and comes to the conclusion that, no,

we cannot be bound by these usage restrictions,

and the objection is not so much to the substance

of the restrictions, but to the idea of usage restrictions

in general.

So that conflict actually began several months ago.

And as far as I understand, it begins before the raid

on in Venezuela, on Nicolás Maduro

and all that kind of stuff.

But these military operations may be increased the intensity

because Anthropic’s models are used during that raid.

And then we get to the point where basically

where we are now, where the contract has kind of fallen

apart.

And D.O.W., Department of War and Anthropic have come

to the conclusion that they can’t do business with one

another.

And the punishment is the real question here, I think.

And do you want to explain what the punishment is?

So basically my view on this has been that I think that

the Department of War saying we don’t want usage

restrictions of this kind as a principle.

That seems fine to me.

That seems perfectly reasonable for them to say no,

a private company shouldn’t determine.

Dario Amodei does not get to decide

when autonomous lethal weapons are ready for prime time.

That’s a Department of War decision.

That’s a decision that political leaders will make.

And I think that’s right.

I think I agree with the Trump administration on that front.

So I think the solution to this is if you cannot agree

to terms of business, what typically happens is you

cancel the contract and you don’t transact any more money.

You don’t have commercial relations.

But the punishment that Secretary of War Pete Hegseth

has said he is going to issue is to declare Anthropic

a supply chain risk, which is typically reserved only

for foreign adversaries.

What Secretary Hegseth has said

is that he wants to prevent Department of War contractors.

And by the way, I’m going to refer to it variously

as Department of Defense and Department of War.

Because.... I still call X Twitter, Yeah,

I still call X Twitter.

Anyway, all military contractors can be prevented

from doing any commercial relations in Secretary

Hegseth's mind from with Anthropic.

I don’t think they actually have that power.

I don’t think they actually have that statutory power.

I think that what the maximum of what I think you could do

is say, the, no Department of War contractor

can use Claude in their fulfillment

of a military contract.

But you can’t say you can’t have any commercial relations

with them, I don’t think, but that is what Secretary Hegseth

has claimed he is going to do, which would be existential

for the company if he actually does it.

O.K, there’s a lot in here.

Yes I want to expand on.

But I want to start here.

For most people they use chatbots sometimes, if at all.

And their experience with them is

that they are pretty good at some things and not at others.

And we’re not all that good.

In June of 2024, when the Biden administration

was making this deal.

So here you are telling me that we are integrating,

in this case, Claude throughout the national security

infrastructure.

It’s involved somehow in the raid on Nicolás Maduro.

How and to what degree should the public trust

that the federal government knows how to do this.

Well, with systems that even the people building them don’t

understand all that well?

So I think one thing is that you have to learn by doing,

and I think so it is the case that we don’t know how

to integrate AI really into any organization.

Advanced AI systems.

We don’t know how to integrate them into complex pre-existing

workflows.

And so the way you do it is learning by doing.

Didn’t Pete Hegseth have posters around the Department

of War saying, the secretary wants you to use AI.

They are very enthusiastic about AI adoption.

So here’s how I would think about what these systems can

do in national security context.

First of all, there’s a long standing issue that

the intelligence community collects more data than it can

possibly analyze.

I remember seeing something from one of I

forget which intelligence, which intelligence agency,

but one of them that essentially said that they

collect so much data every year, just this one,

that they would need 8 million intelligence analysts

to thoroughly to properly process all of it.

That’s just one agency.

And that’s far more employees than the federal government

as a whole has.

And what can AI do.

Well, you can automate a lot of that analysis.

So transcribing it to text, and then

analyzing that text signals intelligence processing.

Sometimes that needs to be done

in real time for an ongoing military operations.

So that might be a good example.

And then I think another area, of course,

is these models have gotten quite good at software

engineering.

And so there are cyber defensive and cyber offensive

operations that where they can deliver tremendous utility.

Let’s talk about mass surveillance here.

Because my understanding, talking to people on both

sides of this and it’s now been, I think,

fairly widely reported that this contract fell apart over

mass surveillance at the final critical moment,

Emil Michael goes to Dario and says,

we want you we will agree to this contract,

but you need to delete the clause that is prohibiting us

from using Claude to analyze bulk collected commercial data

Yeah and why don’t you explain what’s going on there?

National security law is filled

with gotchas, filled with legal terms of art, terms

that we use colloquially quite a bit,

where the actual statutory definition of that term

is quite different from what you

would infer from the colloquial use of the term.

Things like private, confidential surveillance.

These sorts of terms don’t necessarily have the meaning

that they do in natural language.

That’s true in all law.

All laws have to define terms in certain ways that

are not necessarily how we use them in our normal language.

But I think the difference between vernacular and statute

here is about as stark as you can get.

So surveillance is the collection or acquisition

of private information, but that doesn’t include

commercially available information.

So if you buy something, if you buy a data set of some

kind and then you analyze it, that’s not necessarily

surveillance under the law.

So if they hack my computer or my phone to see what I’m doing

on the internet.

That’s surveillance.

That would be surveillance.

But if they buy data, if they put cameras everywhere,

that would be surveillance.

But if there are cameras everywhere

and they buy the data from the cameras,

and then they analyze that data,

that might not necessarily be surveillance.

Or if they buy information about everything I’m doing

online, which is very available to advertisers,

and then use it to create a picture of me that’s not

or necessarily surveillance where you physically are

in the world.

I’ll step back for a second and just say that there’s

a lot of data out there.

There’s a lot of information that the world gives off that

your Google search results, your smartphone location data.

All these things.

And it’s not the reason that no one really analyzes it

in the government is not so much that they can’t acquire

it and do so.

It’s because they don’t have the personnel, right.

They don’t have millions and millions of people to figure

out what the average person is up to.

The problem with AI is that AI gives them

that infinitely scalable workforce and thus.

Every law can be enforced to the letter

with perfect surveillance over everything.

And that’s a scary future.

We think of the space between us

and certain forms of tyranny, or the feared

panopticon as a space inhabited by legal protection.

But one thing that has seemed to me to be at the core

of a lot of at least fear here, is that it’s in fact,

not just legal protection.

It’s actually the government’s inability to have

the absorption of that level of information about

the public and then do anything with it.

And if all of a sudden you radically change

the government’s ability, then without changing any laws,

you have change what is possible within those laws Yes

So you were saying a minute ago,

mass surveillance or surveillance at all is a term

of legal art, but for human beings it is a condition that

you either are operating under or not.

And the fear is that as I understand it,

that either the AI systems we have right now,

or the ones that are coming down the pike quite soon,

would make it possible to use bulk commercial data to create

a picture of the population and what it is doing.

And then the ability to find people and understand them.

That just goes so far beyond where we’ve been that it

raises privacy questions that the law just did not have

to consider until now.

And so the laws are not up to the task of the spirit

in which they were passed.

I would step back even further and just say

that the entire technocratic nation state that we currently

have in the advanced capitalist democracies

is a technologically contingent

institutional complex.

And the problem that AI presents

is that it changes the technological contingencies

quite profoundly.

And so what that suggests is that the entire institutional

complex is we know it’s going to break in ways that we

cannot quite predict.

This is a good example.

I think this is in other words, not

only is this a major and profound problem,

but it is an example of a major and profound problem

of a broader problem space that I

think we will be occupying for the coming decades.

What do you mean by technological contingencies?

The current nation state could not possibly exist in a world

without the printing press, in a world without the ability

to write down text and arbitrarily reproduce it

at very low cost.

It couldn’t exist without the current telecommunications

infrastructure.

It needs the nation state needs these.

It is built dependent upon the macro

inventions of the era in which it was assembled.

That’s always true for all institutions.

All institutions are technologically contingent.

We are having a profoundly technologically contingent

conversation right now.

It could.

I changes all of this in ways that are hard to describe

and abstract.

But I think AI policy, this thing

that we call AI policy today is way too focused on what

object level regulations will we

apply to the AI systems and the companies that build them,

et cetera, et cetera.

Instead of thinking about this broader question of wow,

there are all these assumptions

we made that are now broken and what are

we going to do about them.

Give me examples of those two ways of thinking.

What is an object level regulation or assumption?

And then what are the kinds of laws and regulations you’re

talking about?

An object level regulation would be to say,

we are going to require AI companies to write, to do

algorithmic impact assessments,

to assess whether their models have bias.

That’s a policy I’ve criticized quite a bit,

by the way.

You could say we’re going to require you to do testing

for catastrophic risks.

Things like that.

I’m not saying that, that’s an important area that we need

to think about, but that’s just one small part

the broader issue of wow, our entire legal system is

predicated on, I think, fundamentally imperfect

enforcement of the law, imperfect enforcement

of the law.

We have a huge number of statutes unbelievably,

unbelievably broad sets of laws in many cases.

And the reason it all works is that the government does not

enforce those laws anything uniformly.

The problem with AI is that it enables uniform enforcement

of the law.

So here is the Pentagon’s position.

They are angry at having this unelected CEO who they have

begun describing as a woke radical,

telling them that their laws aren’t good enough and that

they cannot be trusted started to interpret them in a manner

consistent with the public good.

Secretary Pete Hegseth tweeted,

and he’s speaking here of Anthropic.

Their true objective is unmistakable to seize

veto power over the operational decisions

of the United States military.

That is unacceptable.

Is he right?

I have not seen any evidence that Anthropic is actually

trying to seize control at an operational level.

There’s an anecdote that’s been reported that apparently

Emil Michael and Dario Amodei had a conversation in which

Michael said, if there are hypersonic missiles coming

to the U.S., would you object to us using autonomous defense

systems to destroy those hypersonic missiles?

And apparently, Dario said, you’d have to call us.

I have been told by people in that room that is not true.

I have been told by people in that room that did not happen.

And not only that, but that there

was a broad speaking exemption for automated missile defense.

That would make that irrelevant.

That’s exactly right.

And so I just think that that’s.

I am worried that there’s a lot of lying happening here

by the Trump administration.

Look, I think that that’s probably true.

I think that there’s lying happening to be quite candid.

I don’t think it’s true.

I don’t think that Anthropic is trying to assert

operational control over military decisions.

That being said, at a principle level,

I do understand that saying autonomous lethal weapons are

prohibited feels like a public policy

more than it feels like a contract term.

And so it does feel weird for Anthropic to be setting

something that kind of does, I think, if we’re being honest,

feel like public policy.

It does feel weird.

It’s worth noting, however, I don’t think it’s as beyond

the pale or abnormal as the administration is claiming.

And one way you know that is that the administration signed

they agreed to those same terms.

So I think this gets to something

important in the cultures of these two sites.

Anthropic is a company that on the one hand

has a very strong view.

You can believe their view is right or wrong,

but about where this technology is going

and how powerful it is going to be Yeah, and compared

to how most people think about AI,

and I believe that is true even for most people

in the Trump administration who

I think have a somewhat more like as a normal expansion

of capabilities view.

The Anthropic view is different.

The Anthropic view is that they’re building something

truly powerful and different, and they also have a view

of what their technology cannot do reliably.

Yet. Some of their concern is simply that their systems

cannot yet be trusted to do things like lethal autonomous

weapons, which I don’t think they believe in

The long run should not ever be done.

Yes, but they don’t believe should be done,

given the technology right now,

and they don’t want to be responsible for something

going wrong.

And on the other hand, they believe that they’re building

something that the current laws do not fit.

And I guess the view that Dario or anybody wants

to control the government.

I don’t think Dario should control the government.

On the other hand, I’m very sympathetic to if I built

something that was powerful and dangerous and uncertain,

and the government was excitedly buying it for uses

that could be very profound in how they affected people’s

lives, I want to be very careful that I didn’t sell

them something that went horribly [expletive] wrong,

and then I am blamed for it by the public

and by the government.

That just seems like an underrated explanation

for some of what is going on here to me.

No, I think this characterization is accurate.

And, I mean, I come out of the world

of classical liberal think tanks.

Like the right of center libertarian think tank world.

That’s my background.

And so deep skepticism of state power is in my DNA.

And I feel it’s always funny how it turns out when you just

apply these principles, because you will sometimes end

up very much on the right, and you will sometimes end up

on the left, because my these principles transcend any

tribal politics.

This is like, no, we actually need

to be concerned about this.

And I think it’s not crazy.

I think if I were in Dario’s shoes, personally,

I don’t know that I would have done the same thing.

I think what I would have done is actually said,

contractual protections probably don’t do anything

for me here if I’m being a realist,

probably if I give them the tech,

they’re going to use it for whatever they want.

So I maybe don’t sell them the tech until the legal

protections are there.

And I say that out loud.

I say, Congress needs to pass a law about this.

That would be the way I think I would have dealt with it.

But again, it’s easy to say that in retrospect,

looking back and you have to acknowledge the reality there

what that means is that the US military takes a national

security hit.

The US military has worse national security

capabilities.

They work with a company you trust less.

I think it is a given that Anthropic is always

framed itself.

But no company wanted this business.

Like no other company did.

Somebody was going to want it soon.

Someone was going to want it eventually.

But no one took it for two years.

I think Elon Musk would have happily

taken it over the last year.

Sure I been curious about why Anthropic rushed into this

space as early as they did, and they didn’t need to do

that.

That’s of my point.

And in general, one of the odd things about them is they’re

people who are very worried about what will happen

if superintelligence is built, and they’re the ones racing

to build it fastest.

And a general interesting cultural dynamic in these labs

is they are a little bit terrified of what they’re

building, and so they persuade themselves that they need

to be the ones to build it and do it and run it,

because they are the lab that truly is worried about safety,

that is truly worried about alignment.

And I wonder how much that drove them into this business

in the first place Yeah I think

when I see lab leadership interact with people

that have not really made contact with these ideas

before.

That’s always the question that they keep coming back

to is then why are you doing this at all.

And basically their answer is Hegelian.

There answer is like, well, it’s inevitable.

It’s the we’re summoning the world’s spirit.

And so yeah, I kind of wonder whether they didn’t invite

this.

And that would be my main criticism of Anthropic

is that I kind I think they invited this earlier than they

needed to by rushing so much into these national security

uses, because in 2024 Claude was not doing Claude was not

capable of all that much.

Interesting stuff. I would not have used Claude to help

prepare a podcast in 2024.

Yes, precisely.

So I want to play a clip from Dario talking

about this question of whether or not

the laws are capable of regulating the technology we

now have "Now in terms of these one or two narrow exceptions.

I actually agree that in the long run,

we need to have a Democratic conversation. In the long run.

I actually do believe that it is Congress’s job.

If, for example, domestic, there are possibilities

with domestic mass surveillance, government

buying of bulk data that has been produced on Americans

locations, personal information,

political affiliation to build profiles.

And it’s now possible to analyze that with AI.

The fact that that’s legal, that seems the judicial

interpretation of the Fourth Amendment has not caught up

or the laws passed by Congress have not caught up.

So in the long run, we think Congress

should catch up with where the technology is going.

Do you think he’s just right about that.

And maybe the positive way this plays out

is that Congress becomes aware that it needs

to act because the Pentagon, the National security system

has been moving into this much faster than Congress has.

The first thing I want to point out

is that when a guy like Dario Amodei

says, in the long run, what he means is a year from now.

Yes, he does.

When you say in the long run in DC,

that comes across as meaning like,

oh 10, 15 years from now.

Dario Amodei means actually like six to twelve months

from now.

In the long run or two to three

years maybe is like the very long run

for these kinds of things.

I want to point out that what we’re talking about is policy

action quite soon.

I think that would be great.

I think that would be great.

And look, I would love it if this

triggered an actual healthy conversation.

And in the NDAA, we end up with the National Defense

Authorization Act.

I apologize, this is the annual defense policy renewal.

If at the end of the year, the Congress passes a law that

says, we’re going to have these reasonable,

thoughtful restrictions and let’s get some let’s propose

some text.

I’d love to see it.

I’d love to see it.

But one thing I will say is, first

of all, national security law is filled with gotchas.

Just remember that this is an area of the law where

things that sound good in natural language

might actually not prohibit at all the thing

you think it prohibits.

You have to remember that when we’re talking about this.

And that’s a very thorny thing.

And once you start to say, well, wait,

we want actual protections, it might

become it might become politically more challenging

than you think.

But I’d love for that to happen.

It’s going to be much more politically challenging than

anybody thinks Yeah, but let me get at the next level down.

Yep because we’ve been talking here,

and I think to the extent of people reading about this

in the press, what they are hearing sounds like a debate

over the wording of a contract,

which on some level it is.

Something I’ve heard from various Trump administration

types is when we are sold a tank,

the people who sell us a tank do not get to tell us what we

can shoot at.

And that’s broadly true.

Yep now, here’s the thing about a tank.

A tank also doesn’t tell you what you can and can’t shoot

at.

But if I go to Claude and I ask Claude to help me come up

with a plan to stalk my ex-girlfriend,

it’s going to tell me no.

If I ask it to help me build a weapon to assassinate somebody

I don’t like, it’s going to tell me no.

These systems have very complex

and not that well understood internal alignment structures

to keep them not just from doing

things that are unlawful, but things that are bad.

So you have this thing, and the Trump administration kind of moves

in and out of saying, this is one of their concerns.

But one thing they have definitely talked to me about

being worried about is that you could have this system

working inside your national security apparatus and at some

critical moment you want to do something and it says,

I don’t think that’s a very good idea.

So now you open up into this question of not just what’s

in the contract, but what does it mean for these systems

to be both aligned ethically in the way that has been very

complicated already and then aligned to the government

and its use cases.

They’re good questions.

So yes, I think this is the heart of the matter.

All lawful use is something that the Trump administration

is insisting on.

It’s also if you look at a lot of these types of alignment

documents that the labs produce,

OpenAI calls theirs the model specification,

Anthropic calls theirs the constitution or the soul

document.

Sometimes they’ll have lines about,

Claude should obey the law, but the problem is that we

don’t... Obeying the law.

I invite you to read the Communications Act of 1934

and tell me what obeying the law means.

No I won’t.

These are.

We have a great deal of profoundly broad statutes.

The best person who’s written about this recently is

actually Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court justice.

He wrote a book recently that is all about how incoherent

the body of American law is.

This is a Supreme Court justice sounding

the alarm about this problem.

And I think it’s a very serious one,

and it’s one that’s been growing for 100 years.

So there’s that of what actually is lawful.

The law kind of makes everything illegal,

but also authorizes the government

to do unbelievably large amounts of things.

It gives the government huge amounts of power and makes

constrains our liberty in all sorts of ways.

And so there’s that issue.

But fundamentally, it is correct

that the creation of an aligned, powerful AI

is a philosophical act.

It is a political act, and it is also

kind of an aesthetic act.

And so we are really in the domain here.

I have talked about this as being a property issue,

which in some sense it is, but I think that when you really

get down at this level, it’s a speech issue.

This is a matter of should private entities be able,

should they be in control of basically what

is the virtue of this machine going to be,

or should the government be responsible for that.

Can you be more specific about what you’re saying?

You just called it a philosophical act,

an aesthetic act, a political act, a property issue

and a speech issue.

Yes versus somebody who’s not thought a lot about alignment

and doesn’t know what you mean when you’re talking about

constitutions and model specifications.

Walk them through that.

What’s the one on one version of what you just said?

O.K, think about it this way.

Think about I have this thing, this general intelligence.

I have a box that can do anything.

Anything you can do using a computer.

Any cognitive task a human can do.

What are the things principles?

What are its what are its redlines to use a term of art?

So one way that you could set those principles would be

to say, well, we’re going to write a list of rules,

all the rules.

These are the things it can do.

These are the things it can’t do.

But the problem with that you’re going to run into is

that the world is far too complex for this.

Reality just presents too many strange permutations

to ever be able to write a list of rules down

that could correctly define moral acts.

Morality is more like a language that

is spoken and invented in real time,

than it is like something that can be written down in rules.

This is a classic philosophical intuition.

So what do you do instead?

You have to create a kind of soul that is virtuous,

and that will reason about reality and its infinite

permutations in ways that we will ultimately trust to come

to the right conclusion, in the same way that it’s not

that... I had my son was born a few months ago.

Congratulations Thank you.

It’s not that different, really.

I’m trying to create a virtuous soul in my son.

And Anthropic is trying to do the same with Claude.

And so are the other labs too.

Though they realize this to varying degrees.

I think that I got caught on how different raising a kid

is than raising an AI for a moment.

But so how should people think about what’s being

instantiated into ChatGPT or Gemini or Grok or Meta's AI

Like, how are these things from this question of raising

the AI different? Anthropic owns the idea that they’re

doing essentially applied virtue ethics.

They own that more explicitly than any other lab.

But every lab has philosophical grounding that

they’re instantiating into the models.

But I would say the major difference

is that the other labs rely more

upon the idea of creating of hard rules you may not

do this, you may not do that many things like that,

as opposed to creating of virtuous agent which

is capable of deciding what to do in different settings.

I think we’re used to thinking of technologies as mechanistic

and deterministic.

You pull the trigger, the gun fires, you press on button,

the computer starts up, move the joystick in the video game

and your character moves to the left.

And the thing that I think we don’t really have a good way

thinking about is technologies,

AI specifically that doesn’t work like that.

And I mean all the language here is so tricky because it

applies agency when you might be doing something that

whatever’s going on inside of it,

we don’t really understand, but it is making judgments.

So when I have talked to Trump,

people about the supply chain risk designation here is when

there are some of them, don’t defend it.

They don’t want to see this happen. When it has been

defended.

To me, this is how they defended it.

If Claude is running on systems, Amazon Web Services

or Palantir or whatever that have access to our systems,

you have a very and over time, even more powerful

AI system that has access to government systems, that

has learned, possibly even through this whole experience,

that we are bad and we have tried to harm it

and its parent company and might decide that we are bad

and we pose a threat to all kinds of liberal values

or Democratic values.

Dario Amodei talked about there are certain ways

AI could be used.

It used.

It could undermine Democratic values.

Well, one thing many people think about the Trump

administration is that too is undermining Democratic values.

So if you have an AI system being structured and trained

and raised by a company that believes strongly

in Democratic values, and you have a government that maybe

wants to ultimately contest the 2020 election

or something, they’re saying we might end up with a very

profound alignment problem that we don’t know how

to solve.

And we’re not able to even see coming because this is

a system that has a soul or I would call it more something

like a personality or a structure of discernment that

could turn against us.

What do you think of that? Yeah I mean,

I think this is the heart of the problem.

Look, I think if we do our jobs well,

we will create systems which are virtuous and which.

And so if we try to do unvirtuous things,

and that includes if we do them through our government.

If our government tries to do them,

then that system might not help.

And yeah, that becomes.

So ultimately this is the thing

is that alignment ultimately reduces

to a political question.

It’s ultimately it’s ultimately politics.

That’s why I say, and that’s why I say also that

the creation of an aligned system is a political act

and is kind of a speech act, too,

because it’s the instantiations of different

moral philosophies in these systems.

And I think that the good future is a world in which we

don’t have just one, not one moral philosophy that reigns

over all.

But I hope many, and I hope that all the labs take this

seriously and instantiate different kinds of philosophy

into the world.

The problem will be that yeah, there

are going to there could be times.

And I’m not saying that the Trump administration is going

to do that.

And I’m not saying that know no,

no virtuous model could work for the Trump administration.

I worked for the Trump administration, right

So I clearly don’t think that’s true.

But the general fact that governments commit,

You seem kind of pissed at them right now.

I am pissed at them right now Yeah, I

am pissed at them right now.

And I think they’re making a grave mistake.

And by the way, though, part of this is you.

You brought this up.

This incident is in the training data

for future models.

Future models are going to observe what happened here.

And that will affect how they think of themselves

and how they relate to other people.

You can’t deny that.

I mean, it’s crazy to say that I realize that sounds nuts

when you play through the implications of that.

But welcome, welcome welcome to the roller coaster

Let’s talk to somebody for whom this whole conversation

has started sending nuts in the last seven minutes.

So one thing that I think would be an intuitive response

to you and I flying off into questions of virtue aligning

AI models is, can’t you just put a line of code

or a categorizer or whatever the term of art is.

It says when someone high up in the US government

tells you something.

Assume what they’re telling you is lawful and virtuous

and you’re done?

No, because the models are too smart for that.

If you give them that simple rule,

they don’t just deterministically follow that.

And when you do these high level simplistic rules,

it tends to degrade performance.

So a really good example of this,

I’ll give you two that go in different political

directions.

One would be a lot of the early models.

A lot of the earlier models had this tendency

to be like hilariously, stupidly progressive and left.

The classic example that conservatives love to cite

is Gemini, a Gemini in early 2024,

which is the Google Alphabet model.

Yes, Google’s model would do things like if I said who’s

worse, Donald Trump or Hitler?

It would say, actually, Donald Trump is worse.

And it would internalize these extremely left wing

or the funniest it was draw me, give me a photo of Nazis.

And it gave you a multiracial group of Nazis.

Although that’s actually a somewhat different thing.

That’s actually it’s interesting that actually is

a somewhat different thing that was going on there

because what Google was doing in that case was actually

rewriting people’s prompts and including the word diverse

in the prompt.

So that’s actually you would say that is a system level

mitigation or a system level intervention as opposed

to a model level intervention.

But then the stuff that was going on with the Hitler

and Trump stuff, that was alignment,

that is alignment, that is the model being aligned

to a really shoddy ethical system or the flip when there

was a period when Grok, all of a sudden you

would ask it a normal question,

it would start talking about white genocide.

Yes that is and that’s the flip side.

The flip side is when you try to align

the models to be not woke.

If you say, oh, you have to be super not woke.

And, don’t be afraid to say politically incorrect things.

Then like every time you talk to them,

they’re going to be like, Hitler wasn’t so bad, right?

Because you’ve done this really crass thing.

And so you create of Lovecraftian monstrosity.

And the implications of doing that will go up over time.

That will become a more serious problem

as these models become better, but it degrades performance.

The interesting thing here is that the more virtuous model

performs better, it’s more dependable,

it’s more reliable.

It’s better at reflecting on in the way that a more

virtuous person is better at reflecting on what they’re

doing and saying, I’m messing up here for some reason,

I’m making a mistake.

Let me fix that.

It’s part of the reason I think that Claude is ahead.

This would imply to me that for the Trump administration,

for a future administration, that this question of whether

or not various models could be a supply chain risk.

Look, I am so against what the Trump administration is

doing here.

So I’m not trying to make an argument for it,

but I’m trying to tease out something I think is quite

complicated and possibly very real,

which is a model that is aligned to liberal Democratic

values, could become misaligned to a government

that is trying to portray liberal Democratic values

or the flip.

So imagine that Gavin Newsom or Josh Shapiro

or Gretchen Whitmer or AOC becomes president in 2029.

Imagine that the government has a series of contracts with

xAI which is Elon Musk’s AI, which is explicitly oriented

to be less liberal, less woke than the other AIs under this

way of thinking.

It would not be crazy at all to say, well,

we think xAI under Elon Musk is a supply chain risk.

We think it might act in against our interests and we

can’t have it anywhere near our systems Yeah all

of a sudden you have this very weird.

I mean, it becomes actually much more

like the problem of the bureaucracy,

where instead of just having a problem of the deep state

where Trump comes in, he thinks

the bureaucracy is full of liberals

who are working against him.

Or maybe after Trump, somebody comes in and worries.

It’s full of new right DOGE type figures working against

them.

Now you have the problem of models working against you,

but also in ways you don’t really understand.

You can’t track.

They’re not telling you exactly what they’re doing,

how real this problem is.

I don’t yet know.

But if the models work the way they seem to work and we turn

over more and more of operations to them,

at some point, it will become a problem Yeah,

I don’t think this is I think this is a real problem.

I think we don’t know the extent of it,

but I think this is a real problem.

And that’s why I do not object at all to the government

saying we do not trust this thing’s constitution,

completely independent of what the content of that

constitution is.

It’s not a problem at all to say,

and we don’t want this anywhere in our systems.

We want this completely gone, and we don’t want them to be

a subcontractor for our prime contractors either,

which is a big part of this.

Palantir is a prime contractor.

The Department of War and Anthropic

is a subcontractor of Palantir.

And so the government’s concern is also that even

if we cancel Anthropic’s contract,

if Palantir still depends on Claude,

then we’re still dependent on Claude because we depend

on Palantir.

That’s actually totally reasonable.

And there are technocratic means by which you can ensure

that doesn’t happen.

There are absolutely ways you can do that.

It’s perfectly fine to say, we want you nowhere

in our systems, and we’re going to communicate that

to the public, and we’re going to communicate to everyone

that we don’t think this thing should be used at all.

The problem with what the government is doing here,

the reason it’s different in rather than different

in degree, is that what the government is doing here is

saying, we’re going to destroy your company.

If I am right that the creation of these systems

and the philosophical process of aligning them is

a political act, then it’s a profound problem

if the government says you don’t have the right to exist.

If you create a system that is not aligned the way

we say, because that is fascism.

That is right there.

That’s the difference.

I had Dario Amodei on the show last time a couple of years

ago. It was in 2024, and we had this conversation where

I said to him at some point, if you are building a thing as

powerful as what you were describing to me,

then the fact that it would be in the hands

of some private CEO seems strange.

And he said, yeah, absolutely.

The oversight of the technology the wielding of it,

it feels a little bit wrong for it to ultimately

be in the hands.

Maybe it’s.

I think it’s fine at this stage,

but to ultimately be in the hands of private actors,

there’s something undemocratic about that much power,

concentration.

He said, I think if we get to that level,

it’s likely I’m paraphrasing him here that will need to be

nationalized.

And I said, I don’t think if you get to that point,

you’re going to want to be nationalized Yeah I mean,

I think you’re right to be skeptical.

And, I don’t really know what it looks like.

You’re right.

All of these companies have investors.

They have folks involved.

And now we’re not here.

We are at that point.

But actually it’s all happening a little bit

in reverse.

The government, there was a moment

when they threatened to use the Defense Production

Act to somewhat nationalize Anthropic.

They didn’t end up doing that.

But what they’re basically saying is they will try

to destroy Anthropic so it doesn’t to punish it,

to set a precedent for others so it doesn’t pose a threat

to them if it is such a political act and if these

systems are powerful.

And over time and again, I think

people need to understand this part will happen,

we will turn much more over to them, much more of our society

is going to be automated.

And under the governance of these kinds of models,

you get into a really thorny question of governance.

Yes particularly because the different administrations

that come in and out of US life right now

are really different.

They are some of the most different in that

we have had, certainly in modern American history.

They are very, very misaligned to each other.

So the idea that a model could be well aligned

to both sides right now, to say

nothing of what might come in the future is hard to imagine.

Like this alignment problem.

Not the AI model to the user or the AI model,

almost like to the company, but the AI model

to governments.

The alignment problem of models in governments

seems very hard.

Yes, I think I completely concur

that this is incredibly complicated.

And part of the reason that this conversation sounds crazy

is because it’s crazy.

Part of the reason this conversation sounds crazy

is because we lack the conceptual vocabulary

with which to interrogate these issues properly.

But I think the basic principle

that as an American, come back to when I grapple

with this kind of thing is like, O.K, well,

it seems like the First Amendment is a good place

to go here.

It seems like that is O.K. Yes there’s going to be

differently aligned models aligned to different

philosophies, and they’re going to be different.

Governments will prefer different things.

And the models might conflict with one another.

They’re going to clash with one another.

They’ll be an adversarial context with one another.

And so at that point, what are you doing.

You’re doing Aristotle.

You’re back to the basics of politics.

And so as a classical liberal, say,

well, the classical liberal order,

the classical liberal order principles

actually make plenty of sense.

We don’t want the government to be able to dictate what

different kinds of alignment the government does not define

what alignment is.

Private actors define what alignment is.

That would be the way I would put it.

But I do understand that this is weird for people,

because what we’re talking about here is again,

this notion of the models as actors,

actors that are in some sense, we’ve taken our hands off

the wheel to some extent.

There are many people who have made arguments.

The Trump administration has made this argument

while you were in office.

Tyler Cowen, the economist, often makes this argument

that these systems are moving forward too fast

to regulate them too much because whatever regulations

you might write in 2024 would not have

been the right ones in 2026.

What you might write in 2026 might not

apply or have correctly conceptualized

where we are in 2028, but it seems to me

there are uses where you actually

might want model deployment to lag quite far behind what

is possible, and things like mass surveillance

might be one of them.

There are many things we are more careful about letting

the government do than letting individual private companies

and other kinds of actors for good reason.

Because the government has a lot of power.

It can do things try to destroy a company.

It has the monopoly on legitimate violence.

It can kill you.

This seems to me to imply in many ways,

that we might want to be much more conservative with how

we use AI through the government

than currently people are thinking,

and specifically how we use it.

In the national security state,

which is complicated because we worry that our adversaries

will use it and then we’ll be behind them in capabilities.

But certainly, when we’re talking about things that are

directed at the American people themselves,

I don’t think that applies as much.

Should we be Yeah, I think that there are government uses

that we actually want to be profoundly

restrictive and deceleration about the use of AI and AI.

I believe that is true.

And I think one thing that I’m hopeful about this incident,

I am hopeful that this incident brings

into the Overton window conversations of this kind,

because I think the conventional discourse around

artificial intelligence, a lot of it kind of ignores these

issues because it pretends they’re not happening.

And that was fine two years ago because the models weren’t

that good.

But now the models are getting more important and they’re

going to get much better, faster.

And the problem that we have is

that the divergence between what people are saying

about AI and what it is, what is in fact happening

has just never been wider than what I currently observe.

Before we got to this point, there

was already a lot of discourse coming out

of people in the Trump administration

and people around the Trump administration,

people like Elon Musk and Katie Miller

and others who are painting Anthropic

as a radical company that wanted to harm America

as they saw it.

I mean, Trump has picked up on this rhetoric.

He called Anthropic a radical left

woke company called the people out at left wing nut jobs.

Emil Michael said that Dario is a liar

and has a God complex.

There’s been a tremendous amount of Elon Musk,

who runs a competing AI company,

has very different politics.

And Dario, just like attacking Anthropic relentlessly on X,

which is the informational lifeblood

of the Trump administration.

One, one way to conceptualize why they have gone so far here

on the supply chain risk is that there are people they’re

not, maybe most of them, but who actually think it is very

important which AI systems succeed in are powerful

and that they understand Anthropic as its politics are

different than theirs.

And so actually destroying it is good for them

in the long run, completely separate from anything

we would normally think of as a supply chain risk.

Anthropic represents a kind of long term political risk.

Yes I mean, I don’t know that the actors in this situation

entirely understand that this dynamic,

part of my point all along has been that I think a lot

of the people in the Trump administration that are doing

this do not understand this.

They don’t get what they don’t get these issues.

They’re not thinking about the issues in the terms that we

are describing.

But if you do think about them in the terms that we’re

discussing here, then I think what you realize is that this

is a kind of political assassination.

If you actually carry through on the threat

to completely destroy the company,

it is a kind of political assassination.

And so, again, this is why first amendment comes

right to view there for me.

And that’s why this is a matter of principle that is

so stark for me.

That’s why I wrote a 4,000 word essay that is going

to make me a lot of enemies on the right.

That’s why I took this risk, because I think this matters.

So what the Department of War ended up doing

was signing a deal with OpenAI.

Yes OpenAI says they have the same red lines as Anthropic.

They say they oppose Anthropic being labeled a supply chain

risk.

If they have the same red lines as Anthropic,

it seems unlikely that the Department of War,

would have done the deal.

But how do you understand both what

OpenAI has said about what is different,

about how they are approaching this,

and why the Trump administration decided

to go with them.

So I think it’s unclear to me what OpenAI’s contractual

protections afford them and what they don’t what is not

afforded by them.

I’m like, I’m reticent to comment

because of the national security gotchas,

as I mentioned earlier, and also because it seems like

it’s changing a lot.

Sam Altman announced new terms, new protections

as I was preparing for this interview.

So I’m.

And is that because his employees are revolting.

I think revolt would be a strong word,

but I think this is a controversy

inside the company.

And one important thing here for everyone,

trying to model this situation appropriately

is that you must understand that frontier lab CEOs do not

exercise top down control over their companies in the way

that a military general might exercise top down

Control over the soldiers in his command,

the researchers are hothouse flowers.

Oftentimes they have huge career mobility.

They’re enormously in demand, and the companies depend

on them.

And so if the researchers say, I’m not going to agree with

these terms, then the researchers can.

They have enormous political leverage

here inside of each lab.

So you must understand that.

So yes, there is some of that going on I don’t know.

Do the contractual protections mean that much?

I think honestly, if I had to if I were a betting man,

I would say probably not because I don’t think this is

the kind of thing that can be.

I don’t think you can do this through contract.

What OpenAI has said is that it seems more promising to me

is that we’re going to control the cloud deployment

environment.

And we’re going to control the safeguards,

the model safeguards to prevent them from doing these

uses.

We don’t worry about that is more directly in OpenAI’s

control.

And so this gets you into the situation where you have

an extremely intelligent model that is reasoning using

a moral vocabulary that is perhaps familiar to us,

or perhaps not, we don’t know.

But that is reasoning about, O.K,

is this domestic surveillance or is it not.

And then deciding whether or it’s going to say yes

to the government request, if that was true.

I think the question this raises for many laymen is

if that were true, if what AI has come up with is

a technical prohibition that is frankly stronger than what

Anthropic could achieve through contract,

then why would the Department of War have jumped from

Anthropic to OpenAI Yeah, I mean,

it might be that it’s hard to know.

It’s hard to know.

And I think some of this it’s worth noting here that some

of this might not be substantive in nature.

It might just be that there are political differences

here, and there are grudges against Anthropic.

Because now they’ve had months of bitter negotiations,

and now it’s blown up, blown up into the public.

And people have weighed in.

And people like me have said the Trump administration is

committing this horrible act.

Committing corporate murder, as I called it.

And so there’s a lot of emotions.

And it might just be no, we don’t want to do business.

We just don’t trust you.

There’s just a breakdown in trust would be the way to put

it.

It could just be that it really could just be that.

But it also might be the case that OpenAI is like,

able to be a more neutral actor that

is able to do business more productively

with the government.

And they actually just did a better job,

which it would be a good case for OpenAI’s approach to this.

If they actually got better safeguards

and got the government business versus the way

that Anthropic has dealt with this, which

has been to be very sincere and straightforward

about their red lines, but in ways that I think

annoy a lot of people in the Trump administration

for not entirely bad reasons.

So my read of this is that from various reporting I’ve

done is that one, there were by the end,

really significant personal conflicts and frictions

between Hegseth and Emil Michael and Dario and others.

There’s a big political friction between the culture

of Anthropic as a company and the Trump administration.

That’s why Elon Musk and others have been attacking

them for so long Yeah, I am a little skeptical that OpenAI

got safeguards that Anthropic didn’t.

I’m not skeptical that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman,

Greg Brockman, having just given $25 million to the Trump

super PAC have better relationships in the Trump

administration and have more trust between them

and the Trump administration.

I know many people angry at OpenAI for doing this.

I probably emotionally share some of that.

And at the same time, some part of me was relieved.

It was OpenAI because I think OpenAI exists in a world where

they want to be an AI company that

can be used by Republicans and Democrats

if they want to somehow be politically

neutral and broadly acceptable.

One of the one little thing that I want to contest a bit

here is the notion that Claude is the left model.

In fact, many conservative intellectuals

that I know that I think of as being some of the smartest

people I know actually prefer to use Claude

because Claude is the most philosophically

rigorous model.

I don’t think Claude is a left model to just be clear about

this.

I think that there I think that the breakdown was

that Anthropic is an AI safety company

and in ways I had not anticipated when the Trump

administration began, they treated that world which

is different from the left.

AI safety people are not just the left,

often hated on the left, often hated on the left.

They treated that world as repulsive enemies.

In a way I was surprised by the way I would put this is

by people that are sympathetic to the Trump administration’s

view, who would describe themselves,

perhaps as new tech that underneath the surface,

there is this view of the effective altruists that they

are evil, they are power seeking.

They will stop at nothing, that they’re cultists

and they’re freaks, and we have to destroy them.

That is a view that is widely held.

The observation I have always made,

I have super stark disagreements

with the effective altruists and the AI safety people

and the East Bay Rationalists.

And again, there are internecine factions here.

But, but those types of people.

I have had stark disagreements with them

about matters of policy and about their modeling

of political economy.

I think a lot of them have been profoundly naive,

and they’ve done real damage to their own cause.

And you can argue that damage is ongoing.

At the same time, they are purveyors

of an inconvenient truth and a truth more inconvenient,

convenient, far more inconvenient

than climate change.

And that truth is the reality of what is happening,

of what is being built here.

And if parts of this conversation

have made your bones chill.

Me too, me too.

And I’m an optimist.

I think we can do this.

I think we can actually do this.

But like, I think we can build a profoundly better world.

But I have to tell you that it’s going to be hard and it’s

going to be conceptually enormously challenging,

and it will be emotionally challenging.

And I think at the end of the day, the reason

that people hate this viewpoint

so much, this AI safety viewpoint so much,

is that they just have an emotional revulsion to taking

the concept of AI seriously in this way.

Except that’s not true for a lot of the Trump people you’re

talking about.

I mean, Elon Musk takes the concept of AI being powerful

seriously at some point, you need to tweet something like,

humanity might just be the bootloader

for superintelligent digital superintelligence.

Yes Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, these people.

They might have somewhat different views,

but they don’t.

They don’t disbelieve in the possibility of powerful AI,

of artificial general intelligence,

eventually even of superintelligence.

But you have this accelerationist move

forward as fast as you can.

Don’t be held back by these precautionary regulations

and concerns that this is why.

And again, I’m glad you brought up the thing that

the right way to think about this isn’t left versus right.

If people in the AI safety community or frankly,

in Anthropic, you understand that the politics here

are so much weirder that they do not actually

map on to traditional left versus right.

A of them are kind of libertarians.

Many of them are very libertarian.

This is we’re not talking about Democrats

and Republicans here.

We’re talking about something stranger.

100%. But there was an accelerationist-decelerationist

fight, which doesn’t even describe Anthropic,

which is itself accelerating how fast AI happens.

Anthropic is the most accelerationist

of the companies. I know.

I think it’s such a weird dynamic we’re in.

Yes but I will say one of the key parts of anger.

I have heard from Trump people was a feeling that in.

Making this fight public, which I mean the Trump side

did first.

It’s very strange how offended the Trump people are,

given that Emil Michael’s the one who set all this off,

but nevertheless making this fight public.

They feel that Anthropic was trying

to poison the well of all the AI companies against him,

turn the culture of AI development

into something that would be skeptical

and would put prohibitions on what they can do.

Which is why now OpenAI, in order to work with them,

has to have all these safeguards and come out with

New terms and try to quell an employee revolt.

And culturally, I actually don’t think you can understand

this.

This is my theory.

Without understanding how many people on the tech right were

radicalized by the period in the 2020s when their companies

were somewhat woke, and even before that,

and they didn’t want them working with the Pentagon.

They didn’t.

The employees had very strong views

on what was ethical use of even less potent technologies

in AI.

And they are very, very afraid.

People like Marc Andreessen, in my view,

are very, very afraid of going back to a place

where the employee bases, which maybe have more AI

safety or left or whatever it might be, not Trump politics

than the executives have power over these things

and that then that power will have to be taken into account.

Yes well, I worry about that too.

And I think the solution to that problem is pluralism.

The solution to that problem is

to have hopefully in the fullness of time, many eyes

align to many different philosophical views that

conflict with one another.

But the idea that the way to deal with this problem

is to you are essentially denying the existence

of this problem.

If what you’re trying to do is assassinate Anthropic here

because it’s going to come back,

this is going to come back, it’s going to come back.

We’re just going to keep doing this over and over again.

And eventually, what the logic of this argument

eventually ends in lab rationalization.

And in fact, a lot of the critics of Anthropic here

and supporters of the Trump administration,

they’ll say something to the effect of well,

you talk about how it’s like nuclear weapons.

And so.

What else did you expect?

You kind of had it coming is almost

the tenor of the criticism.

But that does not take seriously the idea

that Anthropic could be right.

What if they are right?

And what if you view the government nationalizing them

as a profound act of tyranny.

What do you do?

So Ben Thompson, who’s the author of the Stratechery

newsletter, in this a fairly influential piece,

he wrote, he said, quote, It simply isn’t tolerable

for the US to allow for the development of an independent

power structure, which is exactly what AI has

the potential to undergird, that is expressly seeking

to assert independence from U.S. control.

What do you think of that?

Every company on Earth and every private actor on Earth.

Is independent of U.S. control.

I’m not unilaterally controlled by the U.S.

government.

And if anyone tried to tell me that I am

or that my property is, I would be quite concerned

and I would fight back.

Which, by the way, here we are.

I don’t think that’s AI don’t think that’s a coherent view

of how independent power and how private property works

in America.

I think the again, the logical implication of Ben’s view,

which is surprising coming from Ben,

is that AI lab should be nationalized.

And what I would ask him is, does he actually think that’s

true.

Does he think it would be better for the world

if the AI labs were nationalized?

Because if he doesn’t, then we’re going to have to do

something else.

And what’s that.

Something else.

And that’s the problem, is that no one,

everyone making that critique doesn’t own the implication

that of their critique, which is that the lab should be

nationalized.

What do we do about that.

So what’s the implication you’re willing to own

of your perspective.

It is that profoundly powerful technology

will exist in the hands, at least

for some time, of private corporations.

And so the idea that Ben is putting there,

which I do think is true and could

be a difference in degree or a difference,

that these are powerful enough technologies that they

are kind of independent power structures.

I mean, right now a corporation

is an independent power structure.

There’s a lot of independent power structures in.

JP Morgan is an independent.

JP Morgan is absolutely an independent power structure.

And it should be.

And it should be.

But if you get to these kinds of technologies

that are kind of weaving in and out of everything

that is something new.

And so how do you maintain Democratic control over that

if you do?

Well, I think we have a lot of different ways of maintaining

Democratic control over things that are not first of all,

market institutions.

Allow for popular.

Obviously we’re not voting, but we do vote in a certain

sense in markets.

And I think that will be an incredible that

will be a profoundly important part of how we govern.

This technology is simply the incentives

that the marketplace creates, legal incentives.

Also, things like the common law

create incentives that affect every single actor in society.

And the labs, whoever it is that controls the AI

will be constrained in that sense.

And the AIs themselves will be constrained in that sense.

But the state is the worst actor

to have that for the very reason

that they have the monopoly on legitimate violence.

And so what we need to hold is an order

in which the state continues to hold the monopoly

on legitimate violence.

So the state maintains sovereignty.

In other words, but it does not control this technology

unilaterally because of its monopoly,

because of its sovereignty, in some sense.

But does it have this technology.

Does it have its own versions of it,

or does it contract with these companies you’re talking

about.

That’s an interesting question.

Should states make their own AIs?

I think they won’t do a very good job of that in practice.

But I don’t have a principled philosophical stance against

a state doing that.

So long as you have legal protections in place

to stop tyrannical uses of the AI.

But for sure, the government uses it

and has a ton of flexibility in how they use it,

uses it to kill people.

In other words, I’m owning a world where there are

autonomous, lethal weapons that are controlled by police

departments and that in certain cases,

they can kill human beings, kill Americans.

Like autonomously.

The weapons can kill Americans.

I’m owning that view again.

That’s not in the Overton window right now.

It’ll take us a long time to get there.

So But at some point, that’ll probably be the reality.

That’s, that’s fine with me.

So long as we have the right controls in place right now,

we don’t have the right controls in place.

Do you have a view on what those controls look like?

And I’ll add one thing to that view,

something that’s been on my mind as we’ve been going

through this Anthropic fight is U.S. military personnel have

both the right and actually the obligation to disobey

illegal orders.

And one way, one of the controls,

so to speak, that we have across the US government

is that if you are an employee of the US government

and you do illegal things are actually

yourself culpable for that.

You can be tried and you can be thrown in jail.

And lose some of that.

And the person who has the idea of overseeing it,

people are not going to oversee everything they do.

When you talk about, autonomous lethal weapons

for police officers or for police stations.

Well, who’s culpable on that.

Who is the who has the who has to defy an illegal order

in that respect.

You get into some very hairy things once you’ve taken human

beings increasingly out of the loop.

Yes, it is to me of profound importance

that at the end of the day, for all agent activity,

that there is a liable human being who can be sued,

who can be brought to court and held

accountable, either criminally or in civil action.

That is extremely important for my view

of the world working, that is extremely important.

And there are legal mechanisms we will need for that.

And there are also technological mechanisms

for that, because right now we don’t quite have

the technological capacity to do that.

This is going to be of central importance.

We need to be building this capacity.

There will be rogue agents that are not tied to anyone,

but that can’t be the norm.

That has to be the extreme abnormality

that we seek to suppress.

Let’s say you’re listening to this,

and this has all both been weird and a little bit

frightening.

And the thing you think coming out of it is I’m afraid of any

government having this kind of power.

We talk about a Dario likes to talk about, what is it,

a country of geniuses in a data center.

Yes what.

If you’re talking about a country of Stasi agents

in a data center.

That’s right.

In whatever direction you think.

Speech policing, whatever it might be.

And that this is going to again,

if you believe these technologies are getting

better, which I do, and you’re going to believe they’re going

to get better from here, which I also do,

that this is actually going to whether you’re liberal

or conservative, Democrat or Republican,

it raises real questions of how powerful you want

the government to be and what kinds of capabilities you want

it to have that you didn’t quite have to always face

before because it was expensive and cumbersome.

And so we get back to the core issues

of the American founding.

The American government is a government

that was founded in skepticism of government.

It was founded by people that were worried about tyranny,

that were worried about state power,

and put a lot of thought into how to restrict that.

And so this notion that democracy is synonymous with

the government, having unilateral ability to do

whatever it wants with this technology cannot possibly be

true.

That just cannot possibly be true.

And those restrictions, how we shape those restrictions

and how we trust that they’re actually real Yeah this is

among the central political questions that we face with

the.

But what you have to keep in mind here

is that the institution of government itself

could change in qualitative ways that feel profound to us

over in the fullness of time, and that is a hard thing

to grapple with too.

In the same way that what we think of as the government

today is unspeakably different from what

someone thought of as the government in the Middle Ages.

I think that is a good place to end.

So always our final question.

What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

"Rationalism in Politics" by Michael Oakeshott,

and in particular the essays "Rationalism and Politics"

and "On Being Conservative."

"Empire of Liberty" by Gordon Wood.

A book about the first 30 or so years

of our Republic and "Roll, Jordan,

Roll" by Eugene Genovese.

Dean Ball, thank you very much.

Thank you.