(Preview) The Anthropic Mess Continues, Frontier AI and the Uncertain Future of Law, Q&A on Netflix, Dating Apps, F1

Ben and Andrew react to a week of Anthropic discussion, including Dario Amodei’s leaked memo to employees, why a compromise is still possible, and answering a variety of questions in response to Ben’s article this week. At the end: A terrible AI law for young parents, surveying the implications for Netflix after Paramount wins the Warner Brothers bidding, a dispatch from dating app hell, a question about feeds on chatbots, should Google be the model for ChatGPT ads?, and thoughts on the business of F1 and the new season.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech.

• 0:08Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, it's great to see you. It's great to be back. How you doing?

• 0:21Ben Thompson?

  I'm doing okay. I mean, it looks like you just leave, go on vacation, let me go to my own devices and I just go out and get canceled, apparently.

• 0:28Andrew Sharp?

  Can I tell you what? Nothing on my vacation was more relaxing than not recording a Friday night emergency episode about Anthropic versus the Trump administration.

• 0:41Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, we're not doing those anymore.

• 0:42Andrew Sharp?

  We may be post emergency episode on this podcast, but we are going to talk about Anthropic and the Trump administration on this podcast. One week ago, for anybody who's missed it, the Trump administration canceled a defense contract with Anthropic and announced a plan to phase Anthropic out of all government institutions within the next six months or so. That will take some time. Secretary Pete Hegseth.

• 1:06Ben Thompson?

  If it happens.

• 1:07Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah, TBD on all of this. It's changing by the day here. Pete Hegseth also threatened to label the company a supply chain risk to national security, potentially implicating many more Anthropic contracts.

• 1:21Ben Thompson?

  Well, he wouldn't be on that. He said that no one who has contracts with the US can work with Anthropic, which goes even, supply chain risk is a very extreme measure. It also does not go that far. So there's like, there's, there's been some definitional issues all along.

• 1:40Andrew Sharp?

  Broadening the scope of the potential implications, at least in Hegseth's tweet, and they have not followed through on that threat one week later. So again, TBD on a lot of this. For now, we will talk about everything you wrote earlier in the week. I wrote about it for Friday as well. We do have to start with the updates as we record Thursday afternoon here. I'll read from the information, which republished an internal memo from Dario Amodei to Anthropic employees.

• 2:10Andrew Sharp?

  It was a long memo. This is not the whole memo, but it did culminate with this. The real reasons D O W and the Trump administration do not like us is we haven't donated to Trump. While OpenAI slash Greg have donated a lot. That's Greg Brockman for anyone keeping track. Dario continues and says, we haven't given dictator style praise to Trump while Sam has. We have supported AI regulation, which is against their agenda. We've told the truth about a number of AI policy issues like job displacement. And we've actually held our red lines with integrity rather than colluding with them to produce, quote, "safety theater for the benefit of employees."

• 2:51Andrew Sharp?

  In parentheses, he says, "which I absolutely swear to you is literally what everyone at D O W, Palantir, our political consultants, et cetera, assumed was the problem we were trying to solve." Sam is now, with the help of D O W, trying to spin this as we were unreasonable. We didn't engage in a good way. We were less flexible, et cetera. I want people to recognize this as the gaslighting it is. And then, just to keep all of us on our toes, like, four hours after that memo leaked, we got a headline from the Financial Times. Anthropic chief back in talks with the Pentagon about an AI deal. So, what do you make of that?

• 3:32Ben Thompson?

  What important detail about this memo is this was a memo he wrote last Friday. It was not a memo he wrote yesterday. Yes. So, the memo was published on Wednesday, but it, yes, it was in the heat of the moment. Uh, is the memo a good look? Uh, no, it's not. Does the memo of Vince a accurate theory of mind for everyone that Amodei is?

• 4:02Ben Thompson?

  Interacting with, I don't think so.

• 4:05Andrew Sharp?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:06Ben Thompson?

  I found this memo quite validating, actually, in terms of what I wrote, which it's always the, you know, I have a principle. Assume everyone is smart and figure out why they're doing dumb things.

• 4:19Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 4:19Ben Thompson?

  And sometime, and no one is denying that Dara Amin is smart and brilliant and everyone at Anthropic is.

• 4:26Andrew Sharp?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:27Ben Thompson?

  And yet I've felt for ages, they and this sort of broader movement uh, has had a significant blind spot, which we talked about in our first podcast of the year. We were going to the dorm room.

• 4:41Andrew Sharp?

  Mm hmm.

• 4:42Ben Thompson?

  And that blind spot is the, the, this entire article, we talked about that Dorgish Patel wrote about the future when AI does everything and humans have no worth. Everything in the world was different, except for modern conceptions of property rights, which were still the exact same.

• 4:58Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 4:58Ben Thompson?

  And, and like, that was one of the pushbacks we had. And you almost feel silly pointing this out. And we're going to get to, sorry, a couple emailers. I know I'm already going to go in on you for similar, similar reasons here.

• 5:11Andrew Sharp?

  Mm hmm.

• 5:12Ben Thompson?

  But like, there's just this weird blind spot that is consistently there that I feel like was at role in this case. It's like there's assumption that certain rules and laws are immutable and no sort of conception about how do laws come to exist? Like, it's kind of funny because the first article, or when ChatGPT came out, I wrote that, an article called AI homework.

• 5:39Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 5:40Ben Thompson?

  And just sort of like, you know, it, it sort of opened with a, I asked a question about Hobbes versus Locke. And the ChatGPT got it wrong. And I thought that was sort of interesting, sort of started the initial like, like hallucinations, obviously a bad thing, but also amazing. And then you can sort of understand how that particular illusion happened. And because Hobbes and Locke are always referenced together in like textbooks. And it basically confused their two views. This is ChatGPT 3.5, right?

• 6:07Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah. This was very early on. One of my favorite articles of yours.

• 6:11Ben Thompson?

  Well, thank you. Um, I, I think that's a compliment. Um, but the, the, but.

• 6:17Ben Thompson?

  Maybe there was a bit where can we all go back to Hobbes and Locke or just philosoph- political philosophy in general? Where do rights come from?

• 6:26Andrew Sharp?

  Mm-hmm.

• 6:27Ben Thompson?

  Like, what is the foundation of authority and government? And, you know, Hobbes was sort of like the monarch and Locke was more on like the democratic sort of will the people. But even then, it goes back to what's the foundation of rights? Uh, you know?

• 6:43Andrew Sharp?

  Totally. I mean, I noted that in my article. It's like the idea of property rights, which are supposedly implicated by some of what the US government is trying to do to anthropic. Those themselves are a legal construct that is given force by the American government that allegedly imperils these property rights.

• 7:03Ben Thompson?

  Exactly. And so when I read, when I read this memo, it's like, it's, it's interesting because I think one of the frustrations I had when I wrote what I wrote, which I didn't expect the degree of blowback that it got, but I mean, that's fine. I, I mean, I, I stand by it. And actually, I'm going to bring up the blowback a little bit because there's an analogy to a previous article I wrote when we talk about your, your piece in a little bit. But there, you certainly have people who only see things through a partisan lens, which is very frustrating. And I, this, the whole point here is this is not a partisan issue. I think it wouldn't matter who's in the White House. Maybe today it matters, but like in 10 years, if AI is as powerful as it potentially is, it's not going to matter. It's going to be the government versus the AI companies.

• 7:48Ben Thompson?

  And there's a bit where I'm actually fairly grateful. This came up in the interview I had with Greg, Gregory Allen this week, which I highly suggest everyone listen to. I thought it was really, really good.

• 7:56Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 7:57Ben Thompson?

  And, uh, it's sort of like fleshing out some of these issues, which he doesn't completely agree with me with. Like, we went back and forth on a few different things. But, um, there's a bit where it's, I'm quite grateful this debate is happening right now in 2026. When all things considered, the stakes are pretty low.

• 8:16Andrew Sharp?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:16Ben Thompson?

  Because this is a, there's a potential that the stakes are drastically higher in a very short amount of time, given the exponential increase in the power of AI. And there's actual real- Fundamental questions at play here that need to sort of be discussed. And so I don't think it's a partisan issue. And yet, of course, there's the category of people for whom it's a partisan issue, right? And what's frustrating is they don't even attempt to grapple with the article. It's just a like, is this broadly in line with the Trump administration or not? And then they get insulting and call me a fascist and a bootlicker and sort of whatever it might be. Sort of easy to dismiss.

• 8:53Andrew Sharp?

  You're only a bootlicker when we're talking about antitrust, just to clarify for the audience out there.

• 8:59Ben Thompson?

  That's right. I'm a bootlicker for the corporate, our corporate overlord, not our political ones. So, um, so this is, I'm gonna clip that. So anyhow.

• 9:07Andrew Sharp?

  It was a risk on my part, but here we are, you know? No, I mean.

• 9:12Ben Thompson?

  But I was frustrated about with the response was from the, again, we're going to, for just categorization purposes. We already have an issue with the Department of War versus Department of Defense. Anthropic used Department of War, so we'll use Department of War, not a partisan.

• 9:28Andrew Sharp?

  And for everybody out there, I believe there is some sort of congressional, there's a congressional threshold that needs to be cleared before it's officially the Department of Defense. But everyone involved in this mess is referring to it as the Department of War. It is a bit of a minefield in DC, depending on who you're talking to. You have to choose your nomenclature carefully, but Department of War for the next hour here as we talk through all this.

• 9:53Ben Thompson?

  I was just using Department of War because Anthropic did. I wasn't really thinking about it, but I just sort of assumed that was the case. And then some people are coming at me, oh, you're saying the part, I'm like, I honestly, I did not give two cents. So I've, I've just been saying the US government basically ever since, but whatever it might be. I might try like, that first sentence in my article or the quote, you know, you might not care about politics. We'll call this cares about you or whatever it is. That wasn't just about Anthropic. That was also about me, right? So to be clear, um, the, what I found disappointing was, oh, the other sort of categorization that I'm going to use in this podcast for ease of use is sort of EA, the effective altruist, out of which a lot of the AI researchers come.

• 10:38Ben Thompson?

  Anthropic is kind of the standard bearer as far as AI companies for that. Now, there's a gazillion definitions in who it is or whatever it might be. This is a very blunt instrument. I'm just using it for terminology purposes.

• 10:50Andrew Sharp?

  Okay.

• 10:51Ben Thompson?

  But I think one of the frustrations I had with the EA critiques is. They sounded a lot like the Trump, like the, the, the anti-Trump critiques. Where it's like, did you actually read the article? Instead, there was just a, a, this sort of visceral reaction that seemed to like, I'm like, I addressed that. That was in there, like, whatever it might be.

• 11:15Andrew Sharp?

  So how so? What were they objecting to in terms of the EA side of things?

• 11:21Ben Thompson?

  Oh, well, no, actually, a lot of them just fell into Trump like things like, oh, he's trying to back into a conclusion here. Because he wants to support sort of XYZ. And a lot of them really fell into this property rights will last forever sort of categorization. When my whole point here is laws ultimately are human constructs. And they come back at the end of the day, laws are formed, nations are founded on the tip of a bayonet. Like, like, like, it's worth, go back to Hobbes.

• 11:54Andrew Sharp?

  I was gonna say Hobbes and Locke, here we are.

• 11:56Ben Thompson?

  That's right. Hobbes in particular, right? And given that, a lot of people, this is where I brought up the Palmer lucky. We should let democratic leaders decide because ultimately they have the legitimacy. I was not making that argument.

• 12:13Andrew Sharp?

  Okay.

• 12:14Ben Thompson?

  Because what I was talking about was the risk that we face here. Is that AI becomes so powerful, it becomes a source of power in its own right. It becomes the ultimate gun, the ultimate, the sharpest of the bayonets. And when that's the case, the problem is the, call it temptation, or call it felt necessity. Of the government is going to be to violate property rights, to leverage their monopoly on violence. Not just because they want the technology, but they actually fear they're losing their monopoly.

• 12:52Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 12:53Ben Thompson?

  And that's anti-democratic. That's why I'm not relying, my point was not a democratic argument. My point is the risk we are running if we don't get alignment here between AI companies and the government is we're creating the conditions for the government to turn anti-democratic, to violate the laws. The laws exist and are enforceable because the government enforces them. What happens when the enforcer is the one that decides the laws don't matter and need to be violated?

• 13:25Andrew Sharp?

  Right. We're seizing your property under-

• 13:28Ben Thompson?

  Right, are you gonna call the international police?

• 13:29Andrew Sharp?

  Something like that.

• 13:30Ben Thompson?

  There are, right, and so, so this is actually, and I kinda wish I'd have made this more clearly. I think I did in that Gregory Allen interview, sort of like fleshing this out. And I almost regret even bringing in the Palmer Lucky bit. Cause I did say in there, this is another reading, I'm like, this is not my argument.

• 13:47Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 13:47Ben Thompson?

  What I should have added is it's not just not my argument. It's that my concern, and it's so funny, people are calling me fascist. My concern is fascism. We're creating the conditions for the government to violate its own laws, to obliterate the concept of property rights precisely because they fear the power of AI more than they fear the ultimately human constructs of laws and the self-control to abide by them.

• 14:19Andrew Sharp?

  So let me tease out what you're saying there. Are you saying that your fear is that if there isn't close coordination with all of the frontier AI labs, that these labs will then be nationalized and weaponized by the state without any sort of input from those labs?

• 14:37Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, that's, and that's arguably an optimistic outcome.

• 14:39Andrew Sharp?

  Hmm, okay. So there's sort of a techno dystopian hellscape that could emerge if the government-

• 14:46Ben Thompson?

  There's-

• 14:47Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 14:48Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, so like just at a very fundamental level, the government has a monopoly on violence.

• 14:52Andrew Sharp?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:53Ben Thompson?

  You know, there's a groomer brought this up in Dithering. This or I think it was, he said it's PJ or I wasn't familiar with the article, but the idea that at the end of the day, you pay taxes because the government has guns.

• 15:03Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 15:03Ben Thompson?

  Like, like, and it's like, none of us think that way. We just pay taxes because that's what you're supposed to do. But ultimately, what happens if you don't pay taxes?

• 15:12Andrew Sharp?

  They come and take your house and you go to jail.

• 15:15Ben Thompson?

  And who comes to take you to jail?

• 15:17Andrew Sharp?

  Probably someone with guns. Yeah.

• 15:19Ben Thompson?

  Right? And like, and this, this is why I thought the Iran, that's why I started with the bit of international law in Iran, whatever, like sort of a useful analogy, I thought, like.

• 15:30Andrew Sharp?

  This is a sensitive issue on Monday morning as everyone's processing the world.

• 15:34Ben Thompson?

  I know.

• 15:35Andrew Sharp?

  Probably did you no favors as far as backlash is concerned, but yeah.

• 15:38Ben Thompson?

  But so the issue, the issue isn't just that. So the government has a monopoly on violence.

• 15:43Andrew Sharp?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:44Ben Thompson?

  The problem is if AI is what it is promised to be. It's that the government doesn't just want it for its own purposes. It's that it will feel threatened by it.

• 15:57Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 15:57Ben Thompson?

  And again, is it threatened by it today in 2026? No. If these exponential curves actually play out, is this potentially going to happen sooner or we think? Yes. And so if we want to retain our system of government, if we want to have democratic control, we ought to, all of us as an industry, be thinking about how do we not create the conditions that the government feels oppositional to and threatened by AI? Because that, last week, the government felt oppositional and threatened by AI.

• 16:37Ben Thompson?

  And fortunately, we're still in a place where we can laugh at it and say they overreacted, they overdid it.

• 16:43Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 16:44Ben Thompson?

  But what if AI was 100 times or 1,000 times more capable and powerful than it is today? And that might be here pretty soon.

• 16:52Andrew Sharp?

  Indeed. Well, before we get to more about what you wrote last week, or this week, excuse me, two questions on Anthropic's next moves here. First, Scott sent this in after the memo leaked. Subject line was "Strategy Credit Overdraft." He writes, "Hello, gents," or no, he wrote, "Hello, gents. One of Ben's hottest takes recently was that his concept of a strategy credit is his greatest idea, even better than aggregation theory. I can't disagree. Is it possible, though, to exhaust one's credit or overplay the strategy credit hand? I wonder if Anthropic has a strategy credit in saying no to the Department of War to further sell themselves

• 17:37Andrew Sharp?

  as the ethical AI shop, better to attract talent and consumers, but could this strategy credit lead them so far in one direction that they undermine their core business? It feels a bit like a politician winning the primary, but going so far left or right that they can't win the general election. What do you think about that possibility?

• 17:58Ben Thompson?

  Yes, but I would actually, I don't think it undermines their core business. I think it probably by and large helps their core business. Number one, you have the Pentagon saying, "We're going to ban you because we want you so much and you won't help us and your technology is so awesome." You have the talent wars where I'm sure by and large across AI talent, people are much more sympathetic to and align with Anthropic's views.

• 18:24Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah, I would guess they'll gain more talent than lose anything in the next couple of years.

• 18:28Ben Thompson?

  Right. You have this, you know, they've been number one in the App Store, I think, all week, right? Like, and people deleting OpenAI, going with Claude, and maybe for the first time. And maybe it turned out those Super Bowl ads, which I thought were somewhat deceptive, but whatever, all ties together. And they're building this sort of... This great brand and the so the problem here isn't that they're undermining their core business. The problem I have is they are becoming unaligned with our democratic government.

• 18:57Andrew Sharp?

  Which, you know, I mean, that does undermine their core business. That's the risk that I see as far as the next year or two for anthropic here.

• 19:05Ben Thompson?

  No, I my worries are are much more basic than that. I'm worried about them undermining our democratic government and and way way of living. And and the the means of that isn't necessarily anthropic acting badly. It's prompting, putting in the incentives for the government to act badly. And again, like, the the the great irony about this is particularly on the domestic surveillance point, I have tremendous sympathy and by and large, I'm aligned with anthropic.

• 19:34Andrew Sharp?

  Okay.

• 19:35Ben Thompson?

  Like, I think the holes we have, the loopholes we have for domestic surveillance are fairly atrocious. I think a lot of our privacy policies were predicated on a world where there was friction. It was hard to spy on everybody and we've already like blown past them to a great degree because computers can can wiretap everyone.

• 19:53Andrew Sharp?

  Mm hmm.

• 19:54Ben Thompson?

  Like, just like, you know, one of those secret closets in the AT&T building, uh, don't ask, uh, you know, the and now we can analyze all that sort of at tremendous scale. I think it's a totally legitimate concern, but everything is a trade off. And I just don't think this was a fight worth picking, particularly in this is where we don't know what the details were. You can't have a you just it's not tenable to have a situation where on a case by case basis, you sort of get to have a say.

• 20:25Andrew Sharp?

  Right.

• 20:26Ben Thompson?

  Let's get as clear of guidelines as we can and that the lawyers in the DOD slash DOW can decide go, no go, and they don't have to ask you for permission. Like, and let's do that not just because we support national security, but let's do that because we are developing potentially the most powerful technology ever.

• 20:48Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 20:48Ben Thompson?

  And we need to appreciate the threat that is going to pose to not just people's jobs, not just SaaS companies, but to the very fundamental legitimacy of the United States of America.

• 21:04Andrew Sharp?

  Indeed.

• 21:05Ben Thompson?

  And and like this.

• 21:08Ben Thompson?

  Actually, the other funny criticism I got was that, oh yeah, Ben just wrote that because he doesn't like take seriously AGI or like the power of like, that's the exact opposite. It's because I'm taking you seriously.

• 21:21Andrew Sharp?

  Right.

• 21:22Ben Thompson?

  Like, if I was convinced, I could see the arguments, this is just another technology, just like computers. It's actually not going to be that big of a deal.

• 21:30Andrew Sharp?

  Mm hmm.

• 21:30Ben Thompson?

  Uh, in which case, it's like, yeah, let's let's unapologetically support them because just we saw abuse that happened with computers. But I am taking seriously the possibility, this is unbelievably powerful and destabilizing. And for that exact reason, it's super important that we be aligned with our democratic system of government.

• 21:50Andrew Sharp?

  Well, related to this, one more question on Anthropic's calculus in the short term here. Adam says, "Strip down, the analysis in your post on Monday is pretty banal. Anthropic can't and shouldn't be able to dictate its TOS with the US government because of obvious power dynamics." Here's the thing, no firm in Anthropic's position would be unaware of the US government's ability to force Anthropic's hand. Forget the supply chain risk designation for a minute. The real hammer the US lords over Anthropic is the Defense Production Act. It's not quite all the marbles, but it's most of them. So why then has Anthropic performed such very public line drawing over the last week? What's the end game?

• 22:31Andrew Sharp?

  Any guesses on the end game and/or why this is all played out in public the way it has? Because I don't think that has been strategically optimal for Anthropic.

• 22:42Ben Thompson?

  I don't know. I can speculate, but I'm hesitant to. I think one of the critiques that can be aligned at

• 22:54Ben Thompson?

  maybe the EA movement to a bit is, and where I do feel a certain sort of allergic reaction to them, is this sort of

• 23:03Ben Thompson?

  We are the smartest people in the world and we're the only ones that truly think through costs and benefits.

• 23:09Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 23:10Ben Thompson?

  Everyone else is kind of stupid. And that's one thing, but it sort of follows on, therefore we should make decisions for everyone.

• 23:18Andrew Sharp?

  Hmm.

• 23:19Ben Thompson?

  And one of the big issues I've had with the AI labs in general, and this goes back to OpenAI's being a nonprofit, certainly applies to Anthropic, is this sort of assumption that AI must be used for the good of everyone.

• 23:34Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 23:35Ben Thompson?

  And the question is, who decides? And when you push on it, it's always we do.

• 23:39Andrew Sharp?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:40Ben Thompson?

  And I am very allergic to that point of view. I think that leads to hubris. It leads to very dystopian outcomes. It leads to the worst abuses we've seen in human history. Uh, people don't, the, the worst actors are not the ones that are attempting to be evil. It's the ones who are so convinced that they are good.

• 24:03Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 24:04Ben Thompson?

  That everyone who opposes them ought to be eliminated for the greater good.

• 24:08Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 24:08Ben Thompson?

  And I'm not saying, I'm not saying they're there. I'm just saying like, it's like, it's shades of that.

• 24:15Andrew Sharp?

  Well, and you can see shades of it in the memo. There, there's a fervor permeating that memo that made me unsettled.

• 24:23Ben Thompson?

  Maybe felt justified because like this is, this is not fully grappling with reality. Like, you know, is Sam a tricky guy in an op, yeah, I think we figure that out. But there's a, there's a, yes, a fervor, a fervor here. And I find fervors fairly terrifying.

• 24:43Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 24:43Ben Thompson?

  And particularly when the fervor is being evinced by the leader of, again, potentially the most powerful technology ever.

• 24:54Andrew Sharp?

  Right.

• 24:55Ben Thompson?

  Like, that's unsettling. I, I find it very unsettling. And I do want to note, I thought the analysis is pretty banal also, right? Like, and the, you know, this didn't rise nearly to the level of, but I would say this is like, there was at least a, a shadow of the.

• 25:18Ben Thompson?

  Out of pocket response I got to net neutrality in like the first year of the Trump administration. When I've sort of told this story, I wrote about net neutrality and the conflicts of Netflix versus Comcast in like 2014 or something.

• 25:32Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 25:32Ben Thompson?

  And I basically said Netflix is full of BS here, uh, in terms of like their, their appearing agreements and stuff like that. I basically made the same argument in 2017 when the, uh, Trump, so Obama, and I think it was 2016 last year, imposed Title II of the Telecommunications Act to internet data, which imposed net neutrality, but with this massive amount of bureaucratic paperwork that basically was designed to apply to AT&T back when they did long distance.

• 26:00Andrew Sharp?

  Right.

• 26:01Ben Thompson?

  And my point in that article is that I'm definitely pro net neutrality, but this is the worst possible way to do it. And it's going to restrict investment in broadband and blah, blah, blah, blah. A very technocratic article that I thought was quite banal.

• 26:15Andrew Sharp?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:16Ben Thompson?

  And for which I not only got, again, I got like a few hundred replies here. I got thousands, tens of thousands of replies. I got death threats. I got like the whole sort of kit and caboodle. I had people like who this like take Neil Patel, uh, who this week called me a fascist on Blue Sky. At that time, writing entire screeds about how I don't care about democracy, like this whole sort of thing. And, um, it's funny, if you go back to that article, I quoted several tweets, uh, they're all deleted. Because every single person who lost their minds about that was totally wrong.

• 26:49Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 26:50Ben Thompson?

  And not just that, of the vast majority of them changed their position in terms of wanting more control of, they wanted, they didn't want neutrality. Suddenly they wanted platforms making decisions about what was and wasn't allowed.

• 27:03Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 27:04Ben Thompson?

  And I appreciated your piece this week on Sharp Text, which didn't get into the issues as much as saying, "These reactions are out of control."

• 27:15Andrew Sharp?

  It's pretty exhausting. You know what the common thread was between your piece on net neutrality? Which I have said in the past, I cited in law school, got an A plus in the class on the. Final exam cited Ben Thompson before I even knew you at that point.

• 27:31Ben Thompson?

  That's right. We'd never even met.

• 27:33Andrew Sharp?

  But the common thread, I believe, didn't Ajit Pai share that piece on Twitter?

• 27:40Ben Thompson?

  Yes.

• 27:41Andrew Sharp?

  A member of the Trump administration.

• 27:43Ben Thompson?

  So I deserve blame because I originally entitled it, Why Ajit Pai is Right?

• 27:47Andrew Sharp?

  Oh, great.

• 27:49Ben Thompson?

  That title, that was a mistake. The title is no longer that. It is like.

• 27:53Andrew Sharp?

  Fun spicy title.

• 27:54Ben Thompson?

  Pro net neutrality, anti Article Two or something like very dry like that.

• 27:58Andrew Sharp?

  Let's tone this down. I'm getting death threats.

• 28:01Ben Thompson?

  Yeah. Yeah. But yes, and then M. O. Michael retweets my article on Monday. Not helpful. I, like, I'm not on a side here. I'm just trying to make a point.

• 28:11Andrew Sharp?

  That's right. Yeah. Well, and as far as Anthropic's end game, all I will say is that I wrote in my piece, I would expect them to broker some sort of compromise in the midst of all this.

• 28:22Ben Thompson?

  I think that's gonna happen. It's possible this happens even before this podcast publishes. Like, I think the, he was very, I think he settled down. He was at the Morgan Stanley TMT conference, and I think was fairly conciliatory in his tone.

• 28:37Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 28:37Ben Thompson?

  I'm hopeful that maybe in some small way, what I wrote is like, would have been like, like, let's wake up here. Like, this is, let's not go down this route.

• 28:49Andrew Sharp?

  All right. And that is the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes, or you can also go to sharp tech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week, plus lots more great content from Stratechery and the Stratechery Plus bundle. Check it out. And if you've got feedback, please email us at email at sharp tech.fm.