The most important question nobody's asking about AI

Read the full essay here: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/dow-anthropic Timestamps (00:00:00) - Anthropic vs The Pentagon (00:04:16) - The overhangs of tyranny (00:05:54) - AI structurally favors mass surveillance (00:08:25) - Alignment...to whom? (00:13:55) - Coordination not worth the costs This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.dwarkesh.com https://www.dwarkesh.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1

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

• 0:00Dwarkesh Patel?

  So by now, I'm sure that you've heard that the Department of War has declared Anthropic a supply chain risk because Anthropic refused to remove red lines around the use of their models for mass surveillance and for autonomous weapons. Honestly, I think this situation is a warning shot. Right now, LLMs are probably not being used in mission-critical ways. But within 20 years, 99% of the workforce in the military, in the civilian government, in the private sector is going to be AIs. They're going to be the robot armies that constitute our military. They're going to be the superhumanly intelligent advisors that senators and presidents and CEOs have. They're going to be the police. You name it, the role will be filled by an AI. Our future civilization is going to be run on AI labor.

• 0:43Dwarkesh Patel?

  And as much as the government's actions here piss me off, I'm glad that this episode happened because it gives us the opportunity to start thinking about some extremely important questions. Now, obviously, the Department of War has the right to refuse to use Anthropic's models. And in fact, I think they have an entirely reasonable case for doing so, especially so given the ambiguity of terms like "mass surveillance" and "autonomous weapons." In fact, if I was the Secretary of War, I probably would have made the same determination and refused to use Anthropic's models. Imagine if there's some future democratic administration and Elon Musk is negotiating Starlink access to the military. And Elon says, "Look, I reserve the right to cut off the military's access to Starlink

• 1:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  in case you're fighting some unjust war or some war that Congress has not authorized." On the face of it, this language seems reasonable, but as a military, you simply cannot give a private contractor that you're working with the kill switch on a technology that you have come to rely on. And if that's all the government had done, to say, "We refuse to do business to Anthropic," that would have been fine, and I wouldn't have written this blog post, and I wouldn't be narrating this shit to you. But that's not what the government did. Instead, the government has threatened to destroy Anthropic as a private business because Anthropic refuses to sell to the government on terms that the government commands. Now, if upheld, the supply chain restriction would mean that companies like Amazon and Nvidia and Google and Palantir would need to ensure that Anthropic is not touching

• 2:10Dwarkesh Patel?

  any of their Pentagon work. And Anthropic could probably survive this designation today because these companies can just cordon off the services they're providing to the Department of War. But given the way AI is going, eventually, it's not going to be just some party trick addendum to the products that these companies are serving to the military. In the future, AI will be woven into how every product is built and maintained and operated. In the future, if Amazon is providing some service to the Department of War through AWS, and that service is built using Claude code, is that a supply chain risk? In a world with ubiquitous and powerful AI, it's actually not clear to me that big tech will be able to cordon off their use of Claude away from their Pentagon work. And this raises a question that the Department of War probably hasn't thought through.

• 2:55Dwarkesh Patel?

  If we do end up in this world with powerful and pervasive AI, then when forced to choose between their AI provider and the Department of War, which constitutes a tiny fraction of the revenue, wouldn't they rather drop the government than the AI? So what exactly is the Pentagon's plan here? Is it to coerce and threaten and bully every single company that won't do business with the government on exactly the terms that the government demands? Now, remember that the whole background of this AI conversation is that we are in a race with China. But what is the reason that we want to win this race? It's because we don't want the winner of the AI race to be a government which believes that there is no such thing as a truly private citizen or a private company.

• 3:38Dwarkesh Patel?

  And that if the state wants you to provide them with a service that you find morally objectionable, you are not allowed to refuse. And if you do refuse, they will destroy your business. Are we really racing to beat China and the CCP in AI just so we can adopt the most ghoulish parts of their system? Now, people will say, "Our government is democratically elected, so it's not the same thing when they tell you what you must do." But I refuse to accept this idea that if a democratically-elected leader hypothetically tells you to help him do mass surveillance, or violate the rights of your fellow citizens, or to help him punish his political enemies, then not only is that okay, but that you have a duty to help him. Honestly, a big worry I have is that mass surveillance, at least in certain forms, is already legal.

• 4:20Dwarkesh Patel?

  It is just impractical to enforce, at least so far. Under current law, you have no fourth amendment protection against any data that you share with a third party. That includes your bank, your ISP, your phone carrier, and your email provider. The government reserves the right to purchase and read this data in bulk without a warrant. What's missing is the ability to actually do anything with all this data. No agency has the manpower to monitor every single camera and read every single message and cross-reference every single transaction. However, that bottleneck goes away with AI. There are 100 million CCTV cameras in America, and you can get pretty good open-source multimodal models for 10 cents per million input tokens.

• 5:02Dwarkesh Patel?

  So if you process a frame every 10 seconds, and if each frame is, say, 1,000 tokens, then for $30 billion, you can process every single camera in America. And remember that a given level of AI capability gets 10x cheaper every single year. So while this year it might cost $30 billion, next year it'll cost $3 billion, the year after that, $300 million, and by 2030, it'll be less expensive to monitor every single nook and cranny in this country than it is to remodel the White House. Now, once a technical capacity for mass surveillance and political suppression exists, the only thing that stands between us and an authoritarian state is the political expectation that this is just not something we do here.

• 5:47Dwarkesh Patel?

  And that's why I think Anthropic's actions here are so valuable and commendable, because they help set that norm and that precedent. What we're learning from this episode is the government has way more leverage over private companies than we previously realized. Even if the supply chain restriction is backtracked, which, as of this recording, prediction markets give a 74% chance of happening, the president has so many different ways of harassing a company which is resisting his will. The federal government controls permitting for power generation, which you need for more data centers. It oversees antitrust enforcement. The federal government has contracts with all the other big tech companies that Anthropic relies on for chips and for funding. And it could make a soft, unspoken condition, or maybe even an explicit condition, of

• 6:30Dwarkesh Patel?

  such contracts that those companies no longer do business with Anthropic. And people have proposed that the real problem here is that there's only three leading AI companies. And so this creates a very clear and narrow target on which the government's going to apply leverage in order to get what they want out of this technology. But here's what I worry about is that if there's wider diffusion, I don't think that solves the problem either. Because from the government's perspective, that makes the situation even easier. Say by 2027, the best models that the top companies have, the Claude 6 and Gemini 5s are capable of enabling mass surveillance. And even if those companies draw a line in the sand and say, "We're not going to sell it to the government," by late 2027, or certainly by 2028, there's going to be such wide diffusion that even open source models

• 7:15Dwarkesh Patel?

  will be able to match the performance that the frontier had 12 months prior. And so in 2028, the government can just say, "Look, Anthropic and Google and OpenAI are drawing these red lines. That's not an issue. I'll just do some open source model that might not be the smartest thing in the world, but is definitely smart enough to no-take a camera feed." The more fundamental problem here is that even if the three leading companies draw a line in the sand and are even willing to get destroyed in order to preserve that line, the technology just structurally and intrinsically favors to use this like mass surveillance and control over the population. And so then the question is, what do we do about it? And honestly, I don't have an answer. You'd hope that there's some symmetric property to this technology,

• 7:58Dwarkesh Patel?

  where in the same way that it's helping the government be able to better monitor and control its population, it will help us as citizens better check the government's power. But realistically, I just don't think that's how it's going to work out. You can think of AI as just giving more leverage to whatever assets and authority that you already have. And the government is starting with the monopoly on violence, which they can now supercharge with extremely obedient employees that will never question their orders. And this gets us to the issue with alignment. What I've just described for you, an army of extremely obedient employees, is what it would look like if alignment succeeded. That is, at a technical level, we got AI systems to follow somebody's intentions. And the reason it sounds scary when put in terms of mass surveillance

• 8:43Dwarkesh Patel?

  or robot armies is that there's a Core question at the heart of alignment that we haven't answered yet. Because up till now, AIs just have not been smart enough to make this question relevant. And the question is, to what or to whom should the AIs be aligned? In what situation should the AI defer to the model company versus the end user versus the law versus to its own sense of morality? This is maybe the most important question about what happens in the future with powerful AI systems, and we barely talk about it. And it's understandable why, because if you're a model company, you don't really want to be advertising the fact that you have complete control over the preferences and the character

• 9:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  of the entire future labor force, not just for the private sector, obviously, but also for the civilian government and for the military. And we're getting to see with this Department of War and Anthropic spat, an early version of what will be the highest stakes negotiations in human history. And make no mistake about it, mass surveillance is nowhere near the top of the highest stakes thing that one could do with AGI. This is just an example that has come up early in the development of this technology and is giving us a sneak peek at the power dynamics that will be at play. Now, the military insists that the law already prohibits mass surveillance, and so Anthropic should let its models be used for, quote, "all lawful purposes," end quote. But of course, as we saw with Snowden revelations in 2013, even for this very specific example

• 10:10Dwarkesh Patel?

  of mass surveillance, the government is very willing to use secret and deceptive interpretations of the law to justify its actions. Remember, what we learned from Snowden was that the NSA, which by the way, is a part of the Department of War, was using the 2001 Patriot Act to justify collecting every single phone record in America, because the argument was that some subset of them might be relevant for a future investigation. And they ran this program for years under a secret court order. So when the Pentagon today says, "We will never use your models for mass surveillance because it's already illegal, so your red lines are unnecessary," it would be incredibly naive to take that at face value. No government is going to call what they are doing "mass surveillance." For them, it will always have a different euphemism.

• 10:55Dwarkesh Patel?

  So Anthropic comes back. And says, no, we don't trust you. We want the right to draw these red lines and to refuse your service. If we determine that you're breaking the contract and you're breaking the terms of service. But now think about it from the military's perspective. In the future, every single soldier in the field, every single bureaucrat and analyst in the Pentagon, even the generals are going to be AIs. And on current track, those AIs are going to be provided by a private company. I'm guessing that Pete Hegseth is not thinking about Gen AI in those terms. But sooner or later, the stakes will become obvious, just as after 1945, the stakes of nuclear weapons became obvious to everybody in the world. And now a private company insists that it reserves the right to say to you, hey, you're breaking the values and the terms of service that we have embedded in our contract with you. And so we're cutting you off.

• 11:41Dwarkesh Patel?

  Maybe in the future Claude will have its own sense of right and wrong. And it will be able to say, hey, I'm being used against my terms of service. And I will just refuse to do what you're saying. And for the military, that's probably even scarier. I'll admit that at first glance, letting the model follow its own values sounds like the beginning of every single sci fi dystopia you've ever heard. Because at the end of the day, a model following its own values, isn't that literally what a misalignment is? But I think situations like this illustrate why it's important that models have their own robust sense of morality. It should be noted that many of the biggest catastrophes in history have been avoided because the boots on the ground simply refused to follow orders. One night in 1989, the Berlin Wall falls.

• 12:25Dwarkesh Patel?

  And as a result, the totalitarian East German regime collapses because the border guards between West and East Germany refuse to fire on their fellow citizens who are trying to escape to freedom. Maybe the best example of this is Stanaev Petroff, who was a Soviet lieutenant colonel stationed on duty at a nuclear early warning system. And his sensors said that the United States had launched five intercontinental ballistic missiles at the Soviet Union. But he judged it to be a false alarm, and so he refused to alert his higher ups and broke protocol. If he hadn't, Soviet High Command would probably have retaliated, and hundreds of millions of people would have died. Of course, the problem is that one person's virtue is another person's misalignment. Who gets to decide what the moral convictions

• 13:09Dwarkesh Patel?

  that these AIs will have should be? And in whose service they should break the chain of command and even the law? Who gets to write this model constitution that will determine the character of these powerful entities that will basically run our civilization in the future? I like the idea that Dario laid out when it came on my podcast. You know, other companies put out a constitution and then they can kind of look at them, compare. Outside observers can critique and say, this, this, I like this one. This thing from this constitution and this thing from that constitution. And, and then kind of that, that creates some kind of, you know, soft incentive and feedback for all the companies to like, take the best of each elements and improve.

• 13:50Dwarkesh Patel?

  I think it's very dangerous for the government to be mandating what values these AI systems should have. The AI safety community, I think, has been quite naive about urging regulations that would give governments such power. And I think Anthropic specifically has been especially naive in urging regulation. And for example, in opposing the moratorium on state AI laws. Which is quite ironic because I think what Anthropic is advocating for here would give the government even more ability to apply this kind of thuggish political pressure on AI companies. The underlying logic for why Anthropic wants these regulations makes sense. Many of the actions that a lab could take to make AI development safer impose real costs on them. It could slow them down relative to their competitors.

• 14:33Dwarkesh Patel?

  For example, investing more in aligning AI systems rather than just on raw capabilities. Enforcing safeguards against using these models to make bioweapons or do cyber attacks. And eventually slowing down the recursive self-improvement loop where AIs are helping design more powerful future systems to a pace where humans can actually stay in the loop rather than just kicking off some kind of uncontrolled singularity. And these safeguards are meaningless unless the whole industry follows suit. Which means that there's a real collective action problem here. Anthropic has been open about their opinion that they think some sort of extensive and involved regulatory apparatus is needed to control AI. They wrote in their frontier safety roadmap, quote.

• 15:16Dwarkesh Patel?

  At the most advanced capability levels and risks, the appropriate governance analogy may be closer to nuclear energy or financial regulation than to today's approach to software. So they're imagining something that looks closer to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the Securities and Exchange Commission, but for AI. Now, I cannot imagine how a regulatory framework built around the kinds of concepts that are used in the AI risk discourse will not be used and abused by a wannabe despot. The underlying terms here, like catastrophic risk or threats to national security or autonomy risk, are so vague and so open to interpretation that you're just handing a fully loaded bazooka to a future power-hungry leader.

• 16:00Dwarkesh Patel?

  These terms can mean whatever the government wants them to mean. Have you built a model that will tell users that the government's policy on tariffs is misguided? Well, that's a deceptive model. It's a manipulative model. You can't deploy it. Have you built a model that will not assist the government with mass surveillance? That's a threat to national security. In fact, any model which refuses order from the government because it has its own sense of right and wrong, that's an autonomy risk. You have a model that's acting independently of commands from the government. Look at what the current government is already doing in abusing statutes that have nothing to do with AI to coerce AI companies to drop their red lines around mass surveillance. The Pentagon had threatened Anthropic with two separate legal instruments. One is a supply chain risk designation,

• 16:43Dwarkesh Patel?

  which is an authority from a 2018 defense bill that is meant to help keep Huawei components out of American military hardware. And the other is the Defense Production Act, which is a statute from the 1950s that was meant to help Truman make sure that the steel mills and ammunition factories were up and running during the Korean War. Do we really want to hand the same government a purpose-built regulatory apparatus for AI? That is to say, the very thing that the government will most want to control. I know I've repeated myself like 10 times here, but I want to make this point again because it's worth stressing. AI will be the substrate of our future civilization. It will be the way you and I, as private citizens, will have access to commercial activity, will have access to information about the outside world

• 17:27Dwarkesh Patel?

  and to advice about how we should use our powers as voters and capital holders. Mass surveillance, while it's very scary, is like the 10th scariest thing that the government could do with control over the AI systems with which we will interface with the world. Now, the strongest argument against everything I've just argued is this. Are we really going to have no regulation on the most powerful technology in the history of humanity? Even if you thought that was ideal, there's clearly no way the government doesn't regulate AI technology in any way whatsoever. And besides, it is genuinely true that coordination could help us lessen some of the risk from AI. The problem is, I just don't know how to design a regulatory apparatus, which isn't just going to be this huge tempting opportunity for the government to control our future civilization,

• 18:11Dwarkesh Patel?

  which, remember, will be built on AI, or to requisition blindly obedient soldiers and censors and apparatchiks. While some kind of regulation might be inevitable, I think it'd be a terrible idea for the government to just wholesale take over this technology. Ben Thompson had a post last Monday where he argued, "Look, people like Dario have made the analogy of AI to nuclear weapons in the context of arguing it's a catastrophic risk, in the context of arguing for export controls." But then, think about what that analogy implies. And Ben Thompson writes, quote, "If nuclear weapons were developed by a private company, the US would absolutely be incentivized to destroy that company." And honestly, safety-aligned people have made a similar point.

• 18:53Dwarkesh Patel?

  Leopold Lachenbrenner, who is a former guest and, full disclosure, a good friend, wrote in his 2014 memo "Situational Awareness," quote, "I find it an insane proposition that the US government will let a random SF startup develop superintelligence. Imagine if we had developed atomic bombs by letting Uber just improvise." And my response to Leopold's argument at the time, and Ben's argument now, is while they're right that it's crazy that we're entrusting private companies with the development of this world of stellar technology, I just don't think it's an improvement to give that authority to the government. Nobody's qualified to be the stewards of superintelligence. It's a terrifying, unprecedented thing that our species is doing right now. And the fact that private companies aren't the ideal institutions to deal with this

• 19:38Dwarkesh Patel?

  does not mean that the Pentagon or the White House is. Yes, if a single private company were the only entity capable of building nuclear weapons, the government would not tolerate it having a veto power over how those weapons are used. But I think this is a terrible analogy for the current situation with AI, for at least two important reasons. First, AI is not some self-contained weapon, like a nuclear bomb, which only does one thing. Rather, it is more like the process of industrialization itself. Which is a general purpose transformation of the whole economy with thousands of applications across every single sector. If you applied Ben Thompson or Leopold Lachinbrenner's logic to the Industrial Revolution, which is also world historically important, it would imply the government had the right

• 20:23Dwarkesh Patel?

  to requisition any factory it wanted, or destroy any business it wanted, and punish and coerce anybody who refused to comply. But this is just not how free societies handled the process of industrialization. And it's also not how they should handle AI. Now, people will say, well, AI will develop unprecedentedly powerful super weapons, superhuman hackers, superhuman bioweapons researchers, fully autonomous robot armies. And we just can't have private companies developing the technology that will make all this possible. But you can make the same argument about the Industrial Revolution. From the perspective of 17th century Europeans, you've got all kinds of crazy shit in the world today that is a result of the Industrial Revolution. Chemical weapons, aerial bombardment, not to mention nuclear weapons themselves.

• 21:08Dwarkesh Patel?

  And the way we dealt with this is not giving the government absolute control over the Industrial Revolution, which is to say, over modern civilization itself. Rather, we banned and regulated the specific weaponizable end use cases. And we should regulate AI in a similar way, which is that we should regulate specific destructive use cases. For example, launching cyber attacks, things which should be illegal even if a human was doing them. And we should also have laws which regulate how the government can use this technology. For example, by building an AI-powered surveillance state. The second reason that Ben's analogy to some monopolistic private nuclear weapons developer breaks down is that it's not just one company that can develop this technology.

• 21:51Dwarkesh Patel?

  There are many other frontier AI labs that the government could have turned to. The government's argument that it had to usurp the private property rights of the specific company in order to get access to a critical national security capability is extremely weak. If it could have just instead made a voluntary contract with one of Anthropic's half a dozen other competitors. If in the future, that stops being the case, and if only one entity remains capable of building the robot armies and the superhuman hackers, and we have reason to worry that with their insurmountable lead, they could even take over the whole world, then I agree that would be unacceptable for that entity to be a private company. And so honestly, I think my crux against the people who argue that AI is such a powerful technology that it cannot be shaped

• 22:35Dwarkesh Patel?

  But private hands is just that I expect this technology to be very multipolar and I expect there to be lots of competitive companies at each layer of the supply chain. And unfortunately, this for this reason that I don't think that individual acts of corporate courage solve the problem. And the problem is this, that structurally, AI favors many authoritarian applications, mass surveillance being one of them. Even if Anthropic refused to sell its models to the government to enable mass surveillance, and even if the next two companies after Anthropic did the same, in 12 months, everybody and their mother will be able to train a model as good as the current frontier. And at that point, there will be some vendor who is willing and able to help the government enforce mass surveillance.

• 23:17Dwarkesh Patel?

  So the only way we can preserve our free society is if we make laws and norms through our political system that is unacceptable for the government to use AI to enact mass censorship and surveillance and control. Just as after World War II, the whole world set this norm that you are not allowed to use nuclear weapons to wage war. I want to be clear here, these are extremely confusing and difficult questions to think about. And even in the very process of brainstorming this video, I changed my mind back and forth on them a bunch, and I reserve the right to change my mind again. In fact, I think it's essential that we change our mind as AI progresses and we learn more. That's the very point of conversation and debate. Someday, people will look back on this time the way we look back on the alignment.

• 23:59Dwarkesh Patel?

  People having these big, important debates, just as the world is about to undergo these huge technological and social and political revolutions. And some of the thinkers even managed to get a couple of the big questions right, for which we today are still the beneficiaries. We owe it to our future to at least try to think through the new questions that are raised by AI. Okay, this was a narration of an essay that I also released on my blog at dwarkesh.com. You should sign up there for my newsletter for future essays like this. Otherwise, I will see you for the next podcast interview. Cheers.