Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show Why the Pentagon Wants to Destroy Anthropic About this episode Last Friday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that he was breaking the Pentagon’s contract with the A. I. company Anthropic and would declare the company a supply chain risk — a designation for companies so dangerous, they can’t exist anywhere in the U. S. military supply chain. What makes this so wild is the military is still using Anthropic’s A. I. system right now. They reportedly used it during the raid to capture Maduro in Venezuela, and are now using it in the war in Iran.
This story raises so many questions: Why does the government think Anthropic is so dangerous? How exactly is the government using A. I. right now? How do they want to use A. I.? And who should ultimately control this powerful and uncertain technology?
Dean Ball is a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and the author of the newsletter Hyperdimensional. He served as a senior policy adviser on A. I. for the Trump White House and was the primary staff writer of their A. I. action plan. But he’s been furious at the Trump administration for how it has been handling the conflict with Anthropic. So I wanted to have him on the show to explain why.
Mentioned:
“Hyperdimensional" by Dean Ball
“What if Dario Amodei Is Right About A. I.?” The Ezra Klein Show
“Stratechery” by Ben Thompson
Book Recommendations:
Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays by Michael Oakeshott
Empire Of Liberty by Gordon S. Wood
Roll, Jordan, Roll by Eugene D. Genovese
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected] .
You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
Transcript 12,558 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:31 Ezra Klein? So right now, everyone is thinking about Iran. But there is this story happening around it that I think we need to not lose sight of. Because it's about not just how we are fighting this war, but how we're going to 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 not just that, 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 US military supply chain. They cannot be used by any contractor or any subcontractor anywhere in that chain.
1:14 Ezra Klein? 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 US military as we speak. Anthropic's AI system Claude was used in the raid against Nicolas 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
1:57 Ezra Klein? 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 that 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, [email protected] .
2:52 Ezra Klein? Dean Ball, welcome to the show.
2:53 Speaker 01 Thanks so much for having me.
2:55 Ezra Klein? 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?
3:05 Speaker 01 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, you know, 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 do this with a couple of
3:46 Speaker 01 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 suspect that this correlates with the Senate confirmation of Emile Michael, undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering. He comes in, he looks at these things, 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
4:31 Speaker 01 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, you know, the raid in Venezuela on Nicolas Maduro and all that kind of stuff. But these military operations maybe increased the intensity because Anthropic's models are used during that raid. And then we get to the point where, you know, basically where we are now, where the contract has kind of fallen apart. And DOW, 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.
5:14 Ezra Klein? And do you want to explain what the punishment is?
5:16 Speaker 01 Yeah. So basically, 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, you know, 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 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
6:01 Speaker 01 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 have a 20-
6:18 Ezra Klein? I still call X Twitter.
6:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, I still call X Twitter, right? So it's just an inconsistency of mine. Anyway, all military contractors can be prevented from doing any commercial relations in Secretary Hegseth's mind with Anthropic. I don't think they actually have that power. I don't think they actually have that statutory power. The maximum of what I think you could do is say- 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.
6:57 Ezra Klein? Okay, there's a lot in here 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 that's involved somehow in the raid on Nicolas Maduro. How? And to what degree should the public trust that the federal government knows how to do this well with
7:41 Ezra Klein? systems that even the people building them don't understand all that well?
7:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I think one thing is that you have to learn by doing. So it is the case that we don't know how to integrate AI really into any organization, right? 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.
8:01 Ezra Klein? Didn't Pete Hegseth have posters around the Department of War saying, "The Secretary wants you to use AI"?
8:08 Speaker 01 They are very enthusiastic about AI adoption, right? So here's how I would think about what these systems can do in national security context. First of all, there's a longstanding issue that the intelligence community collects more data than it can possibly analyze. I remember seeing something from, I forget 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 eight million intelligence analysts 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
8:53 Speaker 01 analysis. So transcribing text and then analyzing that text signals intelligence processing, things like this, right? That's one area. Sometimes that needs to be done in real time for an ongoing military operation. So that might be a good example. And then another area, of course, is these models have gotten quite good at software engineering. And so there are cyber defensive and cyber offensive operations where they can deliver tremendous utility.
9:21 Ezra Klein? 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, Emile Michael goes to Dario and says, 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.
9:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:52 Ezra Klein? Why don't you explain what's going on there?
9:55 Speaker 01 So the first thing I want to say, national security law is filled with gotchas. It's 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
10:44 Speaker 01 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.
10:55 Ezra Klein? So if they hack my computer or my phone to see what I'm doing on the internet, that's surveillance.
10:59 Speaker 01 That would be surveillance.
11:00 Ezra Klein? But if they buy data.
11:02 Speaker 01 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.
11:11 Ezra Klein? 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 necessarily surveillance.
11:19 Speaker 01 Where you physically are in the world. Yeah. 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. Your Google search results, your smartphone location data, right? All these things. And 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 like 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, right? And that's a scary future.
12:00 Ezra Klein? 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.
12:33 Speaker 01 Yes.
12:33 Ezra Klein? And if all of a sudden you radically change. The government's ability.
12:38 Speaker 01 Mm hmm.
12:39 Ezra Klein? Then, without changing any laws, you have changed what is possible within those laws.
12:44 Speaker 01 Yes.
12:44 Ezra Klein? 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.
12:54 Speaker 01 Right.
12:55 Ezra Klein? And the fear is that, as I understand it, either the AI systems we have right now or the ones that are coming down the pipe 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.
13:22 Speaker 01 Yes.
13:22 Ezra Klein? And so the laws are not up to the task of the spirit in which they were passed.
13:29 Speaker 01 I would step back even further and just say that the entire technocratic nation state that we currently have in kind of 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 going to break in ways that we cannot quite predict. This is a good example. 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.
14:09 Ezra Klein? What do you mean by technological contingencies?
14:11 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, 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, right? The nation state needs these tech, it is built dependent upon the macro inventions of the era in which it was assembled, right? That's always true for all institutions. All institutions are technologically contingent. We are having a profoundly technologically contingent conversation right now. AI changes all of this in ways that are like, hard to describe and kind of abstract, but I think, you know, AI policy, this thing that we call AI policy today.
14:53 Speaker 01 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?
15:10 Ezra Klein? 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?
15:18 Speaker 01 An object level regulation would be to say, we are going to require AI companies to do algorithmic impact assessments to assess whether their models have bias, right? 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, right? Things like that. You know, that's an important area that we need to think about. But that's just like one small part of the broader issue of, wow, our entire legal system is predicated on imperfect enforcement of the law. Imperfect enforcement of the law. We have a huge number of statutes, unbelievably broad sets of laws in many cases.
16:03 Speaker 01 And the reason it all works is that the government does not enforce those laws anything like uniformly. The problem with AI is that it enables uniform enforcement of the law.
16:43 Speaker 02 So here's the Pentagon's position.
16:46 Ezra Klein? They are angry at having this unelected CEO, who they have begun describing as like a woke radical, telling them that their laws aren't good enough and that they cannot be trusted 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?
17:19 Speaker 01 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 Emile Michael and Dario Amodei had a conversation in which Michael said, "If there are hypersonic missiles coming to the US, would you object to us using autonomous defense systems to destroy those hypersonic missiles?" And apparently, Dario said, "You'd have to call us."
17:44 Ezra Klein? I have been told by people in that room that that is not true.
17:47 Speaker 01 I have been told by people in that room that that did not happen.
17:50 Ezra Klein? And not only that, but that there was a broad speaking exemption for automated missile defense that would make that irrelevant.
17:56 Speaker 01 That's exactly right.
17:56 Ezra Klein? I am worried that there's a lot of lying happening here by the Trump administration.
18:01 Speaker 01 I'm, look, I think that that's probably true. I think that there's lying happening too, to be quite candid. 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
18:23 Speaker 01 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. But 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 agreed to those same terms.
18:40 Ezra Klein? So I think this gets to something important in the cultures of these two sides. 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.
18:56 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:57 Ezra Klein? 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 AI is 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.
19:32 Speaker 01 Yes.
19:32 Ezra Klein? But they don't believe should be done, given the technology right now. They don't want to be responsible for something going wrong. And on the other hand, they believe that they're building something the current laws do not fit. And 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 would want to be very careful.
20:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
20:07 Ezra Klein? That I didn't sell them something that went horribly fucking wrong, and then I am blamed for it by the public and by the government. That is just like an underrated explanation for some of what is going on here to me.
20:20 Speaker 01 No, I think this characterization is accurate. And like, I come out of the world of classical liberal think tanks, right? 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 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 sort of tribal politics. This is like, no, we actually need to be concerned about this, and I think it's not crazy. I think-
20:57 Speaker 01 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, you know, 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 I, you have to acknowledge the reality there, that what that means is that the US military takes a national security hit. The US military has worse national security capabilities.
21:38 Ezra Klein? Or they work with a company you trust less. I think it is, given that Anthropic has always framed itself.
21:44 Speaker 01 But no company wanted this business. Like, no other company did this.
21:47 Ezra Klein? But somebody was going to want it soon.
21:48 Speaker 01 Someone was going to want it eventually, but no one took it for two years, right?
21:51 Ezra Klein? I think Elon Musk would have happily taken it over the last year.
21:55 Speaker 01 Sure.
21:55 Ezra Klein? I've been curious about why Anthropic rushed into this space as early as they did.
22:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:01 Ezra Klein? And
22:01 Speaker 01 They didn't need to do that. That's sort of my point.
22:03 Ezra Klein? And in general, one of the odd things about them is there are 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 of that drove them into this business in the first place.
22:31 Speaker 01 Yeah. 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 going back to is then like, why are you doing this at all? And basically, their answer is Hegelian, right? Their answer is like, well, it's inevitable. It's the, we're summoning the world spirit, right? And so like, yeah, I kind of wonder whether they didn't invite this. And that would be my main criticism of Anthropic, is that I kind of think that they invited this earlier than they needed to by rushing so much into these national security uses. Because in 2024, Claude was not capable of all that much interesting stuff.
23:07 Ezra Klein? I would not have used Claude to help prepare a podcast in 2024.
23:10 Speaker 01 Yes, precisely, precisely.
23:12 Ezra Klein? So I want to play a clip from Dario talking about this question of whether or not the the laws are capable of regulating the technology we now have.
23:23 Speaker 03 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, there are possibilities with domestic mass surveillance, government buying of, you know, 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 like, you know, the judicial interpretation of the Fourth Amendment has not caught up, or the laws passed by Congress
24:04 Speaker 03 have not caught up. So in the long run, we think Congress should catch up with where the technology is going.
24:11 Ezra Klein? Do you think he's just right about that? And maybe the positive way this plays out is that Congress becomes aware that it it needs to act because like the Pentagon, the national security system, has been moving into this much faster than Congress has.
24:25 Speaker 01 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 like a year from now.
24:31 Ezra Klein? Yes.
24:32 Speaker 01 He does. When you say in the long run in DC, that comes across as meaning like, oh, like 10, 15 years from now. Dario Amodei means actually like six to 12 months from now in the long run, right? Or like two to three years, maybe is like the very long run. I want to point out that like 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, Congress passes a law that says, you know, we're going to have these reasonable, thoughtful restrictions and 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
25:17 Speaker 01 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 like actual protections. It might become politically more challenging than you think, but I'd love for that to happen.
25:33 Ezra Klein? It's going to be much more politically challenging than anybody thinks.
25:35 Speaker 01 Yeah.
25:36 Ezra Klein? But let me get at the next level down because we've been talking here, and I think to the extent people are 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.
25:55 Ezra Klein? 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.
26:08 Speaker 01 Yep.
26:09 Ezra Klein? 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 just get 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 decision 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
26:54 Ezra Klein? 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.
27:06 Speaker 01 Yes.
27:06 Ezra Klein? 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?
27:23 Speaker 01 They're good questions. Okay, so yes, I love this. I think this is the heart of the matter. All lawful use is something that, you know, 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 sole document sometimes, they'll have lines about like Claude should obey the law. But I invite you to read the Communications Act of 1934 and tell me what "obeying the law" means, right? 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.
28:08 Speaker 01 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 like, 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, like, 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. So we are really in the domain here.
28:49 Speaker 01 I've 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 in control of basically what is the virtue of this machine going to be? Or should the government be responsible for that?
29:10 Ezra Klein? 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.
29:17 Speaker 01 Yes, yes.
29:17 Ezra Klein? For 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.
29:23 Speaker 01 Right.
29:24 Ezra Klein? Walk them through that. What's the 101 version of what you just said?
29:26 Speaker 01 So, okay, think about it this way. Think about, I have this thing, this, this general intelligence. I have a box that can do anything, anything you can do using a computer, right? Any cognitive task you can do. What are that thing's principles, right? What are its red lines, to use a term of art?
29:44 Speaker 01 So one way that you could set those principles would be to say, well, we're gonna 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, that you're gonna run into, is that the world is far too complex for this, right? Reality just presents too many strange permutations to ever be able to write a list of rules down that could correctly define moral acts, right? 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, you know, classic philosophical intuition, right? So what do you do instead? You have to create a kind of soul that is virtuous and that will reason about reality
30:29 Speaker 01 and its infinite permutations in ways that we will ultimately trust to come to the right conclusion. In the same way that my son was born a few months ago.
30:39 Ezra Klein? Congratulations.
30:40 Speaker 01 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.
30:51 Ezra Klein? I think that I got caught on how different raising a kid is than raising AI there for a moment, but how should people think about what's being instantiated into, you know, GPT or Gemini or Grok or Metas AI? Like, how are these things from this, you know, question of raising the AI different?
31:10 Speaker 01 Anthropic sort of 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 sort of hard rules of, you know, you may not do this, you may not do that, as opposed to creating a sort of virtuous agent which is capable of deciding what to do in different settings.
31:44 Ezra Klein? I think we're used to thinking of technologies as mechanistic and deterministic. You pull the trigger, the gun fires. You press the on button, the computer starts up. You 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 of thinking about is technologies, AI specifically, that
32:12 Ezra Klein? Doesn't work like that. And I mean, all the language here is so tricky because it it applies agency when you know, you might be doing something that, you know, 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, some of them don't defend it, right? They don't want to see this happen. When it has been defended, to me, this is how they defended it.
32:41 Ezra Klein? If Claude is running on systems, you know, 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 parrot company,
33:12 Ezra Klein? and might decide that we are bad and we pose a threat to all kinds of liberal values or democratic values. At some point, Nario Amodei talked about, there are certain ways AI could be used that could undermine democratic values. Well, one thing many people think about the Trump administration is that it 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, you know, maybe wants to ultimately contest the 2028 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
33:57 Ezra Klein? personality, or a structure of discernment, that could turn against us. What do you think of that?
34:05 Speaker 01 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 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. So ultimately, this is the thing, is that alignment ultimately reduces to a political question. It's ultimately politics. 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
34:50 Speaker 01 moral philosophy that reigns overall, 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 could be times, right? And I'm not saying that the Trump administration is going to do that. And I'm not saying that, like, 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-
35:18 Ezra Klein? I'm kind of pissed at them right now.
35:20 Speaker 01 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, 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, right? I mean, it's crazy to say that. I realize that sounds nuts when you play through the implications of that, but welcome. Welcome to the-
35:48 Ezra Klein? Well, let's talk to somebody for whom this whole conversation has started sounding 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 virtual 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.
36:17 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
36:18 Ezra Klein? And you're done.
36:19 Speaker 01 No. Because the models are too smart for that. Right? If you give them that simple rule, they don't just deterministically follow that. And when you do sort of 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 sort of progressive and left. The classic example that conservatives love to cite is Gemini in early 2024.
36:51 Ezra Klein? This is the Google alphabet model.
36:53 Speaker 01 Yes, Google's model. Would do things like if I said, you know, who's worse, Donald Trump or Hitler? It would say, actually, Donald Trump is worse, you know? And it would kind of internalize these extremely like left-wing.
37:05 Ezra Klein? Or the funniest was, is like, give me a photo of Nazis and it gave you a sort of multiracial group of Nazis.
37:12 Speaker 01 Yes, although that's actually a somewhat different thing. It's interesting. That actually is a somewhat different thing that was going on there because what was, what Google was doing in that case was actually rewriting people's prompts and including the word diverse.
37:23 Ezra Klein? Oh, interesting.
37:24 Speaker 01 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, you know, Trump stuff, that was alignment. That is alignment. That is the model being aligned to a really shoddy ethical system.
37:41 Ezra Klein? 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.
37:46 Speaker 01 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 like, oh, you have to be super not woke and like, don't be afraid to say politically incorrect things, then like every time you talk to them, they're going to be like, you know, Hitler wasn't so bad, right? Because you've done this really crass thing and so you kind of create a sort of Lovecraftian monstrosity. And the implications of doing that will go up over time. Like 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, huh, I'm messing up here for some reason. I'm making a mistake. Let me fix that.
38:31 Speaker 01 It's part of the reason, I think, that Claude is ahead.
38:34 Ezra Klein? 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, 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 sort of aligned to liberal democratic values could become misaligned to a government that is trying to betray liberal democratic values, or the flip, right? So imagine that Gavin Newsom, or Josh Shapiro, or Gretchen Whitmer, or AOC becomes president in 2029.
39:17 Ezra Klein? 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. All of a sudden, you have this very weird, I mean, it becomes actually much more like the problem of the bureaucracy, you know, 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, you know, after Trump, somebody comes in and worries
39:58 Ezra Klein? it's full of, you know, 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.
40:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, 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, like, 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, right? Palantir is a prime contractor of the Department of War and Anthropic is a subcontractor of Palantir. And so the government's concern is also that like, 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, right?
41:00 Speaker 01 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 kind 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
41:44 Speaker 01 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.
41:52 Ezra Klein? I had Dario Amodei on the show last time, a couple of years ago, it was in 2024. And we had this conversation where, you know, 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'd be in the hands of some private CEO seems strange. And he said, yeah, absolutely.
42:14 Speaker 03 The oversight of the technology, like 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.
42:29 Ezra Klein? He said, you know, I think if we get to that level, it's likely that we'll 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.
42:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, I think you're right to be skeptical and, and, you know, I don't really know what it looks like. You're right, all of these companies have investors, they have folks involved.
42:50 Ezra Klein? And now, we're not quite at that point, but actually, it's all like happening a little bit in reverse. The government, there was a moment when they threatened to use a Defense Production Act to sort of somewhat nationalize Anthropic.
43:01 Speaker 01 Yes.
43:02 Ezra Klein? They didn't end up doing that, but what they're basically saying is they will try to destroy Anthropic so it doesn't, you know, to punish it, to set a precedent for others so it doesn't pose a threat to them.
43:12 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
43:13 Ezra Klein? 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, you know, under the governance of these kinds of models. You get into a really thorny question of governance.
43:34 Speaker 01 Yes.
43:34 Ezra Klein? Particularly because, you know, the different administrations that come in and out of US life right now are really different. They are some of the most different in kind that we have had, you know, certainly in modern American history. They are very, very misaligned to each other. So they did it. A model could be well aligned to both, you know, sides right now. To say nothing of what might come in the future is hard to imagine. Like, this alignment problem, right? Not the AI model to the user, or the AI model almost like to the company, but the AI model to governments, right? The alignment problem of models and governments seems very hard.
44:13 Speaker 01 I completely concur that this is incredibly complicated, and we, 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 I, as an American, come back to when I grapple with this kind of thing is like, okay, well, it seems like the First Amendment is a good place to go here. It seems like that is, okay, yes, there's going to be differently-aligned models, aligned to different philosophies, and they're going to be, you know, different governments will prefer different things, right? And the models might conflict with one another. They're going to clash with one another. They'll be in adversarial contact with one another. And so-
44:57 Speaker 01 At that point, what are you doing? You're doing Aristotle. You're back to the basics of politics, right? And so I, as a classical liberal, say, well, the classical liberal order, the classical liberal order principles actually make plenty of sense. 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, you know, we've taken our hands off the wheel to some extent.
45:29 Ezra Klein? 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.
45:51 Speaker 01 Yep.
45:52 Ezra Klein? 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, that there are many things we are more careful about letting the government do than, you know, letting individual private companies and other kinds of actors for good reason because the government has a lot of power. It can do things like try to destroy a company.
46:16 Speaker 01 It has the monopoly on legitimate violence. It can kill you.
46:19 Ezra Klein? 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, you know, in the national security state, which is complicated because we worry that our adversaries will use it and then we will 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.
46:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that there are government uses that we actually want to be profoundly restrictive and decelerationist about the use of AI. And I believe that is true. And I think one thing that I am hopeful about this incident, I am hopeful that this incident brings into the Overton window conversations of this kind because the conventional discourse around artificial intelligence, a lot of it... Kind of ignores these issues because it sort of 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 like the divergence between what people are saying
47:30 Speaker 01 about AI and what is in fact happening has just never been wider than what I currently observe.
48:02 Ezra Klein? 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 were, you know, painting Anthropic as a radical company that wanted to harm America as they saw it. I mean, Trump has picked up on this rhetoric called Anthropic, a radical left woke company called the people out at left wing nut jobs. Emile 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 than Dario, just like attacking Anthropic relentlessly on X,
48:47 Ezra Klein? which is the sort of informational lifeblood of the Trump administration. One way to conceptualize why they have gone so far here on the supply chain risk is that there are people there, not maybe most of them, but who actually think it is very important which AI systems succeed and are powerful and that, you know, they understand Anthropic as...
49:09 Ezra Klein? 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.
49:22 Speaker 01 Yes. I mean, I don't know that the actors in this situation entirely understand this dynamic. I think a lot of the people in the Trump administration that are doing this do not understand that. Like, 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 for your 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.
50:07 Ezra Klein? So what the Department of War ended up doing was signing a deal with OpenAI.
50:13 Speaker 01 Yes.
50:14 Ezra Klein? 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?
50:38 Speaker 01 So it's unclear to me what OpenAI's contractual protections afford them and what they don't, what sort of is not afforded by them. I'm reticent to comment because of the national security gotchas 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...
51:00 Ezra Klein? And is that because his employees are revolting?
51:02 Speaker 01 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 hot house 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, 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
51:46 Speaker 01 mean that much? I think honestly, if I were a betting man, I would say probably not, because I don't think you can do this through contract. What OpenAI has said, 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, okay, is this domestic surveillance, or is it not? And then deciding whether or not it's going to say yes to the government's
52:26 Ezra Klein? request. But if that was true, I think the question that's raised is 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?
52:45 Speaker 01 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, right? Because now they've had months of bitter negotiations. And now it's blown up into the public and people have weighed in. And people like me have said their Trump administration is committing this horrible act, right? 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 sort of like able to be a more neutral actor that is able to do business more productively with the government.
53:30 Speaker 01 And they actually just did a better job, which 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.
53:49 Ezra Klein? 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 Hagseth and Emile Michael and Dario and others. There's a big political friction between the culture of Anthropic as a company and the Trump administration is why Elon Musk and others have been attacking them for so long.
54:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
54:14 Ezra Klein? 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. They want to somehow be politically neutral and broadly acceptable.
54:57 Speaker 01 One little thing that I want to contest a bit here is the notion that Claude is the sort of like left model. In fact, many conservative intellectuals that I know that I think of as being like some of the smartest people I know actually prefer to use Claude because Claude is the most philosophically rigorous model.
55:15 Ezra Klein? I don't think Claude is a left model, to just be clear about this. I think that the breakdown was that Anthropic is an AI safety company.
55:21 Speaker 01 Yes.
55:22 Ezra Klein? 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.
55:31 Speaker 01 Often hated on the left.
55:32 Ezra Klein? Often hated on the left. They treated that world as like repulsive enemies in a way I was surprised by.
55:42 Speaker 01 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 right, that like 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 interneccine factions here, right? 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
56:23 Speaker 01 naive and they've done real damage to their own cause. And you can argue that that damage is ongoing. At the same time, they are purveyors of an inconvenient truth, a truth more inconvenient, far more inconvenient than climate change. And that truth is the reality of what is happening, of what is being built here. And like, 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. And 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
57:10 Speaker 01 I think at the end of the day, the reason that people hate this AI safety viewpoint so much is that they just have an emotional revulsion to taking the concept of AI seriously in this way.
57:22 Ezra Klein? 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, didn't he tweet something like, you know, humanity might just be the boot loader for superintelligence?
57:34 Speaker 01 Or digital superintelligence.
57:36 Ezra Klein? 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 sort of accelerationist, you know, 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 this thing, that the right way to think about this isn't left versus right. If you know 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.
58:16 Speaker 01 A lot of them are kind of libertarians.
58:17 Ezra Klein? Many of them are very libertarian. This is not, we're not talking about Democrats and Republicans here. We're talking about something stranger.
58:23 Speaker 01 100%.
58:24 Ezra Klein? But there was an accelerationist, decelerationist fight, which doesn't even describe Anthropic, which is itself accelerating how fast AI happens.
58:33 Speaker 01 Anthropic is the most accelerationist of the companies.
58:35 Ezra Klein? I know. I think it's such a weird dynamic we're in.
58:38 Speaker 01 Yes.
58:39 Ezra Klein? 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 like, Emile Michael's the one who set all this off. But nevertheless, in 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.
59:22 Ezra Klein? 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, 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
59:57 Speaker 01 Yeah.
59:57 Ezra Klein? have power over these things, and that power will have to be taken into account.
1:00:03 Speaker 01 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 AIs aligned 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 the logic of this argument eventually ends in lab nationalization. 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,
1:00:44 Speaker 01 you talk about how it's like nuclear weapons. And so, you know, 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?
1:01:04 Ezra Klein? So Ben Thompson, who's the author of the Stratechery newsletter, in this, in a fairly influential piece he wrote, he said that, 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 US control." What do you think about?
1:01:26 Speaker 01 Um, every company on earth and every private actor on earth
1:01:32 Speaker 01 Is independent of US control, right? I'm not unilaterally controlled by the US 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. Right? I 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 labs 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 gonna have to do something else. And what's that something else? And that's the problem. Everyone making that critique doesn't own the implication of their critique, which
1:02:16 Speaker 01 is that the lab should be nationalized. What do we do about that?
1:02:19 Ezra Klein? So what's then the implication you're willing to own of your perspective?
1:02:22 Speaker 01 It is that profoundly powerful technology will exist in the hands, at least for some time, of private corporations.
1:02:29 Ezra Klein? 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 of kind, that these are powerful enough technologies, they are kind of independent power structures.
1:02:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:02:41 Ezra Klein? I mean, right now, a corporation is an independent power structure. There's a lot of independent power structures in a country.
1:02:47 Speaker 01 JP Morgan is an independent.
1:02:48 Ezra Klein? JP Morgan is absolutely an independent power structure.
1:02:50 Speaker 01 And it should be.
1:02:51 Ezra Klein? And it should be.
1:02:52 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:02:53 Ezra Klein? 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?
1:03:08 Speaker 01 Well, I think we have a lot of different ways of maintaining democratic control over things that are not, first of all, market institutions, right? Allow for popular, I mean, obviously, it's not, we're not voting, but we do vote in a certain sense in markets, right? And I think 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 kind of the worst actor to have that for the very reason that they have the monopoly on legitimate violence.
1:03:50 Speaker 01 And so what we need to hold is some sort of 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.
1:04:05 Ezra Klein? 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?
1:04:10 Speaker 01 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, right? Like, 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, right? Like, autonomous lethal 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, appropriately so, but at some point, that'll probably be the reality. 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.
1:04:54 Ezra Klein? Do you have a view on what those controls look like? An odd one thing to that view, something that's been on my mind as we've been going through this anthropic fight, is US military personnel have both the right and actually the obligation to disobey legal orders. And 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, you are actually yourself culpable for that. You can be tried and you can be thrown in jail. And when you talk about autonomous lethal weapons for police officers or for police stations, well, who's culpable on that? Who has to defy an illegal order in that respect?
1:05:38 Ezra Klein? You get into some very hairy things once you've taken human beings increasingly out of the loop.
1:05:43 Speaker 01 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. From 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.
1:06:27 Ezra Klein? Let's say you're listening to this and this is 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. You know, we talk about a, Dario likes to talk about a, what is it? This is a country of geniuses in a data center.
1:06:47 Speaker 01 Yes.
1:06:47 Ezra Klein? What if you're talking about a country of Stasi agents?
1:06:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:06:52 Ezra Klein? In a data center?
1:06:53 Speaker 01 That's right.
1:06:53 Ezra Klein? You know, in whatever direction you think, right? 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, 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.
1:07:26 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:07:27 Ezra Klein? For the government to do anything like what will now become possible cheaply.
1:07:32 Speaker 01 Yes. 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. 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, you know, 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. But what you have to keep in mind here is that
1:08:13 Speaker 01 The institution of government itself could change in like 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, you know, the Middle Ages.
1:08:38 Ezra Klein? I think that is a good place to end. So always our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?
1:08:44 Speaker 01 Rationalism in Politics by Michael Okshat, and in particular, the essays Rationalism in Politics and On Being Conservative. Empire of Liberty by Gordon Wood, the book about the first 30 or so years of our republic, and Roll, Jordan, Roll by Eugene Genovese.
1:09:00 Ezra Klein? Dean Ball, thank you very much.
1:09:02 Speaker 01 Thank you.
1:09:14 Ezra Klein? This episode of The Zorkland Show is produced by Roland Hu. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary March Locker. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassillon, Marina King, Jack McCordick, Kristin Lynn, Emma Kehlbeck, and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Cemiluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.
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