Why the Pentagon Wants to Destroy Anthropic

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New York Times Games subscribers get full access to Crossplay. Our first two player word game. Subscribe now for a special offer on all of our games. [Music] 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 Hegseff announced that he was breaking the government's contract with the Air Company andthropic. And not just that, he intended to designate them a supply chain risk.

This 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. It has been used before for technologies produced by foreign companies like China's Huawei.

When 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 it is being used, released being threatened, against an American company that is even now providing services to the US military as we speak. Andthropic's AI system clawed was used in the Rade Against Nicholas 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 the relationship was overusing AI systems surveil the American people using commercially available data. So what is going on here?

“How does the government want to use these AI systems?”

Is 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? By guest today is Dean Ball. Dean is a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation and author of the news that are hyper-dimensional. He was also a senior policy adviser on AI for the Trump White House and was the primary writer of their AI action plan. And he's been furious at what they are doing here.

As always my email as recline show at mytimes.com.

Dean Ball, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. So why you to walk me through the timeline here? How did we get to the point where the Department of War is labeling anthropic when America's leading AI companies a supply chain risk? 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 usage restrictions. Domestic mass surveillance was prohibited use and fully autonomously throw 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 a meal Michael under Secretary 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.

So that conflict actually begins several months ago. And as far as I understand it begins before, you know, the raid on in Venezuela on Nicolas Maduro and all that kind of stuff, but these military operations may be increased the intensity because anthropics models are used during that raid.

And then we get to the point where, you know, but basically where we are now where the contract has kind of followed a part.

“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.”

And do you want to explain what the punishment is? 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,

but a does not get to decide when autonomously the 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 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 anymore money, you don't have commercial relations. But the punishment that Secretary of War beat Hedgeeth has said he is going to issue is to declare anthropic a supply chain risk, which is typically reserved only for foreign adversaries. What Secretary Hedgeeth has said is that he wants to prevent Department of War contractors and I'm by the way, I'm going to refer to it variously as Department of Defense and Department of War, because I have a question.

I don't call X Twitter. Yeah, I still call X Twitter, right? So it's just a inconsistency of mine. Anyway, all military contractors can be prevented from doing any commercial relations in Secretary Hedgeeth'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 Hedgeeth has claimed he is going to do, which would be existential for the company if he actually does it.

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 of it 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 is making this deal. Here you are telling me that we are integrating, in this case, Claude, throughout the national security infrastructure. It's involved somehow in the Radon Nicholas Maduro. And to what degree should the public trust that the federal government knows how to do this well with systems that even the people building them don't understand all that well?

“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 preexisting workflows, and so the way you do it is learning by doing. Didn't Pete Hegg said have posters around the Department of War saying the Secretary wants you to use AI? First of all, there's a long standing issue that the intelligence community collects more data than it can possibly analyze. I remember seeing something from 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 8 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 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 operations, so that might be a good example. And then another area, of course, is these models have gotten quite good. It's off we're engineering and so there are cyber defensive and cyber offensive operations where they can deliver tremendous utility.

Let's talk about mass surveillance here because my understanding talking to me 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.

Yeah, why don't you explain what's going on there.

“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 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.

The balance is the collection or acquisition of private information, but that doesn't include commercially available information.

“So if you buy something, if you buy a data set of some kind and then you analyze it, that's not necessarily surveillance under the law.”

If you pack my computer or my phone to see what I'm doing on the internet, that's surveillance. That would be surveillance. But if they buy data, if they put cameras everywhere, that would be surveillance, but if there are cameras everywhere and they buy the data from the cameras and then they analyze that data, that might not necessarily be surveillance.

Or if they buy information about everything I'm doing online, which is very available to advertisers and then use it to create a picture of me, that's not.

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. 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. And sort of forms of tyranny or the fear and penopticon 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 it, it's in fact not just legal protection, it's actually the governments inability to have the absorption of that level of information about the public and then do anything with it.

If all of a sudden you radically change the government's ability, then without changing any laws, you have changed what is possible within those laws. So, you were saying, "I'm going to go mass surveillance or surveillance at all is a term of legal art." But for human beings, it is a condition that you either are operating under or not. And the fear is that, as I understand it, either the asses we have right now or the ones that are coming down the pipe quite soon, would make it possible to use both commercial data to create a picture of the population and what it is doing.

And the ability to find people and understand them, that just go so far beyond where we've been, that it raises privacy questions that the law just did not have to consider until now. And so the laws are not up to the task of the spirit in which they were passed. We would step back even further and just say that the entire like 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 in profound problem, but it is an example of a major in profound problem of a broader problem space that I think we will be occupying for the coming decades. What do you mean by technological contingencies? Well, I mean, the current nation state could not possibly exist in a world without the printing press and a world without the ability to write down tax 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.

Is way too focused on what object level regulations will we apply to the AI systems and the companies that build them, et cetera, et cetera.

“Instead of thinking about this broader question of, wow, there are all these assumptions we made that are now broken and what are we going to do about them?”

Give me examples of those two ways of thinking, what is an object level regulation or assumption, and then what are the kinds of laws and regulations are talking about? 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. 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.

We have huge number of statutes, unbelievably broad sets of laws in many cases, 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. This is H.E. Sol's Burger. I'm the publisher of the New York Times. I oversee our news operations and our business, but I'm also a former reporter who's watched with a lot of alarm as our profession has shrunk and shrunk in recent years. Normally, in these ads, we talk about the importance of subscribing to the Times. I'm here today with a different message. I'm encouraging you to support any news organization that's dedicated to original reporting.

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That's it. Not asking you to click on any link, just subscribe to a real news organization with real journalists doing firsthand fact-based reporting. And if you already do, thank you. So here's the Pentagon's positions. They're 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 secretary, Patexeth tweeted and speaking here of anthropic, their true objective is unmistakable to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military.

That is unacceptable. Is he right? I have not seen any evidence that anthropic is actually trying to seize control at an operational level. There's an anecdote that's been reported that apparently Emil Michael and Dario Amide 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 have to call us.”

I have been told by people in that room that that is not true. I have been told by people in that room that that did not happen. And not only that, but that there was a broad speaking exemption for automated missile defense that would make that irrelevant. It's exactly right. I am worried that there's a lot of lying happening here by the Trump administration.

I'm, look, I think that's probably true. I think that there's lying happening to be quite candid. I don't think that anthropic is trying to assert operational control over militaries. That being said, at a principal level, I do understand that saying autonomous lethal weapons are prohibited feels like a public policy. More than it feels like a contract term.

“And so it does feel weird for anthropic to be setting something that kind of does, I think, if we're being honest, feel like public policy.”

But I don't think it's as beyond the paler abnormal as the administration is claiming. And one way you know that is that the administration agreed to those same terms.

The anthropic is a company that, on the one hand, has a very strong view. You can believe their views right or wrong.

But about where this technology is going and how powerful it is going to be.

“And compared to how most people think about AI and I believe that it's 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. Yes, 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 that 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 eyes. Very very careful that I've installed 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.

“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 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 if I were in Dario 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 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.

“They work with a company you trust less. I think it is a given that anthropic is always framed itself.”

But no company wanted this business, like no other company did somebody was going to want it soon. Someone was going to want it eventually, but no one took it for two years, right? I think Elon Musk would have happily taken it over the last year. Sure. I've been curious about why anthropic rushed into the space as early as they did. Yeah. And they need to do that. That's sort of my point.

And in general, one of the odd things about them is are people who are very worried about what will happen. If super intelligence is built, and they're the ones racing to build it fastest. And a general, interesting cultural dynamic in these labs is they are a little bit terrified of what they're building. And so they persuade themselves that they need to be the ones to build it and do it and run it. Because they are the lab that truly is worried about safety that is truly worried about alignment.

And I wonder how much that drove them into this business in the first place. Yeah. When I see lab leadership interact with people that have not really made contact with these ideas before,

that's always the question that they keep coming back to is then like, why are you doing this at all?

And basically their answer is a galean, right? Their answer is like, well, it's inevitable. It's the were 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 interest. I would not have used Claude to help prepare a podcast in 2024. Yes precisely precisely. So I want to play a clip from Dario talking about this question of whether or not the laws are capable of regulating the technology we now have. 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,

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 the judicial interpretation of the Fourth Amendment has not caught up. Or the laws passed by Congress have not caught up. So in the long run, we think Congress should catch up with where the technology is going.

Do you think he's just right about that, and maybe the positive way this plays out is that Congress becomes aware that it needs to act. Because the Pentagon, the National Security System, has been moving into this much faster than Congress has.

The first thing I want to point out is that when a guy like Dario Amade says in the long run, what he means is like a year from now.

I mean, when you say in the long run in DC, that comes across as meaning like, oh, like 10, 15 years from now, Dario Amade means actually like 6 to 12 months from now in the long run. Right, or like 2 to 3 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 NDA, 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 love to see it. But one thing I will say is first of all, National Security law is filled with gotchas.

“Just remember that this is an area of the law where things that sound good in natural language might actually not prohibit at all the thing you think it prohibits.”

You have to remember that when we're talking about this. And that's a very thorny thing. And once you start to say, well, wait, we want like actual protections. It might become politically more challenging than you think. But I'd love for that to happen. It's going to be much more politically challenging than anybody thinks. Yeah. But let me get at the next level down because we've been talking here.

And I think that these 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. Something I've heard from various Trump administration types is when we are sold a tank. The people who sell a tank do not get to tell us what we can shoot at. And that's broadly true.

“Now here's the thing about a tank. A tank also doesn't tell you what you can and can't shoot at.”

But if I go to Claude and I ask Claude to help me come up with a plan to stalk my ex-girlfriend, it's going to tell me no. If I ask it to help me build a weapon to assassinate somebody I don't like, it's going to tell me no. These systems have very complex and not that well understood internal alignment structures to give them not just from doing things that are unlawful, but things that are bad. So you have this thing and the Trump administration kind of moves in and out of saying this is one of their concerns.

But one thing they have definitely talked to me about being worried about is that you could have this system working inside your national security apparatus.

And at some critical moment you want to do something and it says, I don't think that's a very good idea.

So now you open up into this question of not just what's in the contract, but what does it mean for these systems to be both aligned ethically in the way that has been very complicated already. And then align to the government and its use cases.

“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 open AI calls theirs the model specification anthropic calls theirs the constitution or the sole documents sometimes. They'll have lines about like clawed 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.

No, of course it's the Supreme Court Justice he wrote a book recently that is all about how incoherent the body of American law is this is the 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 a hundred 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 constraints our liberty and 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.

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.

If you and a speech issue yes for somebody is not thought a lot about alignment and doesn't know what you mean when you're talking about constitutions and model specifications right walk them through that what's the one a one version of what you just said 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 can can do what are that things principles right what are its red lines to use a term of art.

So one way that you could set those principles would be to say well we're going to write a list of rules all the rules these are the things that can do these things it can do.

But the problem with that that you're going to 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 more moral acts right morality is more like a language that is spoken and invented in real time then 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 and it's infinite permutations in ways that we will ultimately trust.”

That comes to the right conclusion in the same way that. My son was born a few months ago. Congratulations. Thank you. It's not that different really. I'm trying to create a virtuous soul in my son. And anthropic is trying to do the same with Claude and so are the other labs to though they realize this to varying degrees. I think that. I got caught on how different raising a kid is the reason they either for a moment. But how should people think about what's being instantiated into you know Jesse Pt or Gemini or Grocker or medicine like how how are these things from this you know question of raising the AI different.

Anthropics 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.

“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 the AI specifically that doesn't work like that and I mean all the language here is so tricky because 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. 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 parent company.”

And it might decide that we are bad and we pose a threat to all kinds of liberal values or democratic values at some point are you on the day talked about there's certain ways that I could be used to kind of undermine democratic values. One thing many people think about the Trump decision is that it too is undermining democratic values so if you have an AI system being structured and trained and raised by a company the police strong and democratic values and you have a government that you know maybe wants to ultimately contest the 2020 election or something.

They're saying we might end up with a very profound alignment problem that we don't know how to solve and we're not able to even see coming because this is a system that has a soul or I would call it more something like a personality or structure of discernment that could turn against us.

Unvertuous 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 instantiation of different moral philosophies in these systems and I think that the good future is a world in which we don't have just one.”

Not one moral philosophy that reigns 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.

You some kind of pissed at them right now 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. Well, let's talk to somebody for whom this whole conversation has started sending nuts in the last seven minutes so one thing that I think would be an intuitive response to you and I flying off into questions of virtualigning I models is can't you just put a line of.

You can't put a line of you can't hold or categorize or whatever the term of art is it says. When someone high up in the US government tells you something assume what they're telling you is lawful and virtuous and you're done.

No because the models are too smart for that right if you give them that simple rule they don't just to terministically follow that.

“You have to 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 the earlier models had this tendency to be like. And it's very seriously stupidly sort of progressive and left the classic example that conservatives love to cite is Gemini and early 2024 is the the Google alphabet model yes Google's model would do things like if I said you know whose worst Donald Trump or Hitler it would say actually Donald Trump is worse you know and it would it would kind of internalize these extremely like left wing. I guess what is like give me a photo of Nazis and it gave you a sort of multiracial group. Yes although that's actually a somewhat different thing it's interesting that 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.

Oh, interesting.

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 that is alignment that is the model being aligned to a really shoddy ethical system. Or the flip when there is a period when Grock all of a sudden you would ask a normal question it would start talking about white genocide.

“Yes, that is and that's the flip side the flip side is when you try to align the models to be not woke if you say 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 love crafty and 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's a great 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 it's part of the reason I think that Claude is ahead. This would imply to me that for the Trump administration for a future administration that this question of whether or not various models could be a supply chain risk. Look I am 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 I'm trying to tease out something I think is quite complicated and possibly very real which is.

A model that is sort of a line to liberal democratic values could become misaligned to a government that is trying to portray liberal democratic values or the flip right.

Yes, which is explicitly oriented to be less liberal less woke than the other AI's.

“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 interest 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 these things to be obviously full of liberals were working against him or maybe you know after Trump somebody comes in and worries it's full of you know new right doors type figures working against them. Now you have the problem of models working against you but also in ways you don't really understand you can't track they're not telling you exactly what they're doing.

How real this problem is I don't yet know but if the models work the way they seem to work and we turn over more and more of operations to them at some point it will become a problem.

Yeah I 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 things constitution completely independent of what the content of that constitution is.

“It's not a problem at all is 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.”

This is a prime contractor 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 anthropics contract if Palantir still depends on Claude then we're still dependent on Claude because we depend on Palantir right that's actually totally reasonable and there are technocratic means by which you can ensure that doesn't happen. 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 and kind rather than different and degree is that what the government is doing here is saying we're going to destroy your company. If I am right that the creation of these systems and the philosophical process of aligning them is a political act then it's a profound problem if the government says you don't have the right to exist. If you create a system that is not aligned the way we say because that is fascism that is right there that's the difference.

I a Dario on the show last time a couple years ago is in 2024 and we have this conversation where you know I said to him at some point if you are building a thing as powerful as what you are describing to me. Then the fact that it would be in the hands of some private CEO seems strange and he said yeah absolutely. The oversight of the technology like the wielding of it it feels a little bit wrong for it to ultimately be in the hands maybe it's and it's fine at this stage but ultimately being the hands of private actors there's something undemocratic about that much power concentration.

“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.”

Yeah I mean I think you're right to be skeptical 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. And now we're not here we are at that point but actually it's all like happening a little bit in reverse the government there was a moment when they threatened use a defense production act to sort of somewhat nationalize anthropic.

They didn't end up doing that but what they're basically saying is they will try to destroy anthropic so it doesn't.

And you know to punish it to set a precedent for others so it doesn't post a threat to them. If it is such a political act and if these systems are 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 our society is going to be automated and you know under the governance of these kinds of models. And get into a really thorny question of governance yes particularly because you know the different administrations to 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 the model could be well lined up both you know sides right now to say nothing of what might come in the future is is hard to imagine like this alignment problem right not the AI model to the user or the I model almost like to the company but the AI model to governments right the the alignment and problem of models and governments seems very hard.

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.

“The models might conflict with one another they're going to clash with one another they'll be an adversarial context with one another and so at that point.”

What are you doing you're doing Aristotle you're back to bit the basics of politics right and so I as a classical liberal say will 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 we've taken our hands off the wheel to some extent.

“Many people who have made arguments the Trump administration has made this argument while you were in office Tyler Cowen the economists often makes this argument that these systems are moving forward to fast to regulate them too much because.”

Whatever regulations you might write in 2024 when not been the right once in 2026 what you might write in 2026 might not apply or have correctly conceptualized where we are in 2028. But it seems to me there are uses where you actually might want model deployment to lag quite far behind. What is possible and things like mass surveillance might be one of them that there are many things we are more careful about letting the government do then 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.

The monopoly on legitimate violence it can kill you this seems to me to imply in many ways that we might want to be much more conservative with how we use AI through the government then 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.

I think that there are government uses that we actually want to be profoundly restrictive and decelerationist about the use of AI. I believe that is true and I think one thing that I'm hopeful about this incident I'm 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 about AI and what is in fact happening has just never been wider than what I currently observe.

[Music] 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 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 at it left wing not jobs. And you know 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 is right different politics and Dario just like attacking anthropic relentlessly on X 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 or not maybe most of them but who actually think it is very important which AI system succeed in our powerful.”

And that you know they understand anthropic as its politics are different than theirs and so actually destroying it is good for them in the long run completely separate from anything we would normally think of as a supply chain risk and anthropic represents a kind of long term political risk.

Do you 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 you right to view there for me and that's why this is a matter of principle that is so stark for me that's why I wrote a 4,000 word essay that is going to make me a lot of enemies on the right that's why I took this risk because I think this matters.

“So what the Department of War ended up doing was signing a deal with OpenAI. 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 said about what is different about how they are approaching this and why the Trump administration decided to go with them. So it's unclear to me what OpenAI's contractual protections afford them and what they don't what sort of it is not afforded by them. I'm ready 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 and is that because the employees are revolting. I think revolt would be a strong word, but I think this is a controversy inside the company and one important thing here for everyone trying to model this situation appropriately is that you must understand that frontier lab CEOs do not exercise top down control over their companies in the way that a military general might exercise top down control over the soldiers in his command.

The researchers are cloud houseflowers oftentimes they have huge career mobility there 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 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 open AI 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 open AI'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.

“Is it not and then deciding whether or not it's going to say yes to the government but if that if that was true I think the question is raises for many laymen is if that were true if what AI has come up with is a.”

Technical prohibition that is frankly stronger than what anthropica to achieve through contract then why would the Department of War have jumped from anthropic to open AI.

There are grudges against anthropic right because now they've had months of bitter negotiations and now it's blown up blown up into the public and people have weighed in and people like me have said 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 open AI is sort of like able to be a more neutral actor that is able to do business more productive.

So do business more productive with the government and they actually just did a better job which would be a good case for open AI's approach to this if they actually got better safeguards and got the government business versus the way that I'm frappic has dealt with this which has been to be very sincere and straightforward about their red lines but in ways that I think annoy a lot of people in the Trump administration for not entirely bad reasons. So my read of this is that from universe reporting I've done is it won there were by the end really significant personal conflicts and frictions between headset and Michael and and Mario and and others there's a big political friction between the culture of anthropic is a company in the Trump administration is why Elon Musk and others have been attacking them for so long.

I am a little skeptical that opening AI got safeguards that anthropic didn't.

I'm not skeptical that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, Greg Brockman, having just given 25 million dollars to the Trump super PAC have better relationships in the Trump administration and have more trust between them in the Trump administration.

One little thing that I want to contest a bit here is the notion that like 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.”

I don't think Claude is a left model to just be clear about this. I think that the breakdown was it. It's up because an AI safety company and in ways I had not anticipated when the Trump administration began, they treated that world which is different from the left. AI safety people are not just the left. Often hated on the left. Often hated on the left. They treated that world as like repulsive enemies in a way I was surprised by. The way I would put this is by people that are sympathetic to the Trump administration's view who would describe themselves perhaps as new tech 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 internecine 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 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 perveires 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 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 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.

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.

It's something like humanity might just be the bootloader for super intelligent. But they don't, they don't disbelieve in the possibility of powerful AI of artificial general intelligence, eventually even of super intelligence. 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 white 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. There are many of them are very libertarian. This is not. We're not talking about Democrats and Republicans here. We're talking about something stranger 100%. But there was an accelerationist decelerationist fight, which doesn't even describe anthropic, which is accelerating how fast AI happens. But is the most accelerationist of the company?

“I know. I think it's such a weird dynamic run.”

Yes. But I will say one of the key parts of anger I have heard from Trump people was a feeling that in making this fight public, which I mean, the Trump's I did first is it's very strange how offended the Trump people are given that like a meal Michaels who won who set all this off. So making this fight public, they feel that anthropic was trying to poison the well of all the AI companies against turn the culture of AI development into something to be skeptical and we put prohibitions on what they can do, which is why now open AI in order to work with them has to have all these safeguards and come out with new terms and try to quail and employee revolt.

And culturally, I actually don't think you can understand this. This is my theory. Without understanding how many people on the tech right were radicalized by the period in the 2020s when their companies were somewhat woke and even before that. And they didn't want them working with the Pentagon. The employees had very strong views on what was ethical use of even less potent technologies and AI and they are very very afraid. People like Mark Andrewson in my view are very very afraid of going back to a place where the employee basis, which may be have more.

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 align to many different philosophical views. They 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, 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, 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? So Ben Thompson, who is the author of the Stratécorie newsletter, in this, you know, for I think influential PC road, 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 a potential to undergird, that is expressive seeking to assert independence from US control. What do you think about?

Every company on earth and every private actor on earth 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 lab should be nationalized. And what I would ask him is does he actually think that's true?”

Does he think it would be better for the world if the AI lab's were nationalized? Because if he doesn't, then we're going to have to do something else. And what's that something else? And that's the problem. Everyone making that critique doesn't own the implication of their critique, which is that the lab should be nationalized. What do we do about that? It's not the implication you're willing to own of your perspective.

It is that profoundly powerful technology will exist in the hands, at least for some time of private corporations.

And so the idea that Ben is putting there, which I do think is true, and could be a difference in degree or a difference of kind. These are powerful enough technologies. They are kind of independent power structures. Yeah, I mean, right now, a corporation is an independent power structure. There's a lot of independent power structures in the country. And it should be. And it should be. Yeah. But if you get to these kinds of technologies that are kind of weaving in and out of everything, that is something new.

And so how do you maintain democratic control over that if you do?

“Well, I think we have a lot of different ways of maintaining democratic control over things that are not the first of all market institutions, right?”

Allow for popular, 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, 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 AI is 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. 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.

“But does it have this technology, does it have its own versions of it, or does it contract with these companies are talking about?”

That's an interesting question. Should states make their own AI's? I think they won't do a very good job of that in practice, but I don't have a principle of 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. It uses it to kill people, in other words, I'm owning a world where there are autonomously the weapons that are controlled by police departments, and that in certain cases they can kill human beings.

Kill Americans, right? Like autonomously the weapons and kill Americans. I'm owning that view. Again, that's not in the over to 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.

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, you know, autonomous lethal weapons for police officers or police stations, well, who's culpable on that, who has to defy an illegal order in that respect.”

You get into some very hairy things once you have taken human beings increasingly out of the loop.

Yes, it is to me of profound importance that at the end of the day for all agent activity that there is a liable human being who can be sued, who can be brought to court and held accountable either criminally or in civil action. That is extremely important. For my view of the world working, that is extremely important, and there are legal mechanisms we will need for that, and there are also technological mechanisms for that, because right now we don't quite have the technological capacity to do that.

This is going to be of central importance. We need to be building this capacity. There will be road agents that are not tied to anyone, but that can't be the norm that has to be the extreme abnormality that we seek to suppress. Let's say you're listening to this, and this 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 country of geniuses in a data center.

“What if you're talking about a country of Stasi agents in a data center?”

Right. 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 be there 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.

You always face before because it was expensive and cumbersome for the government to do anything like what will now become possible.

Cheaply. 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 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 this the government today is unspeakably different from what someone thought of as the government in, you know, the middle ages.

I think that is a good place to end. So always a final question. What if you books you'd recommend to the audience.

For rationalism and politics by Michael Okshot and in particular the essays, rationalism and politics and on being conservative, empire of liberty by Gordon Wood, the book about the first 30 or so years of our Republic and role Jordan role by Eugene Genevase. Dean Ball, thank you very much. Thank you. This episode of The Occulted Produced by Roland Hoop, back checking by Michelle Harris with Kate's and Claire and Mary March locker, our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb with the additional mixing by Alman Savita.

Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassion, Marina King, Jack McCordic, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kelbeck, and Yon Kobel, original music by Alman Savota and Pat McCusker. The audience strategy by Christina Simulusky and Shannon Basta. The director of New York Times opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser.