"American Democracy as We Know It Might Not Survive This Technology"
3/9/20261 hr 4 min
What happens when the two biggest stories in the world—the Trump White House and the development of advanced artificial intelligence—collide? Well, nothing good, apparently. When contract negotiations broke down between the Pentagon and Anthropic, a leading AI lab, the Department of War took the extraordinary step of labeling Anthropic a "supply chain risk," a designation typically reserved for Chinese companies suspected of spying on American technology. It’s not just liberals like me that found this announcement jarring. The technology writer Dean Ball—who served as Senior Policy Advisor for AI at the White House as recently as last summer—said the decision amounted to a nearly tyrannical attack on private property. (After all, if the government can walk up to your company, make you a deal, and destroy your company if you say no, that certainly sounds like a world in which the state can destroy whatever it trains its eyes on.) So, I wanted to talk to Dean about what he sees—and why he thinks this episode is so important, and so terrifying. Today, we talk about the difference between Biden and Trump’s approach to artificial intelligence before diving into the Anthropic mess, and pulling out of it the bigger story, according to Dean: that Trump’s scattershot AI policy is just the latest sign that AI’s capabilities are growing faster than many people want to admit—this technology is going somewhere fast, and the the American government simply is not prepared for where it’s taking us. Subscribe to our YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@PlainEnglishwithDerekThompson If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Dean Ball Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDerek Thompson· Host0:00
[drum music] In the big picture, I want this podcast to be about everything in the world. I wanna talk to experts in psychology and media and medicine and economics, but there are times when it feels to me like there are two stories whose significance towers over just about everything else. Story one is Donald Trump and this administration, and story two is artificial intelligence. And today's show is about what happens when these two massive objects smash into each other and what we can see in the wreckage of that collision. Recently, contract negotiations broke down between Anthropic, a leading AI company, and the Department of War, otherwise or previously known as the Department of Defense. The gist is that after weeks of negotiations, the Pentagon couldn't get Anthropic to agree to the use of its technology on autonomous weapons and other military applications. Anthropic claimed that the White House was negotiating in bad faith, forcing a private company to accept contract language that went against its values. The White House, for its part, felt that Anthropic was trying to play God, dictating to the military how its technology should be used in an emergency rather than allowing democratically elected leaders to decide for itself. I have my biases here. I lean toward Anthropic. But at one level you could say this was a typical boring contract dispute. At a higher level, however, I think it was a fight over a question with huge implications for national security, a