I had Dario Amodei on the show last time a couple of years ago. It was in 2024 and we had this conversation where 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 would be in the hands of some private C.E.O. seems strange. And he said, yeah, absolutely. “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.” He said, I think if we get to that level — it’s likely I’m paraphrasing him here — that will 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. And now we’re not. Here we are at that point. But actually it’s all happening a little bit in reverse. The government — there was a moment when they threatened to use the Defense Production Act to 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 — to punish it, to set a precedent for others so it doesn’t pose a threat to them. 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 under the governance of these kinds of models. You get into a really thorny question of governance. Yes. Particularly because the different administrations that come in and out of U.S. life right now are really different. They are some of the most different in kind that we have had, certainly in modern American history. They are very, very misaligned to each other. So the idea that a model could be well aligned to both sides right now, to say nothing of what might come in the future, is hard to imagine. Like this alignment problem. Not the A.I. model to the user or the A.I. model almost like to the company, but the A.I. model to governments. The alignment problem of models in governments seems very hard. Yes, I think I completely concur that this is incredibly complicated. And 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, OK, well, it seems like the First Amendment is a good place to go here. It seems like that is —OK, yes, there’s going to be differently aligned models aligned to different philosophies. And they’re going to be, different governments will prefer different things. And the models might conflict with one another. They’re going to clash with one another. There’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 the basics of politics. And so I as a classical liberal say, well, the classical liberal order, the classical liberal order principles actually make plenty of sense. We don’t want the government to be able to dictate what different kinds of alignment — 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, we’ve taken our hands off the wheel to some extent. 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 are painting Anthropic as a radical company that wanted to harm America as they saw it. I mean, Trump has picked up on this rhetoric. He called Anthropic a “radical left woke company,” called the people at it “left-wing nut jobs.” Emil 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 A.I. company, has very different politics than Dario, just like attacking Anthropic relentlessly on X, which is the 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 A.I. systems succeed and are powerful and that 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. Anthropic represents a kind of long-term political risk. Yes. I mean, I don’t know that the actors in this situation entirely understand that this dynamic — part of my point all along has been that I think a lot of the people in the Trump administration that are doing this do not understand this. Like, they don’t get what — 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 right to be 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.
