Look, I think if we do our jobs well, we will create systems which are virtuous and which — and so 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, and 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 moral philosophy that reigns over all — 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 are going to be — there could be times. And I’m not saying that the Trump administration is going to do that. And I’m not saying that no virtuous model could work for the Trump administration. I worked for the Trump administration. So I clearly don’t think that’s true. But the general fact that governments commit — — You seem kind of pissed at them right now. 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 — you brought this up. 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. I mean, it’s crazy to say that. I realize that sounds nuts when you play through the implications of that. 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 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 aligned to liberal democratic values, could become misaligned to a government that is trying to portray liberal democratic values or the flip. So imagine that Gavin Newsom or Josh Shapiro or Gretchen Whitmer or A.O.C. becomes president in 2029. Imagine that the government has a series of contracts with xAI, which is Elon Musk’s A.I., which is explicitly oriented to be less liberal, less woke than the other A.I.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 interests, and we can’t have it anywhere near our systems. Yeah. All of a sudden you have this very weird — I mean, it becomes actually much more like the problem of the bureaucracy, 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 after Trump, somebody comes in and worries it’s full of 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. Yeah. I don’t think this is — 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 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. 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 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. 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 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.
