Bulwark Takes - LIVE: Did Israel Drag Us Into the Iran War? | Morning Chaser

Episode Date: March 3, 2026

Bill Kristol and Andrew Egger are going live to discuss Israel and the war in Iran, Congressional war powers, the growing split between hawks and “America First” within MAGA, and the DoD/AI question.

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BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with Eye Gaming Ontario. All right, I believe we are live. Hey, everybody out there watching on YouTube and on Substack. I'm Andrew Eger, Whitehouse correspondent for the Bullwork, author of our Morning Shots newsletter with Bill Crystal, our editor at large, who's here with me today. We are here for the third and hopefully not final week of our Tuesday morning live show coming off of our Morning Shots newsletter. It just went out a little bit ago. This is Morning Chaser, your Tuesday Morning Chaser. Thanks to you all for coming and tuning in with us and to everybody who's watching later. Bill, how are you doing this morning? Just fine. And you? Oh, you know, I'm doing great. What a time to be alive. There's so much going on in the news right now. I have been trying to wedge some content on what seems to me like a very important story about AI and who gets to own it and what the future of it is into the newsletter for several days now. But it keeps being superseded by more immediately pressing concerns. So we're going to do both today. We're going to talk about the more immediately

pressing concerns, and we'll do a little bit about AI as well. But let's start with what's on everybody's mind, right? It's good that Andrew isn't taking it personally every time Sam and I tell him, you know, yeah, that thing could be put off another day, Andrew. It's not really quite as important as the war that's going on. And Andrew, you take it, you take it, you take it, you take it. You take it. We'll get it in. I think 2027, 2027, there'll be a good lead morning shots item on AI, DOD, anthropic. It's actually a very interesting topic. We will get to it after we do the war first, right? Yes, that's right. Because as you may or may not have heard or seen by now, we are seemingly sort of at war. We're quasi at war. No war has been declared, but that seems to be

increasingly a sort of frippery, a formality these days, at least the way, you know, presidents from all over tend to practice it, and especially this one. It has been a little strange to watch the president and the defense secretary not bother to avoid the word war. I mean, they keep talking about us being at war. We're usually under these circumstances, presidents have a little bit more. They sort of talk around it. They talk about, you know, these limited actions that we're taking, you know, in these different theaters around the world. But let's talk about that, Bill, because you wrote the top for our morning newsletter today. We are, I don't know how many days now actually removed from the strikes. You know, they happened

over the weekend. And it's now Tuesday morning. And yet, even though we have gotten quite a bit more communication now from the White House in the form of the president calling up many random reporters at odd hours to sort of give his stream of consciousness thoughts about the quote-unquote war. We've had, you know, Marco Rubio out there talking. We've had Mike Johnson out there talking, JD Vance out there talking about these actions. And yet, it does not seem as though we are that much closer to understanding really why we did this or what our objectives are and were in doing it than we did. the weekend. So you wrote about some of this this morning. Can you just kind of talk us through

the state of play in terms of what the administration is saying about all of this right now? Yeah, you know, and on the war issue, it was amazing when Senator Mark Wayne Mullen said yesterday on CNN, well, it's not a war. And really, I mean, Pete HECSeth had said that morning that this is a war that President Trump's going to finish. And, yeah, I don't think the families of the service members who've died fighting this war, tragically. would appreciate being told, well, it's not really a war. You know, and other presidents have stretched, obviously, the kind of their ability to use executive power by saying,

well, it's not quite a war that requires congressional authorization. To be fair, we haven't done anything this big since 2003. I mean, whatever, and the fight against ISIS and ISIL and different versions of the terror groups in and around Iraq and Syria were genuinely a continuation of what was authorized. I think it's fair to say in the original AUMF, authorized the warrant error back at the end of 2001. Obama's intervention in Libya is probably the test case of him pushing the boundaries, but it wasn't nearly at this scale, nothing like this

scale. And it was done in conjunction with NATO allies. I still think better to have gone to Congress then. So this is genuinely shocking that he, I mean, I just think we shouldn't, everyone's been saying correctly, there's a long history of executive overreach and it's been gradual and it's been building up for decades. But this is different in the sense that this is really, big, it's massive, you know, and it's ongoing. It's not a one-off thing like the strike in June, where we sort of finished up what Israel was doing to the nuclear program. So, A, it's really a war. It's a big war. It's pretty, for me, is totally astonishing and unacceptable that they didn't go to Congress. We'll see what Congress says this week in terms of the war powers resolution that they

need to, I think, exert their authority. Even if they defend the war, they should say, okay, well, let's, So let's not quite retroactively authorize it, but let's signal to the world that we're behind it. As it is, you've got the president conducting this war with unfavorable public opinion polls, no congressional authorization or even expression of support. And I think allies and others can look at it and think, well, what exactly is going on here? And then, as you say, the president hasn't given many different explanations, some of which he's walked back, freedom explanation, helping the Iranian people rise up, which is. actually would be a pretty decent explanation for doing what we've done, but that is one that

Congress could have sort of authorized if we were going to do it for that reason. Rubio's tried the imminent threat authorization. We'll get back to that in a minute maybe. That doesn't stand up very well. I don't think they've been a bunch of other, you know, we have to stop Iran from having nuclear weapons and exporting terror, but they've been trying to do both for 20 years and they've been trying to do both for the whole first year of the Trump administration. and we didn't, you know, we didn't think it required this kind of action. Sometimes it does require some military action. So I think the reason the Trump administration seems incoherent about its goals is that it is

incoherent about its goals. And I don't really know why. Honestly, I really don't know why the president is doing. I mean, I think he's doing it for various reasons. Maybe we should get to the Israel point, which you wrote about in the second item, in morning shots a little more I have thought of to on that too. but but uh i do think historians will be maybe venezuela went to his head maybe he he you know he doesn't like iran the iran leadership i totally agree with that he doesn't like what they've done over the last 20 or

47 years i totally agree with that uh chameini tried to kill him as he put it and he he's gotten him back first maybe it's kind of personal revenge i mean it's obviously some combination of all these things but i think the final point i make just right now is i think the venezuela quote success But it was at least a success in the limited sense of Maduro being satched and us doing it neatly and cleanly, though close run thing on the helicopter there. But anyway, that really went to his head, I think. I just think he is high in his own supply in this respect and thinks he can do anything. The U.S. military can do anything. There's no cost to be paid.

People will kow to us anymore, which some will do in the short term if they're scared of us. And there's no thinking through of the broader consequences of what we're doing, I think. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the most striking thing to me, just listening to them talk about it over the last couple of days, especially Pete Hegseth yesterday, you know, speaking to reporters is just the real incongruity between like the stated aims and sort of the rationale that they're given. Because the aims are like pretty traditionally hawkish, at least some of them the way they've been expressed. Iran can never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon, like full stop. Iran, even its, even the degree to which it was stockpiling sort of conventional weapon. Marco Rubio said yesterday, short range missiles and drones, you know, that was threatening to tip them over to a point where they could sort of, you know, attack with impunity in the Middle East and sort of overwhelm missile defenses, our missile defenses there, or Israel's missile defenses there. And so those aims sort of expressed that way, kind of makes sense from like a hawkish sort of kind of thought process expressed by a guy like Marco Rubio. You get Pete Higgseth up there, and he is obviously very concerned with sort of the more

isolationist mega critique of sort of the last 20 years of our foreign policy, right? The idea that, you know, you create these power vacuums, you set the table for yourself to have to fight, you know, years and years and years of war. And he has said in no uncertain terms, that's not what this is going to be. We don't want endless war. We don't want, you know, nation building. We don't want to spread democracy. We don't want to, you know, have woke wars is kind of the way he's, the way he has bizarrely put it. But there's, but the, the incongruity between that stated end and those stated assurances is remarkable. I mean, the thing that they are saying is we are going to refuse to allow this country to have, to reach a certain military threshold forever. But don't think it's

going to be like a lengthy conflict or anything like that. We're going to be in and out. I mean, it's just, am I missing something there or is it actually quite this incoherent? No, that's well said. I mean, you know, I was a supporter of the Iraq war and a very strong advocate of the fact that if we were going to do it, we needed to send in ground troops. So that obviously is very much a mixed out, not a great outcome. And obviously that leads to casualties and so forth. And so that's a very tough thing to advocate and a tough thing to carry out, as we all found out, and George W. Bush found out. We weren't crazy. We weren't just to get to your point, right? And we thought if you're going to go for regime change, if you're going to try to construct something

much better, you can't just bomb them for a day or a week. We had bombed. People have, if Clinton had bombed Saddam Hussein for four days, I think it was, at the end of 1998 and maybe done some damage to the nuclear program. And so, yeah, I think it's really well said the way you put that. I mean, there's a big incongruity, incongruity between the ambition of our aims. And I would say the scale of what we're doing, which is in a way somewhat consistent with that, but then the incredible wish to stop short, not incredible, the understandable, I suppose, but irresponsible wish to just reassure everyone that nothing at stake here. We just demolish them and we have no responsibility. We wash our hands of what happened. I mean, even just from a human,

point of view. Really, you're going to go pulverize the nation, and I'm not against pulverizing some of the regime elements and destroying a lot of the weapons. And then you have no responsibility for what comes next. I mean, that that's not a very sound position, I think. Yeah, yeah. And it really does kind of drive home just how remarkable it is that not only is there no real broad base of popular support for this right now. I mean, small, small minorities of the public, at least prior to the action, said they wanted to see something like this. It was like 21 percent, I believe I saw of, of in one poll. Obviously, that is likely to tick up because of the nature of these things when Trump does a thing. Maga, at least in large part, tends to line up behind him. So I assume the polling will

increase. But there's nothing resembling sort of like a broad base of popular support for action over there, nor are they really trying to generate one, right? I mean, they're not saying, let's buckle in for a really long haul here. And everybody just needs to be patient because the the ends will be, you know, satisfactory. It'll be worth sort of the cost pay. in blood and treasure, but instead, even from the very jump, they are in sort of damage control reassurement mode, right? Like, don't you worry, this isn't going to be like the other ones, this isn't going to be long, this isn't going to be costly, this isn't going to be painful. And I guess we'll see. I mean, like, that's, but it just, again, I just keep coming back to

the incongruity between those reassurances and the deliverables that they are saying they're going to be able to deliver. So we'll find out about that. But one other thing on all of this that we haven't talked about is the one piece of new information, we did get yesterday about why specifically this happened now. And that was this remarkable reporting that we got first out of the New York Times and later confirmed both by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and House Speaker Mike Johnson, basically saying that a big part of the calculus for these strikes for the Trump administration was that Israel was determined to go forward with its strikes now, regardless of whether or not we joined them. And according, again, to these leaders that I just mentioned,

that was a part of our assessment. That's what made it sort of a defensive action in the terminology of Mike Johnson. Or as Marco Rubio put it, that was what we judged we needed to do to address an imminent threat because Israel was going to strike. And we assessed Iran was going to strike back against us and against Israel. And so the sort of, again, in this strange logic train, defensive action they are alleging was to join Israel. Obviously, the logic of that is sort of tortuous. Maybe it holds up, maybe it doesn't. I'm not an expert in these things.

But I think that the bigger sort of, the reason why this explanation made a lot of people prick up their ears is just the underlying state of play that that reveals about sort of who's calling the shots here. I mean, like, between America and Israel, like, it was kind of a startling, at least, suggestion of sort of a lack of agency on the part of, you know, the United States of America in terms of when to get involved and when not to get involved with this conflict. I don't know exactly how to parse all that, Bill. What was your take on this stuff coming out yesterday? I think it's really worth noting. Look, I think part it can eat, who knows what the true truth is

about exactly what Israel would have done if we had said, no, we're not going to help. I mean, the buck passing side of it, which you mentioned in morning shots, shouldn't be ignored, right? I mean, it's a nice excuse everyone, you know, a lot of Republicans, a lot of Americans are pro-Israel, a lot of people are very sympathetic. Israel has a much more existential threat from Iran has had and does have than we, than the U.S. does. And a lot of people are sympathetic to the idea that we should help Israel. And Trump, in fact, went in to help Israel in June, right? He did the last finished up, so to speak, the nuclear bombing. It's unclear why we wouldn't have done that kind of thing again, even if Israel had gone to war.

A. B. in June, the war between Israel and Iran went, I think, for 11 days. until we came in. Very few American assets were hit by Iran. They're not idiots. Do they really want to fight? They were having, they did hit Israel. They tried to. They launched massive missile attacks and so forth. We helped Israel defend itself against those. But it wasn't as if Iran said, great, Israel's attacked us. Let's just attack America too, because we can handle both Israel and America. That's in a way, that's what they're saying, right? That's literally what Rubio is saying. I don't buy that as a true analysis of the Iranian regime. They hate us. Maybe they would try to kill Americans in terror attacks or by lobbing some drones into bases. I don't minimize that.

Obviously, if Israel had attack, we would have taken many defensive precautions. I assume we would have told the Iranians who we were talking to last week in negotiations, you touch us. You're really going to get it. But for now, we're going to let Israel do what it feels it has to do. I mean, there were millions of things, millions of in between positions we could have taken, rather than saying, oh, Israel's going to attack. We can't stop them. And you pointed out in warning shots, we did in June at the end, after. after our sort of concluding nuclear attack on the nuclear facility, Trump told Israel privately and publicly,

we're not with you if you do anything more. Don't do anything more, right? There was some all caps tweet, remember that? Yeah, turn the planes around. Don't drop the bombs. It was really on truth social, right? Out in public. Suddenly now, Rubio's account,

well, we're kind of helpless, but Israel was going to go ahead. Now, either it shows that D.B. had Trump wrapped around his little finger or sort of conned him, I suppose, or Rubio's looking for an excuse. and blaming Israel in a sense or making Israel take responsibility

for this whole war. But again, it's ridiculous. Whatever, I mean, we would have been involved if Israel had gone to war in the same way we were in Jew. We might have done things. We certainly would have had to take defensive precautions. The idea that this massive attack, which we spent two, three months,

sending a huge chunk of our fleet and many bombers and so forth over to the Middle East to participate in was triggered by simply by the need to defend ourselves, because Israel was attacking is both false. And I think dangerous for an American for Rubio to say that. I mean, the effect of it is either to make, I don't know, us look weak in the world's eyes or like a tool of Israel that helps anti-Israel types

here in the U.S. I think both on the right and left, don't you think, and say, well, look at this is, you know, we're now being dragged into a war that, as you said, is not very popular by Israel. Rubio basically said that. And I don't think it's true in the sense that we have a lot of agency. Trump did not have many American, every American president has said no to Israel in the last fall that were such close allies in the last 30 or 40 years. Often on very controversial moments telling Israel we wouldn't support further actions by them in Lebanon or elsewhere.

Often not supporting, you know, it's not as if every administration hasn't had a pull and push and pull with Israel. And Trump has in his first year. So it's really a response. At that part I find really distasteful maybe because I'm pretty pro-Israel and I just feel like this is going to increase. anti-Israel's sentiment and really kind of anti-Semitism probably in the U.S. in the sense that's a Jewish lobby maneuvering, you know. Now, Trump himself may have been very responsive to parts of that, you know, some of his biggest owners, Miriam Adelson. I don't know. I mean, who knows what calculations Trump personally is making, but it's not an excuse. As you put it,

he has agency, the U.S. government has agency. The U.S. government has many times not done what Israel wanted. And it's just saying, well, Israel wanted to do this, so we just had to go along, as Rubio said, not go along. We had to launch a massive attack on our own in conjunction with them. That's really wrong and irresponsible, I think. Yeah, and I think the point that you make that's really important that a lot of the analysis of this out there right now is missing is that Rubio might not have been being particularly forthright, right? I mean, like there are a lot of extraneous reasons why it might have been useful for him, you know, for this or that sort of narrow reason of making the case, for instance,

that there was an imminent threat that we had to address, and therefore, you know, this is constitutional under various, you know, wartime authorities, that sort of thing. All this is kind of in the back of Rubio's mind. But I did want to talk a little bit about sort of the political repercussions of the administration so publicly making this case because there is a fault line. I mean, you kind of gestured out of here. There's a fault line that runs right through the MAGA base in terms of a lot of this stuff right now,

some of which is blatantly anti-Semitic, but a lot of which is doesn't quite go that far, but is very skeptical of sort of extremely close military ties between the United States and Israel, that wants to see less of us doing all of that and so on. And I mean, these people were not happy yesterday. They were not happy about the war at all, first of all, but then seeing these sorts of comments from Rubio and from Johnson,

I mean, there are a lot of people out there who are like, my worst fears about, you know, this administration, and cowtowing to Israel are confirmed from within the MAGA base. I mean, like, I at least was a little surprised to see the White House not feeling the need to massage that side of the base. Maybe it's just because I'm too online and I see them a lot. And I like, I think of them as actually maybe a larger contingent of the broad MAGA constellation than they really are. I mean, but that was my reaction. It's like, isn't this kind of just giving a lot of grist to sort of the Marjorie Taylor Greens, the anti-Israel folks of the party?

So I think it was. Maybe this was Ruby, although very focused, as you sort of said, on taking care of the congressional problem. I think he was on the hill when he said this, wasn't he, that he was dealing with. Why didn't we get, oh, it was immediate, it was urgent, it was imminence, which has always been a sort of a excuse for not going to Congress first. Not just excuse, it would be a reason not to go to Congress first if it genuinely were an imminent threat. You can't forecast it to the world, exactly. So that was the problem he was dealing with, but he maybe didn't think through what other problems it was causing either politically for Trump and for the MAGA base and for Republicans or just for the country to, what does the world think if the Secretary's Day of the United States says we had no choice because this much, much, much smaller country whom we have constrained many times and who we have, as recently as June, you know, stopped from doing something. And in any case can't make us do anything, are saying, oh, we had no choice. they were going in and it wasn't just they were going in but iran was thinking to attack u.s.

assets as if we don't have the ability to defend us asses once iran starts to attack them so um the idea that again i think rubio wasn't thinking about both the geostrategic implications the white house is not actually said what what now that i think about as you mentioned it what rubio said right i mean the white house has not gone down the israel path the white house is into is more just how many is horrible and you know and and and it's uh we can't let them develop nuclear weapons so there may be an interesting you know maybe what ruby you said was not exactly a white house line it was his own attempt to deal with a congressional problem but either way it's it now is out there and it's having the effect it's having yeah and it kind of gets into what what actually counts as an

official white house line right i mean i know that some of the like i think i saw the the the rapid response 47, you know, one of the, one of the, like, White House's Twitter web teams reposted Rubio's remarks. And so, like, that is in some sense an endorsement from, you know, the main building of the line. But also it's, it might just be some random, you know, comm staffer who's like, oh, the Secretary of State said this. Let's fire it out. It's a little opaque. On this point, Andrew, this is why in normal White House's, the president of the United States gives a carefully written 15-minute, 20-minute speech when we're going to launch of Asian military action, each day and lays it out. Now, it's not always perfect and it's not always coherent,

and people can always say that's not a good argument, that one country takes this one, fine. And then each day, and I was in a White House that was at war, the White House's press secretary is coordinating with the State Department and Defense Department spokespeople. And obviously at the top level, the President's coordinating with the SEC DEF and the Secretary of State and so forth, as National Security Advisor. And they are being very careful about their message, right? And I mean, And that's not just, you know, George H. W. Bush was probably better than most administrations at this with Cheney and Baker and Skokroft and those guys. But that's true of every administration, Obama, even Trump won, actually, you know, you mean accounts of Pompeo being on the phone with Kelly

and so forth when there were, you know, moments of really intense action. What has the sense here, it's, you know, hex-thes francing around the Pentagon beating his chest. Rubio is desperately trying to keep the hill sort of under control. There is no national, I guess Rubio is technically the National Security there is basically no national security advisor, which I would just say for those who, you know, from an inside government point of view, that's a very important job when you're actually fighting a war. I mean, someone needs to call the meeting and coordinate these guys. The vice president's got his own little political agenda, keeping his head down because he wants to be sort of on the isolationist side that you think of the MAGA world, so he doesn't really want to be too much

involved in this war and he wants to leak out that, well, if we're going to do what, we have to do it big, but also get it done fast and, you know, kind of getting his own spit out there. So this is where you pay a price for not having a serious. administration, obviously. Yeah, yeah. And if you think that power vacuum is bad in terms of messaging the war in the immediate term in the White House, just think about the one that's now developing in Iran in the wake of all of this. So yeah, there's a lot of chaos. Not a lot of it seems to be adding up to anything good. We will obviously continue to follow this story very carefully in morning shots and in 50 other bulwark products. I mean, this is, it's crazy, the stuff that's going on.

What is time to be alive? We can turn away from that now. I did want to talk a little bit as well. Again, like I said, it feels weird to talk about this in the midst of this actual war breaking out and maybe starting to metastasize, hopefully not too badly, across the Middle East. But I have been working and writing about something else related to the Pentagon, sort of a policy thing that you never know. In the long term, could in fact end up being just as important, which is this fight that has been going on between Pete Hegseth and the AI company Anthropic over the last couple of weeks. weeks, came to a head late last week, resulting in the Pentagon, which had previously been really integrated with Anthropic. Anthropic had been the only AI company licensed for its AI to be used in classified settings. So, for instance, even as late as this weekend, you know, the attacks that

that we carried out in Iran. And then as our commands around the world coordinated our responses or planned for Iran's responses against us, they were using Anthropic AI. Anthropic is integrated into these systems, but it's not going to be for long. And the reason for that is because on Friday, Pete Hegset pulled the plug. He said,

not only are we canceling our contracts with Anthropic, and we're going to sign, you know, we're going to backfill those. We're going to sign similar contracts with a couple of other AI labs, Open AI, which runs ChatGPT, and XAI, which is Elon Musk's GROC. That'll be good in classified settings, I think.

But not only are they, they switching to those other AI software partners to contract with, but they are also forbidding Anthropic from doing any work with any government contractor period in perpetuity until Hegseth decides to take his foot off of their neck, which is a real, you know, existential threat to the company, at least as far as Pete Hegseth has characterized this. If he got his way, Anthropic would no longer be able to partner with many of the companies that own a lot of its stock, Google and Amazon. They would no longer be able to buy video chips that power its technology from invidia. They would no longer be able to sell their software to any number of companies that

have contracts with the DOD. So it's a real threat. And the reason for this is because Anthropic and Pete Hegseth had a disagreement about what the DOD should be allowed to use their software for. Up until now, under the terms of an agreement that was first signed under the Biden administration, but which the defense department under Pete Hegseth re-ratified last year, the Defense Department had very broad latitude to use Anthropics AI for classified military purposes, even lethal purposes. But there were a couple of red lines, one of which is Anthropics said, you can't use our models to conduct mass surveillance domestically.

You cannot do broad American citizen surveillance with our models. And the other red line was, we don't think that our models are currently reliable enough to be used to power lethal autonomous weapons systems. So like, you know, self-targeting, self-actualizing killer robots and drones out there. The models are not reliable enough to do that yet. So we do not think the Defense Department should be able to use our model for that. Heg-Seth basically said, we disagree with these. We don't think you should be able to tell us what to do.

Heg-Seth says we don't want to do either of those things yet. But sort of on principle, Heg-Seth is basically saying, saying, you can't do that, you can't tell us not to do those things. Anthropic said, well, we're going to anyway. So that was kind of what led to the nuclear blowout here. Obviously, this has kind of continued to reverberate. It's going to take a long time. Anthropic is suing. And, you know, some of these other companies are striking these new deals with the defense department. But also, it's not very popular the idea that AI would be used to surveil Americans in mass and pilot killer robots. So these other AI companies are having to sort of,

pretend to the public that that's not really what they're doing. They also really have respect for civil liberties and a healthy fear of the robot apocalypse. So there are amazing things happening in the Defense Department right now. I have just been rambling a lot about the stuff that I find interesting in the world and report on. Bill, I don't know. Do you have a take on this, on this DOD-anthropic blow-up? I mean, there's so many different weird angles about the future that this implicates. No, that was really an excellent, I think, account of what's happened. You wrote about a Friday the day before the war began,

and you have another piece coming, maybe we'll see tomorrow or Thursday, depending on how much the war crowds everything out. But no, that was really excellent. To get pushed again. Yeah, yeah, I'm doing my best to, you know, just soften the blow here. That was a very good summary.

The one thing you said at the end of the piece Friday, I totally agree with is, you know, this should not be a matter of a private negotiation between Pete Hexeth and the CEO of Anthropic. I mean, this is Congress can act here. Congress can and should lay down markers as they do in a million other ways. Remember, every, what, three years or what he gets reauthorized? It's a massive debate in Congress over Section 702.

I don't even honestly remember what 702 is a section of and some act, obviously, some congressional, some law, which has to do with national NSA surveillance and the Rand Paul, but also the left, don't like the degree to which they don't surveil us, but they surveil, I guess, if we're talking to a farther, they can get not the phone, not what we say on the phone, what, to a suspicious foreigner. But the fact that the call happened, anyway, it's, I mean, metadata. I mean, it's very complicated. It's always debated. Everyone thinks, you know what, Congress is a good debate. It's a good thing to debate. There are real differences in how you prioritize privacy and national security. And this is a kind of thing. The United States Congress

resolves. The president has a veto authority, obviously. And I think at times in the previous administration's threatened to veto things that weren't friendly enough to national security. That's, where's Congress? I mean, this is where you pay such a prize for the of Congress, even if it doesn't get resolved perfectly, at least as a sense of a democratic process is dealing with this. And now, as you say at the very end of what you just said before, it's very unclear what's happening. It's unclear if AI, if the other companies really are going to do what Anthropic wouldn't do or not. They're really not going to do it, but they're sort of saying they're going to do it. It's unclear what the legal situation is. Hegseth really doesn't have the right. One wouldn't

think because of one disagreement over these particular things to ban Anthropic from dealing with anyone and any other unrelated defense thing. And as you say, in the, the actual real time right now, Anthropic is in the U.S. Defense Department systems and the others aren't, right? And I don't know that that's changing in the next week or the next month or the next three months. How quickly does these things get, can get they get changed over if they in fact do get changed over. So supposedly they have six months to make it happen, according to that. Yeah, so that's great. So the whole war is going to be fought with this allegedly unreliable. I mean, Texas determination is that Anthropics is an unsuitable partner to have in our defense

supply chain. And we're literally fighting the biggest war we fought in 20 years with a anthropic material contributions on AI. So I think you did an excellent job in the summary. You should keep following it. It is really important. And my only sort of footnote, I guess, more broadly would be I was talking to a very intelligent democratic strategist last week. It was sort of read about other things actually about races in 2026.

I can't remember how it came up even. Maybe we were chatting. Maybe he'd read your piece. And he said, you know what? I think the whole AI issue, that's even so much on the job question, which is what a lot of people have talked about, well, how many white collar jobs? well take and so forth. But on the privacy question, Grock, sexualizing women and I suppose men also they could, and girls and boys, that whole issue is going to be huge. He thought it could be one of the

biggest issues of American politics over the next few years. He thought it should be because it is a genuinely big technological development. It takes us a while to handle these big technological developments and there are big fights about them. We make some stupid decisions as we go forward, But no one thought you could just have the automobile and not have, you know, rules of the road and build highways that are suitable for automobiles and then limit the speed on the highways and then have limit the, you know, danger of automobiles with seatbelts. I mean, right? And God knows, AI is a bigger thing, I think, than automobiles. So the idea that we're just passively watching all this happen gets back to the point about Congress. I mean, it's we need.

And I don't you think, I do think that in each political party, maybe you should say a word about. each if you want, or certainly on the Republican side, this can be a very big kind of lurking issue for 2028, no? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have really more and more been coming around on the idea that not only are these technologies, you know, not a flash in the pan, as some people have kind of thought they're going to plateau off and not create a lot of economic activity, but that in fact they are going to continue to sort of reveal themselves to be more and more powerful than we even really

anticipated, which just, you know, multiplies the potential for disruption, multiplies the upside and the downside, right? And increasingly spotlights how, you know, perilous it is that there really is no energy, hardly any policy work being done at the congressional level to, like, get our laws up to speed in one way or another about this. Because, I mean, this is sort of at the bedrock of the Pentagon's position is like, well, look, you know, we should be able to use these models for what they call all lawful purposes. And what a lot of these advocates and, you know, civil liberties types people are saying, and in fact, the position that Anthropic is, is kind of tacitly endorsing is none of these, none of these sort of privacy laws that we currently

have, first of all, the state of them is not great anyway. We've known this for 20 years, that sort of like the state of the restraints on, on sort of these digital, digital companies, the amount of information that they can vacuum up is so far beyond what anybody would actually sort of deem permissible if they sat down and tried to develop a line for like what they think is reasonable. And it's so far outstrips what we could do before, you know, the digital revolution, before all of our lives moved online. And when you add AI into that and you add not only can, not only are all, is all of this data being vacuumed up all the time and put into these different commercial

databases and government databases and things, but now you have a basic, sort of omnipresent, omniscient database synthesizing machine that can at will sort of put, pull all of those different things out of all of those different repositories and put them all together to assemble like a remarkably thorough and consistent picture of like a person's digital footprint. And that in theory, that's just at the government's fingertips now. Like, that's the kind of thing where you really start to realize, wow, on the surveillance side of things. We have no framework for like, we never anticipated that this would be the case when we were writing the laws that are now on the books. We have not written any new laws since then.

And as a result, these things are getting hashed out in this environment where really the only, the only thing stopping the government from being able to sort of do this at will is the scruples of this or that AI company. And as we have seen, those scruples don't necessarily go very far when as in this case, one AI company like Anthropic is willing to say, well, look, please just don't do this one thing. And the government is going to say, screw you. We're going to destroy your business. And it won't even matter because we're going to get rid of your models. And we're going to move over to this more pliant AI company over here that is willing to let us, let us do these things. So it really is. I mean, like, it's the sort of thing that cries out for real policy thought and real

policy work at a moment when Congress is is completely paralyzed. And it's not a great thing. I don't know what to say about it exactly. Well, can I add, sorry, go ahead, Bill. I just said AI spending a huge amount of money now in congressional races to try to support people who are really in favor of, you know, not regulating them much. Again, in the end, and I don't know, maybe that, you know, that's, well, companies spend a lot of money trying to fight environmental regulations and so forth, right? I mean, so it's nothing wrong with that. It's a free country and all, and interest groups will be, we'll do what they do. But, yeah, one thing that, the limit.

the power of those interest groups, it's just more public discussion, right? The auto companies were very powerful, and then Ralph Nader came along, and a lot of other groups got formed and mothers against drunk driving, and suddenly the auto companies, it wasn't quite as one-sided.

One can imagine that dynamic happening in a normal and healthy political system in the US. It's just the system seems so broken. I guess the final point I make is just, this is so new. I mean, these blue ribbon commissions are often pointless and foolish or, you know, or just they'll really do serious work,

But some of them do. And again, you could have in a different world, an executive commission appointed by the president or appointed by the president with some selections from congressional leadership of big shot former CEOs, former judges, former everyone, civil society types, religious leaders to say, okay, is there, what should be the outlines of a kind of regulatory structure here

or what are at least of the questions that we should be asking? It wouldn't be a foolish thing to do. We've done that in other areas in the past, sometimes it's been helpful. But again, in the era of Trump one, it just sounds silly to even suggest such a thing. Yeah. Yeah. And the White House has had sort of a policy approach to these questions, right? I mean, their broad stance on AI all along has been, don't get in the way. Just like any sort of like overly persnickety regulation that we did right now would only be sort of like shackles on these companies that are developing these models that are going to be so

transformative, you know, that would hold us back in sort of the AI, AI race against China. You know, these have been their positions. And so it's very strange, you know, to see Hegsef and the Defense Department, you know, still pushing this extremely maximalist sort of vision of what AI, the technology should be used for, you know, no restraints on the way we, the Defense Department, are going to use them, you know, keep on pushing that forward because we need to, you know, win the AI race against China while at the same time, you know, having these, these viewpoints about the technology, but now taking this insanely hostile stance toward one of the leading companies in the industry. And so that is like creating this bizarre fissure right now, even inside sort of the tech

right, where they're like, wait a minute, I thought you guys were pro AI. And now you're taking like perhaps the most promising AI company we have that we should be so lucky to have, you know, a bunch of clods, a bunch of anthropics in America. And you're trying to nuke them from orbit. it? Like, how is that sort of, like, pro-AI in this broad sense? Obviously, this is a really developing story. We will hold on onto it. There are 50 different angles that we didn't even talk about about this. But it is, I mean, it's the biggest clash so far between the government and the AI industry. It is spotlighting just how sort of flimsy the legal structures that are, in theory,

should put a curb on all of this are. And it really does just start to look like a race to the bottom in terms of, in terms of, you know, whether there are going to be any real curbs on the most frightening uses of this technology, which we haven't even talked about, like some people think, will actually also just exterminate humanity and destroy the world. I don't necessarily think that, but that's out there too in terms of hooking more and more of our decision-making up to artificial intelligence. I should have said long ago that they tell you, you know, not everybody tunes in at the beginning, remind them who you are, remind them why you're here.

I'm Andrew Eger. This is Bill Crystal. We write morning shots for the book. full work on Tuesdays. We're going live to talk through what we've been writing about, what we're going to be writing about. Thanks to everybody who's out there watching and following along so far. I think we're going to call this one quits, but I should say one more thing before we stop. And that is that Sarah and JVL and Tim will be doing a live taping of the next level this afternoon at 2 p.m. So, you know, you can pretty much these days you can just go through your whole life

consuming live and on-demand bullwork content. You can watch us at 10 a.m. You can go take a long, relaxed three-martini lunch, come back at two for the next level. You know, there are worse ways to spend your time on the internet. We appreciate you guys all out there for watching. We hope you'll head over to the bulwark.com and get the Morningshots newsletter,

as well as our many other excellent newsletter offerings. And I guess we'll see you here next Tuesday. Thanks, Bill, for coming along, and we'll see you all next time. Thanks, Andrew.