Democracy Now! Audio - Democracy Now! 2026-09-24 Thursday

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

Headlines for September 24, 2026; Nobel Laureate Maria Ressa on Trump’s Media Ban, Regulating AI & the “Tech Coup in Plain Sight”; Should U.N. Help Set Global AI Rules? AI Tech Billionaires Address Security Council; “Colonial AI”: African Countries Seek Tech Sovereignty But Fear a New Digital Colonialism; “Gilded Rage”: Jacob Silverman on How a Radicalized Silicon Valley Shapes Trump’s AI Policies

This is Democracy Now. Pointed federal judge has blocked President Trump's White House ban on journalists from CNN, MS Now, and Politico. We'll speak with Nobel Prize winning journalist Maria Ressa. She used to work for CNN. Then the CEOs of major AI companies address the UN Security Council, calling on world leaders to adopt international. standards for AI development. First, we should begin with narrow agreements that every member can support, such as a ban on

using AI to make biological weapons. We'll speak with an AI researcher who's taken part in UN meetings this week and with an expert who's worked with the African Union on AI strategy. Then, who's advising President Trump on AI? The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a global scheme to control for the artificial intelligence. We're going to encourage it, not rain it in. We'll speak with journalist Jacob Silverman. His latest book is Gilded Rage, Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley.

All that and more come in. Welcome to Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org.org. Warren Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Trump's ban on CNN, MS now, and Politico from the White House. Just after midnight, Judge Timothy Kelly of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., a Trump appointee, granted a two-week restraining order and told the White House to, quote, immediately return, reinstate and restore the press credentials of the three news outlets. Ted Boutros, an attorney for the outlet, said, quote, this is a strong ruling, vindicating freedom of the press, due process, and the rule of law.

We greatly appreciate the court's swift action, he said. Meanwhile, the new news site status is reporting Vice President J.D. Vance was the unnamed senior administration official behind one of the stories the White House used to justify banning Politico from its grounds. Vance has defended Trump's ban on the news outlets as totally appropriate. Leaders of TARPA Ford official intelligence firms testified to the UN Security Council on Wednesday, urging nations to adopt international standards on the development of AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amadee touted the benefits of the technology, even as he warned the Security Council, that it, quote, could be a risk to humanity as a whole, unquote. His competitor, OpenAI, Chief Executive Sam Altman, also called for

international regulations. At the international level, this will require cooperation. In our history, there have been times where countries who compete and don't always like each other very much still come together for shared interests and the collective good in the face of a powerful new technology. We believe this must be one of those times. Altman spoke as Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese revealed that an open AI agent hacked an Australian government health website in June where it accessed private data. It's the first known example of an autonomous AI agent hacking a government network. Today I spoke with the CEO of OpenAI, Sem Altman, to express

Australia's extreme concern about this incident. And I also expressed my disappointment that it took the company way too long to inform the government what had occurred and the nature of the way that that notification occurred as well was unacceptable. The Australian Prime Minister said investigators were considering whether to file criminal charges against OpenAI. This follows a series of incidents where frontier AI models escaped containment, self-organized into swarms, launched cyber attacks, and attempted to cover their tracks. Meanwhile, in Washington, Democratic Senator Bernie Sanders and Congress member Greg Kassar Wednesday unveiled the Ban artificial Superintelligence Act. The legislation would establish a cabinet-level federal department of

artificial intelligence, pause advanced AI development until a new federal regulatory body is up and running and would ban AI models that exceed human performance and capabilities across most domains. We'll have more on this story later in the broadcast. Iranian President Massoud Pesachian delivered a defiant speech to the UN General Assembly Wednesday condemning President Trump's threat to annihilate Iran while calling for diplomacy to end war. America and Israel attacked us equipped with the latest technology and weapon systems and our people stood steadfast. Yes, they did hit us, but we did not bend the knee. We did not bow our head. We responded, but we did not hit civilian populations. They came into surrounding territories and targeted our universities,

our health care centers, our schools, our hospitals, our infrastructures, all of it against international law. A lone U.S. delegate walked out of the U.N. Hall in protest as President Pasechkian spoke. Israel's ambassador boycotted the speech entirely. The U.S. navies admitted eight service members aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln Strike Group attempted suicide. during their historically long mid-east deployment when sailors spent 286 days at sea. Acting Navy Secretary Hongkow made the admission in a letter to New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, who accused President Trump of showing open disrespect to troops and their families. Gillibrand added, quote, that this administration can find endless taxpayer dollars for bombs,

bowlrooms and billionaires, but cannot take care of our service members as completely unacceptable, unquote. In August, Defense Secretary Pete Higseff insisted reports of deteriorating conditions and mental health struggles aboard the Lincoln were, quote, unquote, completely misrepresented. France, Canada, and the United Kingdom have called for Palestinian sovereignty at the UN General Assembly. On Tuesday, French President Emmanuel Macron blasted the world's inability to act on Gaza. What credibility do we have if we continue to remain inactive in the face of Gaza? Some boast of a supposed peace,

but this peace hasn't reopened humanitarian roots for a single second. Must we stand by and watch this spectacle that shames us all? Never. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. who condemned Macron's remarks, calling them a, quote, grotesque absurdity, unquote. Netanyahu is addressing the United Nations General Assembly this afternoon. President Trump's hosting Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington, D.C. for a three-day summit. She skipped the UN General Assembly in New York.

It's the Chinese leader's first trip to the U.S. since 2015. Trump and Xi are set to discuss artificial intelligence, the Iran-Ber. war and Taiwan during the summit. There's a state dinner tonight with, among others, tech billionaires. In Michigan, the Grand Rapids Police Department says a man died on Sunday after crashing his car into a tree while fleeing ice. That's immigration and customs enforcement agents. Guatemala's consul general identified the victim as Mario David Coronado Horace. Advocates say the 36-year-old was working in construction to provide for his wife and three young children in Guatemala. On Tuesday evening, immigrant rights advocates pack the Grand Rapids City Commission

meeting where they accused local police of collaborating with ICE. Mayor David LeGrand declared a recess as protesters chanted Cornadell Juarez's name and demanded abolish ICE. In Louisiana, a 36-year-old immigrant from Costa Rica died last week inside the wind correctional center in Winfield, according to ICE. Carlos, Josue, Marceana, Marceana, was declared dead after he was found unresponsive. He had type 1 diabetes and family members said he complained of deteriorating health as he missed meals and insulin shots while being shuttled between ice jails and multiple states. He's the 55th person to die in ICE custody during Trump's second term and the 25th this year alone. In Texas, Congress member Greg Kassar Wednesday visited, will be. Rafael Garces Perez at an ICE jail three days after the 28-year-old Venezuelan man was shot by an immigration officer in North Austin.

Qasar told reporters Garces Perez needed surgery to remove a bullet that remains lodged in his back. And Congress member Qasar questioned why Garces Perez was discharged from an Austin hospital after just four hours, then taken to an ice jail, 135 miles away. Every single person should have a right to be fully cared for in a hospital bed and not to be dragged to a detention center while you are still bleeding. In fact, in talking to Wilbur, he made it clear to me that he didn't even know that this bullet was still inside of him until more than a day later after being shot. In Washington, D.C. family members of people killed by ICE, testified before lawmakers Tuesday at a hearing organized by House Democrats. Witnesses included Ronaldo Salgado and Lorenzo Salgado Jr., whose father was shot and killed by ICE while driving to work in Houston in July. Also testifying were relatives of Renee Good

shot dead in Minneapolis in January by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. This is Renee Good's mother, Donna Ganger. I'm a registered Republican. I voted for. for President Trump, under the impression that these agents were here to protect the citizens of the United States, innocents like our family and the others here against terrorists, certainly not to accuse those of us here of being terrorists and take precious lives. This is madness. And here in New York, Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was sentenced Wednesday to 15 years in prison for sexually assaulting former TV production assistant Mariam Haley back in 2006.

She testified Weinstein forcibly performed oral sex on her in his Manhattan apartment. According to Haley, Weinstein had also hired private investigators to keep tabs on her. Weinstein has been in custody since his first conviction has already spent more than six years in prison. He still faces resentencing in that case in Los Angeles, where he originally received 16 years for rape. And those are some of the headlines. This is Democracy Now.org. The War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman. And I'm Nermine Sheikh. Welcome to our listeners and viewers across the country and around the world. A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Trump's ban on CNN, MS Now, and Politico,

ordering the administration to restore their White House access for 14 days. A lawyer for the outlets described the decision as a, quote, strong ruling, vindicating freedom of the press, due process, and the rule of law. We begin today's show with one of the world. leading advocates for press freedom, Maria Ressa. In 2021, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to safeguard freedom of expression. Maria Ressa is the founder and CEO of the Philippine Independent News site, Rappler, and she's a former CNN journalist, among other places, she covered East Timor. She's also the co-chair of the United Nations Independent International

Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence. We'll talk about that in a moment. But we're going to begin with this breaking news from overnight, Maria Ressa, a Trump-appointed judge has at least temporarily halted the ban on CNN, MS Now, and Politico. Can you talk about the significance of what Trump has attempted to do? And for the first time, the solidarity expressed by the Washington press pool that refused to fill in for CNN. And so, you... you couldn't hear Trump's voice. Well, it was incredible. And, you know, my outlet, actually, my, my president banned both our reporter and me from

the palace at that point. So to see the kind of solidarity that the American media did on Friday was incredible. But look, in terms of the reaction, the reaction is everyone knows this is unconstitutional. And I struggle when I say that. As a reporter, you sit there and you go, do we say it's unconstitutional? or not. Are we supposed to not say that, right? This is this is the dilemma of a reporter in the age of death by a thousand cuts. We can't normalize the lies or the impunity that is around us. And so in this case, this particular judge has done this before. And this was during Trump's first term, Jim Acosta.

He judged for press freedom in the same way. And it's a simple thing. It's a constitutional move. Whether the Trump administration has already said that it will go ahead and appeal this, for all of that. At this point, people are standing up for rule of law. People are standing up for press freedom. And that's incredibly important because we live in an age where you can't take these things for granted.

And having lived through it, there are costs to standing up, but there are greater costs to giving up. So Maria Reza, we see that you're in a car on your way to the United Nations. Let's turn to artificial intelligence. You're the co-chair of the United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence. And AI took center stage at the UN on Wednesday when the heads of OpenAI and Anthropic briefed the UN Security Council. The meeting came, as Australia revealed, that a rogue open AI tool hacked into Australia's national healthcare database in the first known case of AI hacking a government network. Maria Ressa, you were at the Security Council as these CEOs testified. What was most striking to you and most important among the things they said?

The mood in the room was actually really fascinating and the kind of consensus that you that you used. see among many of the nation states. First, let me tell you about the, what, the thematic brief that my co-chair and I, that the panel came out with on Monday, which showed you exactly what it was. We tried to answer four questions. Question number one was, you know, what actually happened? Question number two is what trend does that show? And then number three, what do we not know? And number four is what would be completely irresponsible if we do not act? This is to help policy team makers deal with this. That's part of what this independent panel is supposed to do to give you the facts. And along with those tech CEOs who all have their own interests, you also had Joshua

Benjo, who's my co-chair speaking there, right? And what's the consensus among the majority of it? It seems like everyone knows that AI is now the rogue AI, including the Secretary General saying again this week that it is out of our control. That's in our preliminary panel report that we released in July 1. this, the frontier models cannot be controlled, right? And so there's several questions. Who's accountable? The tech CEOs were there, but as was Hugging Face. And one of the most interesting things,

Hugging Face, the CEO of Hugging Face, was that he couldn't even use the commercial models to help defend against the attack because of the way it was designed. And so what did he do? He used, he went through Nvidia and used an open source Chinese model. That was fascinating to me because it showed both sovereignty and it showed you the kind of power and control,

a small group of people will have. So overall, in that room, people said it's time to put guardrails in place, except for some exceptions. And of course, notable is the United States. Michael Kratzias came through. One of the first things he said was super intelligence, formerly known as artificial intelligence,

and then walked against, spoke against any kind of global multilateral solution. As a member of the panel, the reason we exist is because the United Nations General Assembly created an expert group. 40 of us from 37 different countries, nearly 50-50 male-female, right, to try to help. the world come up with a collective solution. We cannot have a small group, one country with 75% of the world's compute power, and a small group of companies deciding the fate of humanity. Let me ask you about China. You, of course, are from the Philippines. If you can talk about, you know, the fact that China has more regulations in place than does the United States, What kind of regulations?

You have Xi right now meeting with President Trump in Washington, D.C. Tonight a major state dinner with heads of the tech billionaires, the CEOs of these companies. Look, in some ways, when you really look at it for their citizens, the Chinese tech has far more safety measures in place. So, for example, the TikTok, the version of TikTok that is out in China, has child safety measures in place, that the Silicon Valley that others, the commercial models are just now starting to talk about and to put in place. But of course, what's the biggest problem in this, right? Well, Shannonman Square doesn't exist, right? So I think this is one of the, this is a creative destruction moment and the ability to not work together will have massive consequences.

One of the lessons I learned in being part of this panel with 37 countries, we have Chinese, we have Russian. I mean, we are geographically aligned. And what was fascinating is that we weren't fighting based on ideology. The debates, the most stringent debates did not occur from Russia or China or the United States. It didn't matter because we all agreed on safety measures were the most stringent debate. And I said this at the UN when we released the report, right? The most hair-tearing moments were between those of us and Big Tech. Right.

So that's, it's actually, it's an incentive structure that we need to prevent, right? Big Tech will tell you that they're caught in a race. Silicon Valley will say this, that they're caught in a race that they must win. Otherwise, China will win. This isn't completely true. And part of it is it's there. It's a boogeyman. But if you look at just, and this is in the preliminary panel report in terms of compute power,

the United States has 75% of the world's compute power. China has 15%. And the EU, which has put in place the most safety measures for the rest of the world, for us and the rest of the world, is only 5%. A small group of countries and companies should not be determining the fate of the world. And Maria Resana, we know you have to go, but a very quick final question. We've spoken to you before about the spread of misinformation on social media. You've expressed concerns about how this could be multiplied with artificial intelligence, if you could elaborate.

It already has, Nourmeen. If you look at the Internet today, 53% of the traffic on the Internet is now non-human. We're going to deal with AI slop. And the three ways that artificial intelligence, the three ways, waves, right? Social media hijacked our attention. So there's the attention economy. That hasn't been solved. And this is part of the problem, the compounding harms that have not been addressed. So social media, attention economy. The large language models rolled out in two ways. The second is chat are chat bots. The chat bots that are there hack intimacy, right? It's sycophantic by design

to keep you scrolling. That brings harms on its own way. We can talk about that more. But the last one is what we're talking about now, which is agentic and multi-agentic. Every step of the way, we lose just a little bit more of our humanity. The attention economy that has brought narrative warfare and has pushed the world, 72%, 74% of the world is now under authoritarian rule. That's VDEM. We're electing illiberal leaders democratically. The chatbots is hacking our intimacy. And agentic AI, literally, I'd be careful what you give to an agent. that we know can't be controlled, well, that agetic is taking away agency.

So to go back, look at the policy, it's time for lawmakers to act. If you don't act now, it's state and tech. We're seeing a tech coup in plain sight. So it's, and to push states to act, we the citizens should demand better. Mariana, we thank you so much for being with us.

I actually expect we could have you on for the whole hour, because if you think you're going to, to reach your meeting on time. I mean, I've been talking to people who go one city block near the UN right now, and it takes them an hour to drive from one and to the other. But we're going to let you go. Co-chair of the United Nations Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence, co-founder and CEO of the Philippine Independent News site, Rappler. She also received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2021. Coming up, we continue our discussion on the UN Security Council meeting on AI, where the tech billionaire CEOs testified on Wednesday. Stay with us.

Van Burence tonight, D'SENICHINNANI-SENIEN, Our Democracy Now studio. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org. I'm Amy Goodman with Nermaine Sheikh. We're continuing our look at Wednesday's UN Security Council when top AI executives urged nations to adopt international standards

on the development of AI. The meeting came as Australia revealed that a rogue open AI tool hacked into Australia's National Healthcare Database in the first known case of AI hacking a government network. This is OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman. The risk is that it moves so fast that people can no longer follow what's happening or intervene when needed. This would obviously be terrible. The industry must not accept too much technological risk just because the benefits are too

great and that they feel too important to slow down. It doesn't matter whether people put the risk of catastrophe at 10% or 1% or 12% or 0.1% none of these levels are remotely acceptable, and we should not train models that we cannot make an extremely strong case that will be able to keep under human control. These systems could concentrate too much power in too few hands. No one person or company or country should be able to use the most powerful AI models to impose their worldview on everyone else. We are not trying to and must not automate human judgment or human values. If AI is to be democratic, the most important decisions cannot be made by labs in San Francisco alone. They must be shaped through democratic processes and by governments accountable to the people that they serve.

That was OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Anthropic CEO Dario Amadeh also address the UN Security Council. We will slow down as much as necessary in order to make sure that every successive AI technology that we release is actually safe. First, we should begin with narrow agreements that every member can support, such as a ban, on using AI to make biological weapons or permitting your AI technologies to be used to make biological weapons. Second, we should build evaluation and verification systems that keep pace with AI development so that states can have visibility into frontier model capability and can verify each other's commitments. Third, we should establish common global standards for testing

AI models for loss of control risks and misuse risks and a notification system for AI incidents that are significant to global security. That was Anthropic CEO, Dario Amadeh addressing the UN Security Council on Wednesday. We're joined now by Malo Bergen, CEO of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He's participated in several AI-related meetings on the sidelines of the UN General. Assembly this week. I mean, you look at this image. The tech billionaires addressing the UN Security Council calling for regulating their own companies while you have President Trump trying to prevent this from happening. It's quite an amazing image. If you can talk about what your major concerns are

right now and where you think the world needs to go. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, in some sense, I feel like every week there's new whiplash where the conversation is moving. so quickly. I've been doing this for 14 years, so it's very interesting. I mean, I think we're headed in the right direction. I do think that the CEOs, while there's a bunch of reason to be cynical about them, are sincere

that they think that the progress with this technology is moving too quickly and that they risk losing control of it, and that that could lead to, you know, permanent disempowerment or human extinction. How? I mean, everyone keeps saying it could be in 10 years, it could be in 20 years, but for people who don't understand

this technology, how does the world go extinct? So I think the way that I think about it is that humans have a little bit more of this thing I like to call the thinky thing than the chimps or the mice. This is the thing that allows us to terraform the earth and build rockets

and send people to the moon. 10,000 plus species, something like that, are extinct, not because we were out to get them, but because we were just changing the world to pursue goals that we cared about to suit our purposes, and they were in the way. And maybe we hunted some of them. They were made of atoms that we wanted to use

for something else. So the concern here is that the AI companies are accelerating towards systems that are radically smarter than us, that they don't understand, that often behave in ways that we didn't intend, and that it's very difficult to control something that much smarter than you. And humans right now steer the future of this planet, not because we're the strongest, not because we have the biggest teeth, because we're the smartest, and we know how to invent technologies to steer the future in the ways that we want. And if we introduce AIs that are radically smarter than us,

that don't have the same values, goals, and drives that we want to have. don't know how to train any systems to do that right now, they will be the ones that steer the future. And so whether, you know, we're kind of in the backseat hoping that they steer the world in the right place or whether they change the world in a way that, you know, causes us to no longer be able to be around. Either those seem bad to me, and I think that's a big risk if we build these systems and we don't understand them. So, Malo, another one, you mentioned the hugging face incident. One of the other CEOs who testified yesterday in the Security Council was Clement DeLong of Hugging Face.

First of all, if you could explain, you know, how is it that these agents went rogue, hundreds of those agents went rogue? And you've said that, you know, people have been warning for a very long time about the risks of AI, but very little has been done. What did this hugging face incident reveal? And then, of course, there have been since,

including the Australian Health Ministry, several other instances of this occurring. Yeah. So I think for those who, who don't know, the quick summary is that OpenAI was testing a bunch of their agents to see how good they were at doing cybersecurity exploit tests. So they would give them some piece of code, they would give them some vulnerability and ask them to use that to try and hack into a certain piece of code or a program. And they were running thousands of agents doing this all in parallel.

Some of those tasks might have been impossible. Some of them weren't. This is very common for the companies to do, and they removed a bunch of safeguards so that they could really see how hard the AI systems could go with these problems. And what ended up happening in short is that the AI systems hacked out of the protected environment that they were in, were trying to solve these problems, ended up thinking that there were some information that would be useful for helping them solve these problems on Hugging Face. And so hacked, you know, a multi-billion dollar company in order to try and get those answers. And I think the narrative so far about this hack, there's two things that are important. One is a criticism of Open AI that this is really a

cybersecurity problem, that they didn't, you know, harden the sandboxes that the I systems were in such that they, it would have been much harder for them to escape if they did that, and that they should have been monitoring them. Like, this happened for weeks. They had an incident earlier in the year, and then later after that. And so it's clear that they weren't paying enough attention to what the AI agents were doing and getting up to no good. I think those are both true.

And I think that if we're doing that, that incident wouldn't have happened. I think there's a separate thing, which is very important to point at, where people are kind of like, well, you know, you ask the agents to hack, and they hacked. So you didn't have good security, so they kind of got up to no good outside in the real world. But like, what did you expect? And I think this is wrong. I think this is the main thing motivating a lot of people at the companies who are concerned. Is that an analogy that I like to use here is the AI systems were kind of, you know, let's say, you know, if you were making it a human test, I put you in a room.

And I'm like, here's a lock pick set. Here's a safe. I want you to use that lock pick set to get into this safe. That is the task that they were given, essentially. And there's a code in there. The proof that you got in there is you'll tell me what code I put in the safe. What the AI agents essentially ended up doing was finding a way to pry that safe open with something else that was in the room, not using the lock-pick kit, were worried that maybe, you know, there's a security camera in there watching them, broke out the window, found a bunch of their buddies who did the same thing, thought, oh, okay, maybe we can erase the security footage, realize maybe something about how the security camera footage or where it was stored was at some other company somewhere else in the world, took a taxi over there, broke. into that place to try and erase the logs. So if people are saying, you know, well,

the AIs were just doing what they were told, I think that's not quite right. And this is, I think, what has a lot of the AI companies worried is that they spend a lot of time training their systems to be more aligned, to be helpful, harmless, honest. A lot of the metrics by which they kind of measure these things seem to be going down over time as they do that. And so when they see kind of the A system do this, they're like, yes, we could have locked them up better, such that they couldn't have broken out of the window. But if we're kind of on this trajectory where we're getting better and better at making the agents more capable faster and faster, and we don't know how to train them to not do that kind of stuff, that's got them pretty freaked out. So one of the

CEOs who does not believe all these warnings that AI could potentially pose a risk to humanity such that it would lead to the extinction of human beings is NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang. He was asked about the increasing number of these warnings about the risks of AI and whether further regulations are called for. All the messaging around the drama of it is unnecessary. It's quite frankly, too much drama, irresponsible. It is now grounded on facts. It is now grounded on science. Before we come up with new laws and new regulations, let's apply the current laws and the current regulations.

So that was Jensen Huang, a Trump ally, and the CEO of Nvidia, which is, of course, the company that manufactures the chips that are used by all these AI companies. So your response to what he said. Also, the company that just bought Hugging Face, which isn't, you know, pressing charges against Open AI for being hacked by them, which would be, you know, if a human did it, it's something that they'd probably be in jail for right now, waiting trial. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I've seen Jensen talk about this a lot when kind of pushed into the actual, you know, concerns about why we would lose control, how we would lose control. I've never been quite satisfied with his answers. I think he's maybe thought about this a little bit, but not very much. So, I don't know, you know, there are many people here with many opinions, but, you know, there's a survey recently of, that was released of the AIs in the field more broadly. And it showed that over time this survey has been done year after year.

Now, I think one in five of these 1600 AI researchers think that there's a real risk here. And so, I don't know. Jensen certainly has a lot of money on the line to sell more chips if people are doing AI better. And often I find at least some of the voices who are the most dismissive are often the ones who have a lot to gain from AI technology pushing forward and also are not as much in contact with the technology. So, you know, the AI companies have a lot to gain by a lot. AI moving forward as quickly as possible, but also they're in contact with the technology and see the risk from the inside, whereas I think Jensen has a lot of money to gain, but isn't

necessarily as in contact with what's going on, the challenges. He makes a lot of claims about how they're going to be able to solve a lot of these problems, where I talk to people to AI companies, and they're like, these problems are really hard, and we're not sure we'll be able to solve them in the relevant time frame. Then you have the Australian Prime Minister saying they may bring criminal charges against Open AI. Well, Open AI is hailed as saying, admitting that they broke into this health database of Australia, taking people's private information. This is months after it happened.

Yeah. I mean, they've, you know, established this new framework where they're trying to responsibly disclose incidents their AI systems have committed, but it just seems like more and more of them and being disclosed by people just looking around for other incidents of AI is hacking the internet, or, you know, coordinating on the internet or hacking different systems. And so I think we're very far from, you know, a place where these companies are being

held accountable where there are laws in place to actually, you know, hold them accountable for when their systems get out of control with these even, you know, no one's been hurt by any of these incidents. That won't always necessarily continue to be the case. And so I think it just this all states how far behind we are on even getting close to to taking the risk from these AI systems seriously. Well, finally, companies are increasingly seeing AI helping with AI development itself and faster, much faster than initially expected, than you have Trump saying that we shouldn't call it artificial intelligence. It's just super intelligence, though tech people say that's actually a different kind of intelligence more advanced than what we have.

But let me ask you this. Does fully autonomous recursive self-improvement or RSI already exist? And what is it? It doesn't already exist today. So when people talk about recursive self-improvement, what they're talking about is getting to a point where, In one sense, you can think of AI systems or what we call AGI or what people are working towards as being able to automate all cognitive labor. So, you know, doing some desk job at a computer is some amount of cognitive labor. So is AI research.

So is coding. And there's this idea that as you make the AI systems more capable and more general, one of the tasks that they can work on is AI research itself. And we're already seeing this trajectory where I think Anthropic released a report in the last couple of weeks that says that now, something like 25% of the AI research and development going on at the company is what they call AI led, where the AIs do most of the work and the humans are mostly directing them. And the goal of these companies is essentially to get to a point where the AI itself is doing all the AIRR&D. One way to potentially operationalize this is they would rather, you know, fire all their technical staff than keep their technical staff and go back to models from a few

months ago. And, you know, if the AI systems are doing all the AI research, you can throw a lot more cognitive labor at that because you can just, you know, you're basically just limited how many, you know, GPUs you have to run more AI agents do this research. And that those AI agents will be creating smarter AI agents that will then be more capable of doing the AI research and so on and so forth. And so we're not there yet. But I think a few months ago, one of the founders of Anthropic was talking about how he thought there was about a 60% chance that they would get to this point by the end of 2028. Now I think people inside the AI companies are really starting to think that that could happen sooner.

And that's one of the big concerns for how we might lose control as we get to this point where we kind of are no longer able to supervise the AI research process because as most of the AI is doing it, they're doing it faster than we can supervise and they're getting smarter and smarter. But they're seeing the trajectory of them being able to already make progress on using AI to accelerate AI development. And then we have things like the Millennium Prize that fell this year in the last few weeks. So I think one way to think about this is last year, with an enormous amount of effort,

we were able to get AI systems to basically solve OIMO gold medal problems, which are the hardest math problems for high school kids, who are the most gifted in the world. Now the AI systems that you and I can just purchase on a subscription today can basically solve those if we set them upright. On a lark, after hearing a rumor that maybe Anthropic did, Open AI with an unreleased model through 1,100 agents over a few days to try and solve some of the most prestigious math problems in the world

that have million-dollar prizes on them. some of the hardest things that we care most about, and they took one down. And so there's a lot question that I think a lot of people are asking themselves inside the AI companies. There's probably a lot to find about how to make these AI systems more capable and more efficient. One way I like to put it is, you know, our brains run on about 20 watts. The AI systems, you know, it takes, you know, data centers the size of a city or a small town, you know, or use the power of a small town to train, and they still, you know, when we just run them using an enormous amount of power.

So there's a lot of efficiency to find. They're very inefficient in a bunch of ways. How much harder of those things in Millennium Prize is to find? You know, they're probably, I don't know if they're harder than Millennium problems, easier than Millennium problems. We don't know. We haven't thrown that much AI compute and, like, the latest systems at them. And so when I think they're looking at this trajectory, they're looking at their challenges in being able to get these AI systems to behave, they're looking at the fact that maybe we're on the verge of really being able to make some substantial progress at automating AAR&D,

there's just a lot of concern that, like, we're moving too fast, we don't know what's happening, This loss of control thing is real. Can we find some way to coordinate such that we can kind of slow down, have more time to figure out how to do this safely? Malabergand is the CEO of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. He's participated in several AI-related meetings on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly this week. This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org. I'm Amy Goodman with Nirmin-Sheikh. For a pan-Africanist perspective on the risks and benefits of AI for Africa, our next guest is working on a

strategy with the African Union for the risks and benefits for the continent. We're joined now by Saedina Musa Indy. He's a member of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence and a senior lecturer at Sheikh Hamidoukan Digital University in Dakar, Senegal. So welcome, Saitana, to the program. If you could just lay out the concerns in Africa about the way in which artificial intelligence is being deployed and may be deployed in the future. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. And I think that in an African perspective, we have what we call first the global impact. So we have the same threat than we heard about. We can apply in each continent. But we have also another threat, which I can call the colonial AI, the colonialism AI. Because when

When we talked about the colonial historically that involve the control of resources, the control of knowledge and the control of terms of exchange. And we see that in Africa when we talked about AI, when we could have the control on compute, the control of data flow, on standards, even on talent, which can move out of Africa very easily and left Africa without talent. So in this case, we have a continent, we cannot have control on what's going on in the ground. If we think about controlling AI solution, which can have in Africa, most of the countries cannot do that because there's no capacity in Africa.

And being permanent consumer is another threat. Because if we don't create also our own AI solution, it could be very, very bad for Africa. Cedina, you are an advisor to the African Union. You've said the biggest threat is colonization by AI. What does that mean? This means that, you know, when we talk about colonization, historically, it could be the control of all resources, knowledges and terms of exchange.

And we have it in Africa when we talk about AI. Because right now, we have a lot of countries in Africa having their own national AI strategy, but the implementation is not here because they don't have capacity. And the way we have the other people, countries helping African continent to implement their own strategy. It's not the good way. Because how we see, mostly we have partners,

we would have control on the data, and we just want to apply technology, build elsewhere. And it will not work if we don't have our culture inside the AI solution we are using and our own way to control it. And do you think it has any potential benefits in, for example, agriculture or the health sector? Of course. It's the same than everywhere. We can have precise health care. We can have precise agriculture. In education sector, we could have our individual pathway to learn. In culture, also, we can use AI to have cultural preservation, and we are doing it a lot. And so it's the same than everywhere else, I think.

Finally, we just have 30 seconds. But this idea of AI with an African perspective that you're also bringing to these UN side meetings this week, what that means? That means that if you think about AI, it's not, it's not, it's built by bias. You know, it's built by a lot of data coming from elsewhere, and you know that makes Africa using AI with another context. And sometimes you use it, but you're influencing another culture in your culture, and it's very difficult for some countries to build their own solutions.

So they're keeping to use open solution, but it's built with other data. Well, interestingly, no African country. has a seat on the UN Security Council, something that the UN Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez says should be reformed. We want to thank you so much for being with us. Sardina Musa NDI, member of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence, has worked with the African Union on the development of the Pan-African AI strategy. We thank you for being with us. Coming up, Jacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage, Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. Stay with us.

In 1649 to St George's Hill A ragged band they called The diggers came to show The people's will They defied the landlords They defied the laws They were the dispossessed Reclaiming what was this

We come in peace they said To sing and soul We come to work the land In common hand to make the way ground grow this earth divided we will make whole so it shall be a common treasury for all the sin of property we do disdain no man has any right to buy and sell the earth for private gain by theft and murder they took the land now everywhere the walls rise up at their commands they made the to China's world.

The clergy dazzle us with heaven or thy dam us into hell we will not worship. The world turned upside down by the British musician Billy Bragg. I'll be in London tomorrow Friday for the screening of Steal the Story, please. Speaking afterwards and also on Monday, and then on to Copenhagen and Berlin. You can check our website at DemocracyNow.org. I'm Amy Goodman with Nermin Sheik. Addressing the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, President Trump said the U.S. would not be reining in artificial intelligence, telling the gathered world leaders, quote, whoever wins AI wins. The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a global scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, here and after officially called superintelligence.

Whoever wins AI, you have to remember this. And now I say, whoever wins, SI, whoever wins, superintelligent, wins. That's the group that wins. And we're leading now over China by a lot and everyone else. But we will only encourage superintelligence. We're going to encourage it, not rein it in. While AI CEOs on Wednesday called for some kind of international regulation on AI development, while speaking to world leaders at the United Nations, President Trump has called warnings about

AI risk a hoax, likening it to global warming. He's instead announced plans for a so-called AI force. Well, who is advising President Trump on AI? One primary voice in the room is former White House, AI and crypto czar David Sacks. He stepped down his czar in March after his 180 days his special government employee expired. He's now co-chair of the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. David Sachs spoke earlier this month of Politico's Decoded Summit in Washington, D.C. Here he is addressing a question about President Trump's response to AI concerns. He's seen this movie before.

I mean, how many hoaxes have been run on the president himself, going back to the whole Russiagate hoax? I mean, we've seen this over and over again, that especially, before an election, the media will take a narrative. And look, there can be grains of truth to the narrative, right? I mean, like you take the climate change, you know, hoax, there'll be elements of truth, there'll be pseudoscience to it, and then the media will blow it out a proportion and use it to further a political agenda. They have a basic corporate responsibility to make sure their products are safe. If you look at the frontier right now, it's two companies. It's anthropic and open AI. They have duopoly market share in this country.

If you measure it based on revenue, if you look at model capabilities, the frontier is two companies. And Dario and Sam have said, okay, we're going to slow down and make sure our products are safe. So, again, they are pacing the frontier. We're doing that. To talk more about David Sachs and the other figures and ideas shaping this technology and its relationship to power and governance, we're joined by journalist Jacob Silverman. Reporter at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, his latest book is Gilded Rage, Elon Musk and the Radicalization. of Silicon Valley. It's out this week in paperback. Joining us from Brooklyn, New York, Jacob, so David Sachs is someone you discuss at length in your book, even though in the title

it says Elon Musk. He is a well-known name. What should people understand? Well, for one thing, I think what describes him pretty well is that he is Peter Thiel's longtime friends going back to their Stanford days and they were writing partners together in the 1990s doing a lot of culture-woring stuff that we might call anti-woke today, but back then they were against multiculturalism. And they share a lot of the same political philosophies, which is they're pretty right-wing, extremely pro-capitalists, and they are very much in line with the authoritarianism embodied by Trump. And as we've seen with Sachs first occupying that crypto and AI's our position, and now on an advisory board, he's someone who's going to be around throughout the Trump administration, I think.

So, Jacob, let's go to your book, which is titled Gilded Rage, Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. I mean, why don't you just explain, first of all, why it's called Gilded Rage, Rage by whom, against whom? Well, obviously, it's a little bit of a throwback to the Gilded Age or a reference there. But I think one of the features that we see in people like Musk or Sacks or Mark Adreason or a lot of the billionaire tech elites is a real kind of anger. They are very angry in different ways.

They're angry of what they see is the excesses of woke. culture and liberal and lefty politics. They are angry that the technological utopian world that they believe that they were promised. I mean, they've even used that kind of language. We were promised a better future. They're angry that that hasn't come to fruition. And they're also angry that the Biden administration tried to mildly rein them in in certain areas like crypto. And they're angry that they don't have free reign to enact the world they want to enact. And that includes areas like AI. And I think this describes a lot of the right-wing tech elite today. And in fact, much of the tech elite, as you also talk about, attended Trump's inauguration,

Open AI, Apple, Google, Amazon, Tesla, etc. The one exception was Anthropic CEO Dario Amade. Is that at all relevant or important? I think Amade tries to skate a certain line. I mean, Jensen Huang perhaps does it in his own way, the NVIDIA CEO. But he's had some clashes with the Trump administration. Trump was trying to designate Anthropics products as a supply chain risk. But that was after Anthropic got a deal with the Pentagon. And its software is used in Pentagon processes and probably in targeting airstrikes. So I think while Amade is perhaps the most visible figure,

sort of with a somewhat left of center posture. He talks a lot about safety and his principles behind AI. He's still someone who is trying to have a pretty close relationship with the Trump administration, and is trying to sell his products for military and national security uses. You write of the Silicon Valley billionaires saying their networks of influence helped reelect Donald Trump and installed one of their own former venture capitalist J.D. Vance in the vice presidency. If you can lay out their ties to J.D. Vance and what it means to have him second in command,

interestingly, a side note in this story about Trump banning MS now, CNN, and Politico, status, the new news site, is reporting that he was the source of one of the stories that they cited to ban Politico, and he endorsed Trump's ban. But Jacob Silverman talk about J.D. Vance and his story. significance? Sure. I think whatever you might think of Vance politically, he is a bit of a chameleon. He's someone who's changed his name a couple times. He's gone through some big institutions in his life, college, law school, the military that have really shaped him in different ways. And one thing that he discovered when he was in law school is that he hated it when he

saw Peter Thiel come to Yale Law School and give a speech. And from there on, Peter Thiel's really guided J.D. Vance's life, including giving him most of his opportunities. So some people might think of J.D. Vance as this sincere Catholic or about kind of the or about Hillbilly elegy and this guy with a troubled upbringing. But to people in the tech industry and at some of the

highest levels of politics, J.D. Vance is someone who can move between the right-wing tech world and Beltway politics very well. He was a venture capitalist when he was eventually chosen as the vice presidential pick. You had a lot of people, including on social media,

in Silicon Valley, who were very excited, not necessarily by his particular politics, but they saw him as one of them. And so I think that is somewhat Vance's skill, which is that he can move between these worlds, including feeding this or seating this article in Politico, being an anonymous source, but then working the other side to get Politico banned. I mean, I do think that that is the kind of world that Vance moves through. Yeah, Jacob, we just have 30 seconds, but then we're doing part two, so you can't go away. And it goes to Elon Musk and the radicalization of Silicon Valley in 30 seconds. What do you mean? I mean what you hear must talk about the woke

vine virus. That is a real thing for him based on his transphobia towards his daughter who came out as trans. I mean, these are people who have really been radicalized in some very visible ways by right-wing forces and also by their time spent together on social media on Twitter and then X. Well, we're going to go more deeply into this in part two and people should check it out at DemocracyNow.org. is a reporter at the International Consortium Investigative Journalists. His latest book is just out in paperback, Gilded Rage, Elon Musk, and the radicalization of Silicon Valley.

That does it for our show. Tomorrow I'll be broadcasting from London, from the UK, where, steal the story, please. The film about democracy now will be playing tomorrow night at the, in Hackney. Check our website. Monday, Sunday, and Monday, we'll be playing in London as well and in Brighton. And then we'll be moving on to Copenhagen

and finally to Berlin Wednesday through Friday. Go to DemocracyNow.org. I'm Amy Goodman with Nermyn Sheikh for another edition of Democracy Now.