TBPN Live - FULL INTERVIEW: Ben Thompson on Why Anthropic is Wrong

Episode Date: March 2, 2026

This is our full interview with Ben Thompson, recorded live on TBPN.We discuss his essay on Anthropic, why AI is colliding with hard questions about state power, surveillance, and military le...verage, whether private labs can realistically defy governments when AI becomes a true source of geopolitical power, and how trade offs around Taiwan, chips, and democratic accountability could shape the next phase of the AI era far more than abstract debates about safety in the lab.TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays from 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with full episodes posted to podcast platforms immediately after.Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” TBPN has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella.Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.comTBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://Ramp.comAppLovin - https://axon.aiCisco - https://www.cisco.comCognition - https://cognition.aiConsole - https://console.comCrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.comElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.ioFigma - https://figma.comFin - https://fin.aiGemini - https://gemini.google.comGraphite - https://graphite.comGusto - https://gusto.com/tbpnKalshi - https://kalshi.comLabelbox - https://labelbox.comLambda - https://lambda.aiLinear - https://linear.appMongoDB - https://mongodb.comNYSE - https://nyse.comOkta - https://www.okta.comPhantom - https://phantom.com/cashPlaid - https://plaid.comPublic - https://public.comRailway - https://railway.comRamp - https://ramp.comRestream - https://restream.ioSentry - https://sentry.ioShopify - https://shopify.comTurbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.comVanta - https://vanta.comVibe - https://vibe.coFollow TBPN:https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 We have Ben Thompson in the Restream Waiting Room from Sertectory. Welcome to the show, Ben. How are you doing? I'm good. Hopefully I have the right microphone turned on this time. You do, and it sounds fantastic. Thank you so much for joining on short notice. Thank you for writing Anthropic and Alignment. It is a fantastic piece that I think covers all of my questions. But I want to start with just how did you process the weekend?
Starting point is 00:00:26 How did you get to this particular place? and then like what is your key thesis with anthropic and alignment? I mean, this is one of those ones, I don't know if it's good or bad, that it came out sort of at the end of the week, so I had a lot of time to think about it. Ultimately, I think it was good because I'm not sure anyone very, as explicitly made the point I did. And maybe it was bad because I feel there's a lot of like caveats,
Starting point is 00:00:52 maybe in retrospect I should have put in the article that would have addressed a lot of the points that people are upset about. Yeah. Basically, zooming out, this was not a normative article where I'm saying what's happening is good or bad. And that's really the one caveat. I really wish I would have put on there. I mean, I being out there accused about like a Neely Patel, like a full-throated fascist endorsement of fascism or something like that. And it's like, relax.
Starting point is 00:01:18 Okay, can I get some credit for the last X number of years? Basically, the, and there is a deep-rooted concern. that I've had for a long time about, and I'm now hesitant to even use sort of EA as a term because it's kind of now politicized thanks to the events of the last week. But a failure to grapple with a world of guns is basically the long and short of it. And I actually think Alizer has been the one guy who's been honest about this where he wrote that time article about potentially bombing data center someday. And that's actually a point worth bringing up, which is all this, this stuff is right now in the digital realm with robotics and potential other applications and it's obviously being used for military operations. It's crossing over into the physical realm. But if AI is as powerful as people say it's going to be, then there are going to be real world reactions to that. And if we're going to analogize it to nuclear weapons, as Dario Amade has done repeatedly, you have to think through what's, what's,
Starting point is 00:02:28 what would happen in a world where a private company developed nuclear weapons? What would the government's response be? And that's not to say that the government response in that case is good or bad, or does it follow sort of constitutional principles or whatever it might be. Obviously, I want them too. On the surveillance point, I've been concerned about the application of computers to our surveillance laws for years. Like so many things in our society assumed a certain level of friction in doing things that computer is already obviated and AI is going to just do that on steroids.
Starting point is 00:03:09 I do think we need new laws. I think all this stuff is correct. And I think the idea that AI being applied to these commercially purchased data sets, for example, is a huge problem that I don't want to happen. the concern I have is that if this technology is as powerful as it is on pace to be unilaterally imposing restrictions, even if those restrictions are good, isn't just an issue as far as who rules us, the democracy issue, that sort of Palmer Lucky, I think, very eloquently raised. it's inviting very bad outcomes for those asserting that in general. And I feel there's been a lack of awareness of this. That's why I brought up the Taiwan-China thing. This has been a frustration I've had with Anthropic generally.
Starting point is 00:04:07 They talk about, you know, Amade has been very outspoken in terms of opposing selling chips to China. for in a narrow, you know, aspect, very, very good reasons. My pushback has always been what happens if we get super powerful AI and China doesn't. What are they going to do? Sure. The optimal thing would be to just bomb TSM out of existence because suddenly that becomes optimal, even with all the costs that that does. And then what?
Starting point is 00:04:37 Then are we going to do? Like, we're entering this. Like, I don't like getting into political. Posts. It's not fun at all. I'm not having fun with this. It's not enjoyable. I could promise you this. And some people were like, well, you should have just made the post private. I'm like, no, I actually, I really want Anthropic and people associated with this to read this because people have theorized for a while about what's going to happen as AI becomes more powerful. and now it's starting to happen for real. And I guess over the weekend, Parvo was just I felt compelled to say this
Starting point is 00:05:19 and girding myself to do so. And even then, I still wasn't, I haven't waited in this for a while, and it's no fun, but it is what it is. Can you unpack a little bit more of that tweet that you posted where you did the find on the Dario article for Taiwan and saw that wasn't mentioned? Oh, I mean, I've just kind of,
Starting point is 00:05:38 I've sort of griped about. this in general. I think that... So do you just think he should be talking about the Taiwan issue more deliberately? He should be messaging that. Like, why is it important that, why is it, why is it significant that he doesn't mention Taiwan? Well, I think the position about not selling chips to China is a totally legitimate one. I understand the argument. I could make that argument if I needed to. I have advocated the opposite, that number one, not only should we be selling chips to China and a generation or two behind, which has always been sort of our standard practice with chips, we should also be allowing Chinese companies to fab with TSM.
Starting point is 00:06:23 That is a restriction that has come down. Now, these Huawei chips are somehow manufactured by TSMC. Let's not look too closely at it, but we should explicitly be allowing it. And the reason for that is I think it is a safe, equilibrium to have China dependent on Taiwan than to try to cut them off from Taiwan. Well, we are dependent on Taiwan. Taiwan is 70 miles off the coast of China. It's not an ideal position in the world for us to have a dependency on it and China to not have
Starting point is 00:06:55 a dependency on it. So this is a problem. All this stuff has everything going forward has massive tradeoffs. The implication of letting China. a fab with TSM or the implication of letting them buy Nvidia chips is that they gain these incredibly powerful AI capabilities that is driving this entire debate. That is in a vacuum not a good thing, but nothing's in a vacuum.
Starting point is 00:07:23 Everything is a trade-off. And in that specific area, I think that just it's repeatedly again and again being absolutist about the chip issue when I am frustrated to not see any public comment about the, that's not quite fair. He has made comments about, oh yeah, that would slow down sort of the adoption of AI, the long run of Taiwan got, got bombed. And like, that's, in my mind, that's an insufficient consideration of the possibility of Taiwan getting bombed.
Starting point is 00:07:54 Now again, I biased in that regard. I lived there for nearly two decades. But it's just the, the reason I brought it up in this context is if AI is what it is, I what it is, the people with guns are going to want to have a say. Whether that be domestically, whether that be internationally, that might be in the context of the U.S. government just taking it, trying to kill your company because they feel you're not cooperating, or it might be the context of China deciding it has to act because the U.S. is becoming too powerful. Because, you know, and it's not a fun debate. It does, I do think the nuclear angle is a good one. It has echoes of
Starting point is 00:08:34 the proliferation, question of mutual assert destruction, all those sorts of things, and that's just going to be the reality of the debate going forward. And again, it's not very fun, but I think it's also irresponsible to sort of run away from it. How much attention or what kind of factor do you think that information asymmetry between the Department of War and Anthropic played last week? It felt like in hindsight, Department of War knows they're headed into a major, what is now looking like a drawn-out conflict, anthropics, sitting there thinking, hey, we got this arbitrary deadline. Why do we need to renegotiate this now?
Starting point is 00:09:14 And then if going off of Emil Michael's timeline, it sounds like they were still in the final hour trying to make a deal happen. And according to Emil, Dario was in a meeting and was busy and wasn't really respecting the deadline, which maybe he felt was kind of artificial, But in hindsight, now it looks like it was a significant because the Department of War was taking the country
Starting point is 00:09:42 into a conflict and wanted to know, hey, can we lean on one of our AI partners? I don't know. I mean, I think that seems pretty arbitrary to have cut. I mean, I'm hesitant to speculate. I don't know what was going on. I don't know the angles. I think, and that's why I didn't sort of delve
Starting point is 00:10:04 too deeply into it. And I also think some of the specifics like this supply chain risk probably overbroad, and almost certainly the way it was stated in the tweet is definitely overbroad if you actually go and read the statute. I think the goal that I was, and again, this is where I wish I had sort of put more caveats to say, like, I'm not actually talking about all that stuff. I don't really care. I do care, but that's not the point of this article. The point of this article is, There's all this talk about alignment. That's why I put that in the headline. And on one hand, alignment is aligning AI with humanity generally, but for the foreseeable
Starting point is 00:10:48 future, and you could have a philosophical argument about the long-term viability of nation-states in the age of the internet, much less the age of AI and whatever that might be. That certainly is a more pressing conversation than probably ever before. anthropic exists in the context of the United States. And that's why I put that quote, you may not be interested in politics, but politics has an interest in you. What is politics?
Starting point is 00:11:14 War by other means. You might not be interested in that. It is going to have an interest in you. And my, there's a, like I said, a certain longstanding frustration of not fully grappling with that fact, having dorm room theoretical arguments about AGI. You go back to that post over Christmas about like AGI in like 100 years and no one having any jobs or being worthless or pointless or whatever,
Starting point is 00:11:40 which included some implicit assumptions around property rights existing in 150 years as they exist today. Newsflash, if that happens, property rights as they exist today are going away. All these rights. This is a philosophical argument. That's why I start with the international law concept. All these rights, all these laws are subject to the agreement of those governed by them to follow them. And the final say is those who successfully inflict violence. And again, this isn't fun to think about.
Starting point is 00:12:16 It's not pleasant. You would like to assume we operate in a world of laws that everyone follows them and goes by them. But to the extent AI is as impactful and powerful as it is, the more these questions, fundamental questions that we thought have been settled for hundreds of years, if not thousands of years, are going to be raised. And this is just the first of several episodes where I think that's going to happen. I grew up in sort of like post-Cold War, no ducking cover, didn't have a lot of fear of nuclear Armageddon. But Dario Amadeh is, you know, a fan of this book, the making of the nuclear bomb. and it seemed like he sort of predicted that if AI becomes super powerful, the U.S. might take a similar approach that they did with regulation of nuclear weapons.
Starting point is 00:13:07 And as I was thinking about that, I feel sort of good about the way nuclear weapons are regulated. Like, I feel like we got the good ending and we haven't had nuclear weapons drop in 70 years. And it seems like things are going well there as well as they can, considering that there's this amazing or tremendous, like, dangerous technology that exists, but it hasn't been deployed. It hasn't actually, you know, bombed anyone. But how do you think he's processing that book? How do you think we should be processing that idea of the government running the same playbook
Starting point is 00:13:46 that they did with nuclear weapons? It's pretty interesting. I mean, on one hand, just from sort of a physical perspective, dealing with weights and software is very different than dealing with fissionable material. Or I guess the super bombs are like, they're actually like fusion devices, right? And that is trackable. It is interceptable. You know when Iran, to take a pertinent example, is trying to build enrichment facilities, all of which makes the problem easier to solve. Yeah. So that's difference number one.
Starting point is 00:14:20 Difference number two, and I really wish I would, I had this included and I cut it, so the sort of the article would be tighter, but there is a very interesting point in technological history, which was the early days of Intel. And Bob Noyes made the decision that we will sell to the government, but we're not going to design chips for the government. And the distinction there was you had guaranteed orders, which was great. the government would take your IP and there was, and in his mind, the more important thing is there was limited volume. And the way that he foresaw correctly that this was going to be a very upfront
Starting point is 00:15:00 capital intensive process of designing, shape, shape, to design them, if they had the equipment, all of which is in the billions of dollars today, back then was in the tens of millions and hundreds of millions, is you need to find the largest possible market, which was the consumer slash business market, you design for that, that will accelerate your improvement and your capabilities so much that you will end up having better devices than the government could have ever requested or made for itself. Yeah. That is at stake on steroids with AI.
Starting point is 00:15:29 Yeah. People, like, I was talking to someone, like, why doesn't the government just get someone to make their own model? It's like, because it's like, you talk about government contracts, we're like single digit billions. We're talking about for the amount. that's going into cap-x, the cost of these models, we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars for the models and hundreds of billions of dollars Approaching a trillion dollars a year in Cap-X. That is only sustainable and viable if you're selling to everyone
Starting point is 00:15:59 And but that introduces the entire new dynamics where the government built nuclear. It started there and it started with a lot of assumptions because it was a government program We are necessarily for economic reasons because of all the upfront costs entailed, starting with private companies of which the government is one of many customers. And that introduces the assumption that, well, it's a private company with private property rights in all those sorts of things, all of which I want to be true. Again, I don't like how this is going down at all. The point here is to say there's a good reason why it's not going down that way. And there needs to be cognizance that even though these is a private company that is building the model, general purpose, and for very good reasons, wants to put restrictions. Again, I think the same variance one is a very powerful argument that I agree with. The problem is that you just need to be aware of, yes, the government is a small customer.
Starting point is 00:17:04 the government is also the entity, again, not to be, but with guns. Like they, you know, like, why do I pay taxes? Because the law is to pay taxes. Yep. No, at the end of the day, I pay taxes because, you know, if you really want to distill down, if I don't, someone with guns will come to my house and throw me in jail, right? Like, we don't think about that, but at the end of the day, where do these assumptions and laws and rights flow from?
Starting point is 00:17:28 And as long as that is still the case, that it needs to be a decision-making factor for these companies. How do you think this plays out for Anthropic? It's such a small contract, but it's so important in the zeitgeist. There's a lot of people that are rallying around Anthropic because of this. There's a lot of people that are pulling away from Anthropic because of this. It feels like there is a business to be built that doesn't work with the government, but delivers coding models and knowledge retrieval systems and a whole bunch of really valuable products and technology,
Starting point is 00:18:03 and it winds up being fine, but at the same time, you don't want this, like, hairy relationship with the government adversarial to go on for a long time. I would like them to sell to the government, and I would like Congress to pass a law addressing these digital surveillance issues. Yeah. And a lot of people are like, that's unrealistic, which I'm amenable to, but at the end of the day, if you don't have it's legal or not legal as your guiding standards, the only alternative is someone has to decide and the implication of that not being a sufficient
Starting point is 00:18:42 justification is that means a private executive is deciding yeah and if AI is what it is I think that's going to be I use this word intolerable I didn't mean intolerable to me I meant intolerable to those with power to have a private executive making those decisions or not and if you think about if power if we're gonna have this very sort of brute analysis that power flows from or laws flow from power. AI is a source of power. Yeah. So it's not just that, and I think this is where the supply chain, again, which I'm not endorsing, but I think that's where the motivation is coming from. The goal isn't to, fine, we just won't use Anthropic. I do think the goal is to hurt Anthropic. And if you're not going to be
Starting point is 00:19:32 subservient to us, you're not going to be allowed to build a power base, period. And again, I'm not endorsing all this. It's just a matter of, it's not a surprise this is happening. Yeah. And it needs to be just a, there's a real risk factor, a real, that has to be considered in all these decisions. Putting on my Dario hat, I'm thinking about a different way to achieve the goals with maybe less sacrimony and I threw out this idea that maybe the better solution is like
Starting point is 00:20:09 work with the government but then lobby for a surveillance act and actually try and I mean I wish the White House would come out and say yeah with there's a digital surveillance problem let's work on a bit like I don't yeah probably another regret I have is sort of putting this all on anthropic that was sort of the angle I was concerned about I mean that left me I think fairly open to the that this is just like defending the White House's approach. And that was, again, that was, I was trying to be a higher level that's saying, look, this is what's going to happen. But yeah, the, the, I think there should be a way to find a middle ground here.
Starting point is 00:20:45 I'm just thinking of like, from the perspective of like the, if the White House is like this immutable thing, and that you are, you know, involved in anthropic, like, like, one advice would be, hey, okay, instead of going in and having this confrontation with the government directly, go and start a political action committee that lobbies for change in the way that you want through the democratic process. Yes, that is the ideal process. I understand why people are frustrated and skeptical about this. I used to have this debate a lot in the context of antitrust and arrogators. And one of my sort of the the theses about the aggregators and antitrust is that the antitrust laws are fundamentally unsuited to dealing with aggregators.
Starting point is 00:21:30 because antitrust law has historically been about control of supply, and the power of aggregators flows from control of demand. And so you end up with all these solutions that I call pushing on a string. You're just trying to get people to change how they behave, and that doesn't work very well. Like Google has always been right. Competition has always been just a click away. The problem is people aren't clicking.
Starting point is 00:21:52 So the solutions focused on the supply angle doesn't work in a world where the supply is there, just no one's choosing it. And therefore my prescription is you actually need to pass new laws, not try to retrofit these old laws to this new use case where they don't work. And the reaction is always, that's impossible. We can't pass new laws. And okay, but realize the implications of what you're saying. I mean, I saw a tweet. Again, I didn't like it, so I lost it forever. One of the most infuriating things in the world.
Starting point is 00:22:26 But someone was like, I would definitely rather have Dario Amade make these decisions than, and he, and to this tweeters credit, he wasn't limited to Trump. Because me, this isn't a Trump issue. This is any politician issue. Yeah. He said, I would rather have Amade making these decisions than whoever comes out of our screwed up democratic process. Yeah. And points for the honesty, because that's the actual choice that is being put forward. And you could say Congress isn't going to do anything. therefore Amadei should just appreciate that is giving up on the democratic process in saying we should
Starting point is 00:23:03 have unelected, unaccountable individuals making weighty decisions. And again, I understand the sentiment. It's hard to imagine Congress passing laws about anything. But just realize that's like that implication is quite fraught. Yeah, it's a huge change from, I mean, I just spawn in and to believe in democracy and then understand it and study economics and just have reinforced my belief in the American project throughout my entire career and now it really is people discussing an entirely different world of governance which is has been not something people have talked about publicly for a very long time but it is here for sure right and and they always come in on these Trojan horses that are eminally defensible again I'm with
Starting point is 00:23:50 Anthropic on the digital surveillance point I've been I've been I've been concerned about it for years, been writing about it for ages. And it's similar, there is an analogy to the monopoly. Like, you have all these laws that assume someone has to actually physically go somewhere and tap into a phone line. But if you can do it with computers at scale, like suddenly, you, you had all these assumptions that limited what the government could do that magically disappeared, not because the law change, but because we got computers that can do the job of an individual at scale infinitely. And AI, again is going to lead the idea that the NSA by the way this is my sort of like I had to admit
Starting point is 00:24:30 this in the article yeah I was so confused why the Pentagon was so obsessed with domestic surveillance yeah I didn't realize the NSA was part of the John and I had the same moment yeah yeah yeah you sort of thought about it's like an independent agent like the CIA but but that that's a lot of this story makes more sense right no exactly yeah I feel like a lot of tech people are like reading the Fourth Amendment today and understanding like some of these pretty basic processes. Well, yeah, but like it's pretty, the loopholes are massive.
Starting point is 00:24:59 Like, I'm not denying it. And it's similar to the chip thing with China. Like, my prescription for Anthropic to give in is to allow these massive loopholes to be exploited. And for the NSA to allegedly in the service of investigating foreign adversaries, but by the process, basically surveilling the domestic population, I think is bad. And the reality is the nature of tradeoffs is you're choosing between multiple bad options.
Starting point is 00:25:39 And at some point, it's like, which team are you signing up for? They both suck. What do you think of the messaging around like the models themselves not being capable enough to be used in the context that the Department of War asked for. Because that felt like Dario was sort of speaking for all frontier labs. He said that these technologies broadly are not suitable for these missions just yet. I'm not sure that he has all of the information on the other side to know about the advocacy. He certainly understands his models and what's capable in the frontier. I mean, I would assume they're definitely not capable. I think that, yeah, I would assume they're definitely not capable. I think that, I think that point, is more of a precedent setting one. I think Anthropics position is significantly weaker on that point. Like at the end of the day, we either trust the military
Starting point is 00:26:33 or not to make these sorts of decisions. That's why we have a military. And so I have a harder time. And I think the digital sailors point is so compelling for them because I think it's my personal biases. Totally. I think it's a huge problem. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:26:51 The various anecdotes. And again, I hate the reporting from these, because you can tell like the weeks coming from which side for each of these. Yep. But, you know, this idea that putting forward these hypothetical examples of like, oh, you can call us and we'll figure it out then. It's like, no, come on. Yeah, he's serious about this. Like, like, so, yeah, I think that's a weak argument for them. So that's why I almost focus more of the digital surveillance one, just because I think it is a very compelling argument in favor of the anthropic position.
Starting point is 00:27:20 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Jordan, anything else? Oh, there's a lot more. What are you going to be tracking going forward? Obviously, the story is involved. Yeah. Good lunch.
Starting point is 00:27:31 Stay strong. No, I mean, the open eye angle is obviously interesting. I didn't really get into open AI. It's hard to parse exactly what's going on. It seems to me they have agreed to the Pentagon that they will be, the Pentagon will be limited by lawful capabilities. and they make their own judgments about weapon usage. And as I understand it, OpenAI is like, we will on our side be free to stop the model from doing digital surveillance.
Starting point is 00:28:09 Which sounds like you're in sort of a jailbreak competition. It's like we're going to agree to have a jailbreak competition with the U.S. government. Which, again, it's an example of how fraught this is, that that's probably the good place to come down on. Now, there's obviously these dynamics of competing for the same talent base, being in San Francisco, you know, the, this is part of, I think, Anthropics, Anthropic has a local advantage in that most people, I think, in the industry, are with them, and they have a national PR problem in that I think a lot of folks outside of tech don't understand why tech companies always try to, or resist helping the U.S. government. And so it's kind of an interesting dynamic where I think Open AI is in step with the broader public and very much out of step with sort of their talent base in San Francisco. And so that's going to be very interesting to see how that plays out.
Starting point is 00:29:08 Yeah. It's remarkable that Google has stayed out of the fray, given all the Project Maven background and stuff. Like they must be so happy. They're just like... Well, that's the other interesting thing is this actually goes back to Google, I believe. where Google had the project, I think this is right. Yeah, but I think Google had Project Maven, which their employees objected to,
Starting point is 00:29:31 and therefore that went to AWS. Yep. And then some combination of, I think the Pentagon is using Anthropic because that's what ATS. An ABS is a higher FedRamp designation. That's right. And so that's why Anthropic was already allowed for classified content and Open AI wasn't.
Starting point is 00:29:51 Again, I don't know the extent. It was, I've studied Maven pretty closely. It's a wild story. I mean, it was similar like AI for the military, the same like killer robot fears. The actual, I mean, Google was a subcontractor on that project. And what they were actually exposing to the government was TensorFlow APIs that would run on Google hardware. And so they weren't actually writing any AI software, but they wanted to effectively like classify images. from drones in the Middle East, see that's a car, that's a house.
Starting point is 00:30:25 And previously they had Air Force airmen just sitting there like clicking, and they were like, okay, we're gonna automate that. Right. But it was still like scary, don't be evil, working with the government, military, and then there was a backlash, they pulled out, then eventually they went back in and had a new head of Google Cloud. Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, it's hard to, and I speak for myself personally.
Starting point is 00:30:47 I obviously have the biased angle because of Taiwan. I have the biased angle where I think there, you know, just in general, there is this very naive view of the world that doesn't understand why militaries are important and necessary. And I think Silicon Valley got itself in a lot of trouble by giving into this naive mindset that we have no duty to support the military. And there's this tension has been, so it's a tension that's been brewing for years. Yeah. Which is, are you an American company subject to American law? and even beyond law, just morally compelled to support the U.S. military or not. And there's an equally American sort of idea of moral consciousness.
Starting point is 00:31:33 I'm able to say no. That's why we have the First Amendment, right? This goes into the, can the government compel a company to do something? It goes back to some of the questions that happen, you know, with the first Trump administration. And, you know, I've been on both sides of this, like, which I... And this is what... I'm not going to sit here and say. In CBS interview, he said, we are a private company.
Starting point is 00:31:53 We can choose to sell or not sell whatever we want. There are other providers. He's already sort of like making this case. Yeah. Which again, it is a case that I support. But the point here is there's always the question with like a bubble or whatever. Is it different this time? And I guess that's sort of the question I'm raising.
Starting point is 00:32:15 Yep. Is AI actually applicable to every other technology that's come along? or if it is the potential to be a source of power going forward, it's going to be dealt with as such. Yeah, that makes sense. Last question, we'll let you go. How happy should Ted Sarandos be right now? I mean, I think he had the killer quote the last couple of days where I think I was asking you of if this is such a jewel and it's so rare. like isn't it a problem that you're missing out on it?
Starting point is 00:32:50 And he's like, well, have you seen the history of Time Warner? Sounds about right. I'm not sure how an entity with all the debt that Paramount and Warner Brothers is going on. I think there's a bit where Netflix is always in the very long run been positioned, I think to be the final buyer. Like who else are content companies going to sell to? I feel like they sort of, I feel like they've been spooked by YouTube a little bit and they felt a need to push forward.
Starting point is 00:33:16 that bring the future forward, that was not allowed to happen, but that means their original plan, I think, still in place. So probably pretty happy, all things considered. I'm going to say, it's great. Well, I'm excited to get back to Netflix coverage and more anodyne topics. Yeah, I remember it was on Cheeky Pite. You were talking about getting sucked into the idol. And here we are. So I put that quote at the beginning of my article, you know, you may not be interested in politics. politics and interest in you. That was about anthropic and it was also about me. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Welcome, welcome to 2026. Well, we thank you for taking the time to come chat with us. Great to see you. And a fantastic article. We appreciate you, Ben. I'll talk to you soon.
Starting point is 00:34:01 Thank you. Have a great day.

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