The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - Who Controls AI?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today on the AI Daily Brief, we are discussing a question that is extremely easy to ask and much more difficult to answer. Who controls AI? The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, KPMG, Insightwise, AIUC, and Blitzy. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com slash AI Daily Brief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. To learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at AIdailybrief.aI. While you're on AI Dailybrief.ai, you can also find out about the other projects in the AIDB ecosystem, including Claw Camp, Enterprise Claw, registration for which is going on right now.

Starting point is 00:00:45 Basically, if your enterprise wants to learn how to build agents and agent teams, or just more podcast-related stuff like subscribing to the newsletter, which is newly rebooted. Now, if you've been listening to this week, you'll know that we had something of a time of it getting back from South America. door-to-door it ended up being about 55 hours and that didn't include the seven hours that it took me to go drop off the rental car and pick up our old car which was sitting at the airport parking lot. In any case, because of that, I had to miss Wednesday's show, not something that I do very lightly. And so as a makeup, I had slated to do an extra show over the weekend on the day that I'm usually off. As it turns out, this was a pretty opportune week to have that slot open because my goodness, as Ron Burgundy would say, boy, that escalated quickly. I'm referring, of course, to the skirmish-turned all-out war between Anthropic and the Pentagon that came to a crescendo in a head on Friday night.

Starting point is 00:01:35 The TLDR of what happened is that not only did the Trump administration decide to decline to work with Anthropic, they are attacking them in ways that go far beyond just declining to do business with them. Now, for the necessary background and to get caught up with the story from where we left it, we actually have to go back to Thursday when Anthropic CEO Dario Amade released a statement about the dispute. Earlier in the week, you'll remember, Defense Secretary Pete Hegson's, Seth had given Amadeh an ultimatum, removed terms of use limits by Friday or be blacklisted from

Starting point is 00:02:01 the entire military supply chain. Anthropics red lines were that Claude should not be used for domestic surveillance of Americans or for powering autonomous weapons. Their stated view was that Claude is not reliable enough to power autonomous weaponry, and that AI surveillance is undemocratic and perhaps more pertinently has underdeveloped legal safeguards. The White House's position, meanwhile, was that a technology company should not be dictating how the U.S. government uses that technology and should be fine accepting terminology that allows the U.S. government to use it for all legal uses. Dario's post from Thursday begins, I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.

Starting point is 00:02:39 And it is worth noting here, especially if and as this conversation gets caught up in broader partisan talking points, historically speaking, Anthropic has been more vocal about things like China not having access to advanced technology than some of their peers, where Whereas some of the other AI companies have been either fine with or actively lobbying for the ability to sell into China, think specifically around Nvidia and advanced chips, Amade and Anthropic have been consistent that they think that is a very, very bad idea. Point being, at least based on the history, Anthropic is not a pacifist organization. Now, in the blog post Amade continued, Anthropic understands that the Department of War, not private companies, make military decisions.

Starting point is 00:03:18 We've never raised objections to particular military operations, nor attempted to limit use of our technology, in an ad hoc manner. However, in a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine rather than defend democratic values. Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today's technology can safely and reliably do. Two such use cases have never been included in our contracts with the Department of War, and we believe they should not be included now. He then restates anthropic objections to mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. Now, when it comes to those exceptions, he says, to our knowledge, those two exceptions have not been a barrier to accelerating the adoption and use of our models within our armed forces to date. Then in one of the spicerer sections,

Starting point is 00:03:56 he writes, the Department of War has stated they will only contract with AI companies who accede to any lawful use and remove safeguards in the cases mentioned above. They have threatened to remove us from their systems if we maintain these safeguards. They have also threatened to designate us as a supply chain risk, a label reserve for U.S. adversaries never before applied to an American company, and to invoke the Defense Production Act to force the safeguards removal. These latter two threats are inherently contradictory. One labels us as a security risk, the other labels clod is essential to national security. Regardless, he says, these threats do not change our position. We cannot in good conscience accede to their request. Now, it is very clear that this public statement did not

Starting point is 00:04:35 make Anthropic any friends in the White House. Assistant to the Secretary of War for Public Affairs, Sean Parnell, was diplomatic but clear, the Department of War has no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans, which is illegal. Nor do we want to use AI to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human involvement. This narrative is fake in being peddled by leftists in the media. Here's what we are asking. Allow the Pentagon to use Anthropics model for all lawful purposes. This is a simple, common sense request that will prevent Anthropic from jeopardizing critical military operations and potentially putting our warfighters at risk. We will not let any company dictate the terms regarding how we make operational decisions.

Starting point is 00:05:12 They have until 501 p.m. on Friday to decide, otherwise we will terminate our partnership with Anthropic and deemed them a supply chain risk for the Department of War. Former Uber official and Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering, Emil Michael, was not so diplomatic. He wrote, It's a shame that Dario Amadeh is a liar and has a God complex. He wants nothing more than to try to personally control the U.S. military and is okay putting our nation's safety at risk. The Department of War will always adhere to the law, but not bend to whims for any one for-profit tech company. Now, coming into Friday, it seemed like the Court of Public Opinion was sort of leaning in Anthropics' favor. More than 200 Google and OpenAI staff signed a petition that supported Anthropics Red Lines,

Starting point is 00:05:49 which you can find at notdivided.org, and you even saw a bunch of comments like this one on that post from Sean Parnell. Hi, Sean, just FYI, nobody believes this, and it comes off as ingenuine. I'm generally a conservative-leaning voter. I'm also pretty tech forward. I am wildly against this. Reminder that the entire tech lobby flipped on Biden for the exact same reason in May 24. So that's where we were heading into Friday morning. Now, outside of the substance of the argument, it was pretty weird to a lot of folks that it was being had so publicly. As quoted by Axi-Senator Tom Tillis said, why the hell are we having this discussion in public? Why isn't this occurring in a boardroom or in the secretary's office? I mean, this is sophomoric. So that's where we were heading

Starting point is 00:06:27 into Friday morning. In the morning, it seemed like at least OpenAI was lining up alongside their AI peers, or at least, as CNBC put it, trying to help de-escalate the situation. Late on Thursday night in a memo to his team, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said, we've long believed that AI should not be used for mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons, and that humans should remain in the loop for high-stakes automated decisions. These are our main red lines. In an interview on Friday morning with CNBC, Altman said, for all the differences I have with Anthropic, I mostly trust them as a company, and I think they really do care about safety, and I've been happy that they've been supporting our warfighters. I'm not sure where this is going to go. And while a lot of

Starting point is 00:07:04 folks on social media were excited that Altman seemed to be lining up alongside Anthropic, OpenAI was clearly having conversations with the DoD at the same time. He indeed had said, said explicitly in that memo that they were exploring whether they could deploy their models in classified environments in a way that, in his words, fit with their principles. That was the say to things until 347 in the afternoon Eastern time, when President Trump took to truth social to write, in all caps, the United States of America will never allow a radical left, woke company to dictate how our great military fights and wins wars. That decision belongs to your commander-in-chief and the tremendous leaders I appoint to run our military. The left-wing nut jobs at Anthropic

Starting point is 00:07:39 have made a disastrous mistake trying to strong-arm the Department of War and force them to to obey their terms of service instead of our Constitution. Their selfishness is putting American lives at risk, our troops in danger, and our national security and jeopardy. Therefore, I am directing every federal agency in the United States government to immediately cease all use of Anthropics technology. We don't need it, we don't want it, and we will not do business with them again. There will be a six-month phase-out period for agencies like the Department of War who are using Anthropics products at various levels. Anthropic better get their act together and be helpful during this phase-out period, or I will use the full power of the presidency to make them comply, with major civil and criminal

Starting point is 00:08:13 consequences to follow. We will decide the fate of our country, not some out-of-control radical left AI company run by people who have no idea what the real world is all about. Thank you for your attention to this matter, make America great again. Defense Secretary or a Secretary of War or whatever the heck you want to call him at this point, Pete Heggseth chimed in. This week, Anthropic delivered a master class in arrogance and betrayal, as well as a textbook case on how not to do business with the United States government or the Pentagon. Our position is never wavered and will never wavered. The Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropics models for every lawful

Starting point is 00:08:44 purpose and defense of the Republic. Instead, Anthropic and its CEO, Dario Amadeh have chosen duplicity, cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of effective altruism, they have attempted to strong arm the United States military into submission, a cowardly act of corporate virtue signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives. The terms of service of Anthropics' defective altruism will never outweigh the safety, the readiness, or the lives of American troops on the battlefield. Their true objective is unmistakable to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable. As President Trump stated on Truth Social, the commander-in-chief and the American people alone will determine the destiny of our armed forces, not unelected tech

Starting point is 00:09:20 executives. Anthropic stance is fundamentally incompatible with American principles. Their relationship with the United States Armed Forces and the federal government has therefore been permanently altered. In conjunction with the president's directive for the federal government to cease all use of Anthropics technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk to national security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic will continue to provide the Department of War at services for a period of no more than six months to allow for a seamless transition to a better and more patriotic service.

Starting point is 00:09:53 America's warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of big tech. This decision is final. Immediately the lawyers jumped in to start figuring out what the heck. the implications of all this were. Senior research fellow Charlie Bullock wrote, Hegeseth claims that this declaration that no Pentagon contractor or supplier can do business with Anthropic is effective immediately, which seems absolutely insane. Under 10 U.S.C. 3252, which is almost certainly the authority Hegseth has to rely on here, there are multiple requirements that DOW has to fulfill before the SCR declaration becomes effective. They have to complete a risk assessment.

Starting point is 00:10:25 They have to make a written determination that declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk is necessary for national security, and that there's no less intrusive way to address the risk. And they have to notify Congress. It's possible the DOW has already done some of that behind the scenes, quick work, if so, but it's hard to believe that they fulfilled, e.g., the congressional notice requirement in the time between 5 p.m. Eastern and Hegeseth tweeting. In all likelihood, it's just not true that the declaration is immediately as Hegseth claims. Pryns says, to put a finer point on what just happened, Hegsseth Post says that no contractor supplier or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic. Anthropic serves its models through the cloud.

Starting point is 00:10:59 Its primary partner is AWS, but it also serves its models through Google Cloud and Azure. All of Amazon, Microsoft, and Google do business with the U.S. military. If we take HeggS. Post literally, Anthropics should now find itself unable to serve its models via any of these providers. This is what Dan Primac from Axios wanted to know as well. He tweeted, practically speaking, does this mean Amazon, Nvidia, etc., can't do any business with DOD? What about Palantir? Dean Ball, who, to be clear, was integral in writing Trump's policy on AI, wrote,

Starting point is 00:11:29 Invidia, Amazon, Google will all have to divest from Anthropic if Hegeseth gets his way. This is simply attempted corporate murder. I could not possibly recommend investing in American AI to any investor. I could not possibly recommend starting an AI company in the United States. A little bit after that, Anthropic dropped a response statement that mostly sought to assure customers that they could just chill for now. They noted that so far all of their information is coming from the same source as all our information, which is social media.

Starting point is 00:11:56 Anthropic writes, we have not yet received direct communication from the Department of War or the White House on the status of our negotiations. They, of course, promised to challenge any supply chain risk designation in court. The business section was titled, what this means for our customers. In which they write, Secretary Hegeseth has implied this designation would restrict anyone who does business with the military from doing business with Anthropic. Legally, a supply chain risk designation can only extend to the use of Claude as part of Department of War contracts. It cannot affect how contractors use Claude to serve other customers. In practice, this means if you are an individual customer or hold a commercial contract with Anthropic, you're asking.

Starting point is 00:12:29 access to Claude through our API, Clod AI, or any of our products, is completely unaffected. If you are a Department of War contractor, this designation, if formally adopted, would only affect your use of Claude on Department of War contract work. Your use for any other purpose is unaffected. Now, unfortunately, I'm sure Anthropic knows, as anyone who has studied either of the operation choke points over the last decade, that when it comes to governments exerting pressure on private sector companies to not work with other private sector companies, you need is a little push in an implication for those companies to ditch the offending vendor.

Starting point is 00:12:57 A few minutes later, and by the way, this is all happening within the span of an hour or two. Fortune magazine Sharon Goldman wrote, Sam Altman told OpenAI employees at an all-hands meeting on Friday afternoon that a potential agreement is emerging with the Department of War to use the startup's AI models and tools according to a source present at the meeting and a summary of the meeting seen by Fortune. The contract has not yet been signed. According to Goldman, Altman said the government is willing to let OpenAI build their own safety stack,

Starting point is 00:13:22 that is the layered system of technical policy and human controls that sit between a powerful AI model in real world use, and that if the model refuses to do a task, then the government would not force Open AI to make it do that task. A few hours later, Sam Altman confirmed that a deal had gotten done. He tweeted, we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network. In all of our interactions, the DOW displayed a deep respect for safety and a desire to partner to achieve the best possible outcome. AI safety and wide distribution of benefits are the core of our mission. Two of our most important safety principles are prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems.

Starting point is 00:13:58 The DOW agrees with these principles reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement. We will also build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the DOW also wanted. We will deploy forward-deployed engineers to help with our models and to ensure their safety. We will deploy on cloud networks only. We are asking the DOW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements. We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.

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Starting point is 00:17:51 Two, Anthropic might have a reasonable moral take, but the government can't be constrained by them. three, it doesn't matter whether Anthropic is right or not, a private company shouldn't set government policy. Four, not only should a private company not set government policy, Anthropics' moral stance is wrong. Five, whatever I think, if the U.S. government doesn't want to work with a vendor, they should just not work with a vendor, but maybe don't try to kill them. And six, punish the infidels lest the other Uppity AIC CEOs get ideas. As you might imagine, there were comparatively fewer of that last one, but they were in fact there. One interesting example of the Anthropica's right camp came from Eric Vorhees. Eric is the founder of Venice AI, and has long been an actual libertarian,

Starting point is 00:18:28 willing to call out policies he didn't like on the left and the right. He tweeted, Anthropic is definitely woke and lefty, but their refusal to permit Washington to use their tech to carry out warrantless mass surveillance of Americans is eminently based. Dime pointed out that the language of left and right kind of didn't belong here. They wrote, None of us voted for dystopian AI spyware surveilling us in a way that makes the Patriot Act look quaint.

Starting point is 00:18:50 None of us voted for fully autonomous weapons on robots. I understand wanting these things in the AI, arms race with China, but Trump's actual comments are shocking. It is not left-wing to want less domestic surveillance and fully autonomous murder bots. I think it's pretty safe to assume that most of America doesn't want AI used like this. Now, among those who are really against Anthropic, mostly it came down to some version of Yeah, but China. Mike 3 writes, people cheerleading for Anthropic either want China to win the AI supremacy war or they're so politically brain-rodded they don't fully understand what's at stake and think the U.S. government just wants to use it as a tool of oppression. Geiger Capital

Starting point is 00:19:24 writes, wanted to jump on here quick and say China doesn't give a crap about Anthropics Moral Red Lines. We can argue both sides, but they won't. They are implementing AI into their entire military chain, and they are doing it with zero Democratic or civilian oversight. Now, while a lot of the chatter was from the chattering class, one person who agree or disagree with his positions has been living in these questions for much longer than basically any of us is Anderrell founder Palmer Lucky. Palmer writes, do you believe in democracy? Should our military be regulated by our elected leaders or corporate executives. Seemingly innocuous terms from the latter like, you cannot target innocent civilians, are actually moral minefields that levered differences of cultural

Starting point is 00:20:02 tradition into massive control. Who is a civilian and not? What makes them innocent or not? What does it mean for them to be a target versus collateral damage? Existing policy and law has very clear answers for these questions, but unelected corporations managing profits and PR will often have a very different answer. Imagine if a missile company tried to enforce the above policy, that their product cannot be used to target innocent civilians, and that they can shut off access if elected leaders decide to break those terms. Sounds good, right? Not really. In addition to the value judgment problems I list above, you also have to account for questions like, what level of information, classified or otherwise, does the corporation receive that would allow them to make these determinations?

Starting point is 00:20:39 How much leverage would they have to demand more? What if an elected president merely threatens a dictator with using our weapons in a certain way? Al-a-madman theory. Is the threat seen as empty because the dictator knows the corporate executives will cut off the military? Is the threat enough to trigger the cutoff? How might either of those determinations vary if the current corporate executives happen to like the dictator or dislike the president? At what level of confidence does the cutoff trigger, both in writing and in reality? The fact that this is a debate over AI does not change the underlying calculus. The same problems apply to definitions and use of ethically fraught but important capabilities like surveillance systems or autonomous weapons. It is easy to say, but they will

Starting point is 00:21:14 have cutouts to operate with autonomous systems for defensive use. But you immediately get into the same issues and more. What is autonomous? What is defensive? What about defending an asset during an offensive action or parking a carrier group off the coast of a nation that considers us to be offensive? At the end of the day, you have to believe that the American experiment is still ongoing, that people have the right to elect and unelect the authorities making these decisions, that our imperfect constitutional republic is still good enough to run a country without sourcing the real levers of power to billionaires and corpos and their shadow advisors. I still believe. And that is why bro just agree the AI won't be involved in autonomous weapons or mass surveillance. Why can't

Starting point is 00:21:48 you agree? It is so simple, please, bro, is an untenable position that the United States cannot possibly accept. And again, even if you disagree with where Palmer is coming out on this, I think he is rightly identifying that this at core is a question of control. And by extension, and this is where it gets complicated, a question of checks and balances. Part of the problem in why people I think are sympathetic to Anthropic is that checks and balances on executive power, i.e. the folks in Congress, don't really seem to be doing their job. Sure, a bunch of them, like Senator Ed Markey and Senator Mark Kelly, took to Twitter after this to say that Congress needed to be involved. But if that's the case, I think people can be forgiven for being a little

Starting point is 00:22:26 bit cynical as they ask, why weren't you involved before? Now, for some, all of this is just a little highfalutin. Commentator sucks on Twitter writes, if you build a super weapon and it lives in a data center in the USA, it's not your super weapon. You don't own or control it. The people with the aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons do. This is how the world has always worked. Roman Helmut Guy, who you might have seen on social media, writes, satirically, Hi, I'm a private citizen who developed a super weapon potentially a thousand times more powerful than nukes, and now I'm selling it to the government, but I get to choose who they fire it at and how everyone please respect my decision. For many, like Nathan Lanz, this was inevitable.

Starting point is 00:22:59 He writes, people don't get it. AI is becoming critical infrastructure. It will power defense, finance, intelligence, everything. If a private company can decide how the U.S. government is allowed to use it that's not ethics, that's corporate leverage over a sovereign nation. And yet still, for all the people who are sympathetic to that point, and there are many, it feels to me like where the majority of them get uncomfortable is not with the U.S. government's decision to not work with Anthropic, but all of the threats and the retaliatory action that it seems like it's coming with. Lindy founder Flo writes, one, the government is rightly annoyed at a very important vendor thinking they can tell them what to do with their technology. Two, any company has a right to refuse service to anyone,

Starting point is 00:23:36 including the government and army, at least when not in wartime. Three, this does not justify the government going ballistic in treating them as an enemy of the nation. Adam Holter writes, As a conservative, I do not support labeling Anthropic as a supply chain risk for refusing to comply with an all-legal purposes clause. I can also see why the Pentagon can't set a precedent of letting contractors dictate terms. So they should walk away from the deal and cancel the $200 million contract. However, threatening to label Anthropic as a supply chain risk is an unprecedented action for an American company. Nothing Anthropic is doing is dangerous for government contractors to use.

Starting point is 00:24:09 All they're doing is providing two lines and two restrictions regarding how their technology can be used. You can't punish a company for not providing a service, especially not in peacetime. If you disagree, as a conservative, I want you to think. If the Biden administration were doing the same thing, would you be against it? Dean Bolligan, perhaps feeling a little betrayed, given that he shaped AI policy initially for this government, went farther. Think about the power Hegset is asserting here.

Starting point is 00:24:33 He's claiming that the DOD can force all contractors to do. stop doing business of any kind with arbitrary other companies. In other words, every operating system vendor, every manufacturer or hardware, every hyper-scaler, every type of firm the DOD contracts with, all their services and products can be denied to any actor at will by the Secretary of War. This is obviously a psychotic power grab. It is almost surely illegal, but the message it sends is that the United States government is a completely unreliable partner for any kind of business. The damage done to our business environment is profound. No amount of deregulatory vibes sent by this administration matters compares to this arson. And some version of this, I think, was what a lot of people

Starting point is 00:25:10 felt. Gail Wiener writes, the whole reason Silicon Valley dominated for decades was the promise. Build here will protect your intellectual property. We won't interfere with your business. The court's work, the rule of law holds. That was the deal. If you're a brilliant AI researcher in London or Seoul or Berlin or Bangalore right now, and you're watching the president of the United States threatened criminal prosecution against an AI company for having ethics, why would you build in America? Why would you incorporate there? Why would you put your IP under that jurisdiction? Trump just blew that up on X in all camps.

Starting point is 00:25:40 Growing Daniel writes, all of this is just so bad for the defense tech ecosystem. Like, who wants to deal with this? What a crappy customer. Strategy professor Kevin Bryan writes, moral of this story is that no smart company is going to do business with this government. Anthropic built literally the world's best AI and integrated with the military as a national service.

Starting point is 00:25:58 They fulfilled their contract precisely. Result they are being treated like Huawei. Now, one part of the story that'll be interesting to watch over the next couple of days is how this will shake out narratively for both Anthropic and for Open AI. Self-proclaimed AI security hawk Peter Wildeford writes, I think it's important to circle back to Sam Altman here. About 20 hours ago, people including me were applauding his moral clarity. But that moral clarity lasted barely half a day.

Starting point is 00:26:22 Altman sees a short-term way to torture competitor and he's going to take it, no matter what happens to OpenAI Anthropic the US or Us. Trader Mark Valorian writes, I don't know who needs to hear this apparently all of Twitter, but OpenAI did not just magically get the DOD to agree to the terms Anthropic was asking for. Sam is blowing smoke to distract from the fact OpenAI just took the terms Anthropic considered so egregious it warranted jeopardizing an enormous part of their business. Assume all OpenAI data will now be used for what Anthropic deemed mass domestic surveillance

Starting point is 00:26:48 of Americans. And while I think there is, of course, massively, massively more nuance to whatever was going on behind the scenes with OpenAI and the DOD that none of us who are commenting on Twitter have the actual context for, one part of this story is going to be the story. the Court of Public Opinion. Signal writes, As of this writing, Claude is now number two in the App Store, and there's a real non-trivial downside scenario here for OpenAI that many aren't really grasping.

Starting point is 00:27:12 It's low probability, but structurally interesting. If a clean meme forms on TikTok and Instagram tying OpenAI to the Department of War, and that framing hits mainstream liberal users, the reaction won't be analytical, it'll be visceral. Most people won't parse contract scope, defensive use cases, or historical precedent. They'll respond to timing and symbolism. And if this perception hardens, the competitive alternative. it becomes emotionally obvious. An association that feels morally dissonant could trigger switching behavior,

Starting point is 00:27:37 employee discomfort, media amplification, and even long-tail brand drift. I'm not arguing companies shouldn't work with the war department. That's not the point. The point is that in a memetic environment, perception compounds faster than facts. And if that perception locks in among a politically concentrated user base, the second and third order effects on consumer AI could be far more significant than most people expect. Now, what I think signal might be missing here is that this is already starting to happen. It has been widely shared in progressive circles that OpenAI President Greg Brockman is one of Trump's biggest donors this cycle, which has already led many to shift. For some, this is going to be confirmation that this is not a one-time thing, but an actual pattern.

Starting point is 00:28:15 Katie Perry, for one, has already switched. Before all of this went down, Mike Salana got at the damnable complication of all this, writing, am I wrong or is the situation just frozen at, one, we don't want to force private companies to do something they don't want to do. Two, we don't want private companies running the military. Three, we are in an AI arms race with a country that controls its AI labs. I don't really see any satisfying answer here for a free society that also needs to maintain an edge against a successful authoritarian country racing towards a potentially, probably, eventually, brand new doomsday weapon, to be honest. Ultimately, Kristen Faulkner nails it when she writes, The Anthropic Pentagon standoff is not a tech story. It's the moment AI ethics

Starting point is 00:28:54 stopped being theoretical and became geopolitical. As AI becomes more powerful, the power to dictate how AI can and should be used will become even more sought after. Whoever decides the ethics of AI will be deciding the ethics of society. And so here is my positive note to end on. The situation right now for Anthropic and for Open AI and the Pentagon and everyone else is messy. But for all of the rest of us, it's an opening. It is yet another reminder, a big blinking reminder that is cascading from our little corner of the world into mainstream consciousness of just how important these conversations are. As the forces of partisanship always do,

Starting point is 00:29:34 many will try to wrestle this narrative into confirmation bias for their particular partisan story. That is in spite of the fact that at least right now, while the left and the right may in general have nudging impulses in different directions on AI, it is not in any way a hardened or calcified partisan conversation. That, I believe, is a good thing. It's too important to just be eaten up as another culture war issue.

Starting point is 00:29:55 And so my plea is to ignore anyone who's trying to do. that to this conversation. I'm sure there will be a lot more to cover as things evolve, but for now, that is where we are going to conclude this AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching, as always, and until next time, peace.

The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - Who Controls AI?

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