As the fifth anniversary of my seminal contribution to blobology approaches, there will naturally be widespread clamoring for me to take stock—to deliver a report on the state of the Blob (defined, loosely speaking, as the foreign policy establishment). As I prepare this anniversary opus, I thought I’d give NZN readers a preview—a report on the state of my state of the Blob report.

I’m afraid the news isn’t good.

I’m not referring to the obviously bad news: that one of the key takeaways from Blob studies—about the manifest idiocy of launching regime change wars, especially when the regime poses no imminent threat to any nation and no long-term threat to America—somehow failed to penetrate the brain of the current occupant of the White House, even though as a candidate he explicitly assured us that it had.

No, I bring even worse news than that. Namely: As the age of artificial intelligence dawns, the various people who make a living as Blobsters—the think tankers, the past and present government officials, the military-industrial-complex titans, the influential media figures—show few signs of getting the picture. Whereas the atomic age spawned lots of creative and even enlightened thinking about its revolutionary implications for national and international security, the age of AI seems so far to be having roughly the opposite effect.

In recent days, two paradigmatic examples of this problem have come to my attention. One involves the China Talk podcast, which for better or worse (plot spoiler: worse) has attained some prominence within the Blob, and indeed recently featured two important former government officials sharing their thoughts on artificial intelligence. The other example involves Palantir, the Silicon Valley defense contractor known for managing the AI-infused software that processed the list of opening-day targets for the Iran war—a list that seems to have included an elementary school whose student body is now largely dead.

I always encourage people who don’t know much about Palantir and are curious about it to start with this short video of Palantir CEO Alex Karp speaking at a public event a bit more than a year ago:

Why, when I was a boy, the men who ran the big defense contractors were mild mannered and evinced a sense of decorum—maybe because they perceived that coming off as belligerent and semi-deranged would be bad for their brand. I’d like to think that they understood something Karp doesn’t, but I fear that, actually, we’re now living in an age when coming off as belligerent and semi-deranged can be good for your brand.

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I have additional thoughts about Palantir, but they’ll be easier to process if I first spend a little time on China Talk. This podcast’s more dovish detractors sometimes call it China Hawk, and indeed, its host, Jordan Schneider, fits that description. I interviewed Schneider on the NonZero podcast some months ago and tried to challenge his China hawkism. Judging by his recent discussions of AI, my intervention was less than transformative.

Consider, for example, his take on the implications of Mythos, the new but as yet unreleased Anthropic large language model that, as I’ve noted before, has an unprecedented ability to find and exploit software vulnerabilities. Some people think Mythos foreshadows future AI threats to international stability that are best addressed through international cooperation. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently suggested as much, a suggestion that triggered this response from Schneider on his podcast:

[Jensen] said, “Look, this is something that the US and China need to solve with dialogue.” I am sorry—No one is going to solve the fact that states want to hack other states and other state systems and read their secrets, and, like, maybe make things blow up, through dialogue. I mean this is not something like a global pandemic where it sort of threatens everyone.

Actually, this is like a global pandemic. Powerful and autonomous AI hackers, if not kept under control, could be very bad for the US and China—and lots of other nations. For example: (1) These AIs could fall into the hands of a non-state actor, and the damage done by self-replicating autonomous hackers could cross borders, maybe resulting in the destruction of big chunks of the planet’s communications or energy or financial infrastructures; (2) One of the two AI superpowers, mindful of the growing cyberpower of the other, could misread some cyber-snafu as the opening wave of a cyberattack and then counterattack in fearful desperation, starting a conflict that was catastrophic for both.

In both scenarios—and others I could dream up—the key thing is that a lose-lose outcome is possible, so the game is non-zero-sum. In other words: It’s like a pandemic—and like various other phenomena that should in theory lead nations to cooperate out of self-interest.

This isn’t rocket science! It’s game theory 101—and back when the foundations of nuclear strategy were being laid, awareness of these game theoretical dynamics pervaded the discourse. Maybe that explains why the calls for US-China cooperation on the issues raised by Mythos have come mainly from old timers—like New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and the venerable Economist magazine and, well, me.

The rising generation of Blobsters, in contrast, seems curiously uninterested in even discussing, much less pursuing, such possibilities. A good illustration is a different recent episode of China Talk, featuring two Blobsters of some stature: Ben Buchanan, special advisor for AI in the Biden administration, and Michael Sulmeyer, assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy in the same administration. Though the entire conversation was about the implications of Mythos, neither mentioned the possibility of any kind of international agreement on AI cyberweapons—no treaty, no protocol, no memorandum of understanding, no nothing.

There was brief discussion of international “norms” that might constrain certain uses of AI. Buchanan suggested that, once AI gets better at helping people make bioweapons, then “maybe the norms save us at that point” but “I kind of doubt it, to be honest.” Sulmeyer sounded equally fatalistic. “Have we already missed that moment in AI? I’m not saying that a normative regime, you know, that we should be spending a ton of effort on that or not, just that if you’re asking about norms, that would be, I guess, my question: Is it already a little too late?”

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But there’s another path that Buchanan and Sulmeyer are sure it’s not too late to pursue. “Near and dear to my heart is building an American lead in AI,” said Buchanan—and the conversation about Mythos had “reaffirmed the importance of doing that.” Sulmeyer echoed the importance of “the leaders of America’s warfighters” understanding how important it is that “our offensive cyberoperators maintain and extend a competitive advantage.”

Meanwhile, Chris McGuire, their colleague in the Biden administration and now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in the Financial Times: “The consequences of losing the AI arms race are no longer theoretical. AI models are now the decisive offensive and defensive tools in cyber space, and American and allied cyber security depends on maximizing the US lead over China in AI.” McGuire advocated tightening already tough restrictions on the export of chips and chipmaking equipment to China.

So what could the success of McGuire’s plan look like? Here’s a possibility you won’t hear from him: If America’s estimated seven-month lead in the AI race persists or even grows, and AI approaches levels of power that could confer utter dominance on the nation in the lead, the incentive of China to stage a pre-emptive strike would grow (as noted in a much discussed paper called “Superintelligence Strategy,” co-authored by Dan Hendryks, with whom I discussed it on the NonZero podcast). For example, China might attack Taiwan, the location of the factories that produce all those advanced AI chips that, thanks to US export controls, flow to the West but not to China.

It strikes some people as almost unbearably ironic to say that America’s national security could be served by restraint in the development of powerful weapons. But life is full of irony! And there was a time when influential people in the national security establishment understood that. More than half a century ago, some of them realized that, though “missile defense” sounds like a security blanket, it could be the opposite: If nuclear powers started developing missile defenses on a large scale, that could increase the chances of nuclear war by undermining the logic of mutually assured destruction. So Richard Nixon—no hippie peacenik—signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; he chose to keep America’s nuclear missiles vulnerable because, so long as the Soviet Union verifiably reciprocated, that would keep both nations safer.

I grant that maintaining global stability in the age of AI is much more challenging than it was in Nixon’s day. To take just one example: A key to nuclear deterrence is that you’d know where incoming missiles were fired from, so the attacker could expect retaliation—and, as many analysts have noted, cyberattacks, in contrast, don’t generally have a clear return address. So, in the age heralded by Mythos, you can’t count on deterrence to keep the peace.

But don’t bother Alex Karp with details like that. Palantir this week posted a long tweet that was a bullet point summary of the bestselling book The Technological Republic, which Karp co-authored. Bullet Point number 12: “One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on AI is set to begin.”

It will definitely be a new era—we agree on that.

Feel free to pre-order my book on AI, which comes out in June:

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Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis. “The Blob” lede art by Nikita Petrov.

Here’s the link for that April 25, noon ET Zoom call with paid subscribers:

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Save the date: I'll be hosting a Zoom discussion for NonZero members next Saturday, April 25th, at noon US Eastern Time. The main topic will be AI, though some discussion of the Iran war (or, God willing, the war’s end) will probably be in order. A link to the Zoom call is at the bottom of this newsletter.
—Bob

The knives are out for OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, both figuratively and pretty close to literally. Last week—a few days after publication of a New Yorker piece featuring tons of anonymous attestations to Altman’s duplicitousness, and a few days before a Wall Street Journal piece about his conflicts of financial interest—an anti-AI extremist threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s house.

Altman suggested a causal link between the two kinds of attacks. In a blog post about the attempted firebombing, he called the New Yorker article “incendiary” and noted that it came in a time of “great anxiety about AI.” Maybe, he mused, the attack on his home was testament to “the power of words and narratives”.

A debate about the relationship between strong words and radical action was already happening in AI circles, owing to an armed attack a week earlier on the home of an Indianapolis politician who supported the construction of a local data center. The Altman attack turned the volume up a notch.

Nirit Weiss-Blatt, who writes an anti-AI-alarmism newsletter, assessed some Discord posts written by the accused firebomber and concluded that he had undergone “a long radicalization process shaped by ‘AI existential risk’ rhetoric.” OpenAI’s global policy chief, Chris Lehane, connected the Altman attack to the “very, very negative and dark view of humanity” held by “the Doomers.” Lehane said, “When you put some of those thoughts and ideas out there, they do have consequences.” Putting a finer point on it, White House AI adviser (and wealthy veteran of Silicon Valley) Sriram Krishnan highlighted the title of a book co-authored by Nate Soares and Doomer-in-chief Eliezer Yudkowsky. “This is the logical outcome of ‘If we build it everyone dies,’” Krishnan tweeted.

Here’s my radical take: If there’s a sense in which finger pointing is in order, some fingers should be pointed toward Silicon Valley—pointed at the culture of self-serving tech libertarianism that people like Krishnan represent. As exhibit A, I direct your attention to last week’s edition of the very influential podcast All In, whose cast of tech bro regulars includes White House AI Czar David Sacks and which is to Silicon Valley roughly what Pravda was to the Soviet Union (and which, for that matter, is to the Trump administration roughly what Pravda was to the Soviet Union).

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But first a note about the senses in which finger pointing is and isn’t in order:

Obviously, none of us—not the New Yorker, not Krishnan, not Sacks, not Yudkowsky, and, above all, not me—is morally responsible for the actions of people who are inspired or provoked by our words to do things we don’t espouse and didn’t mean to encourage. And if we’re held legally responsible for such things, that’s a threat to the foundations of liberal democracy.

That said, it is legitimate, and can be healthy, to argue that certain kinds of speech, though constitutionally protected, and perhaps morally defensible as well, do make certain kinds of reprehensible behavior more likely. Among other virtues, getting clearer on the causal connections between speech and bad behavior can help conscientious people refine their messaging to reduce its cost/benefit ratio. This clarity can also inform people’s judgments about which kinds of speech, though constitutionally protected, nonetheless deserve moral condemnation.

Now back to All In. Last week’s episode began with a discussion of Anthropic’s new but unreleased large language model Mythos, which I wrote about in last week’s Earthling. Mythos, apparently, has demonstrated an uncanny ability to find, and in many cases exploit, vulnerabilities in software; it has found holes in all major operating systems and browsers, among other platforms. So Anthropic is sharing Mythos with companies that maintain big parts of the digital infrastructure, like Microsoft and Apple and Cisco and Google, so they can find holes and patch them.

The All In discussion of Mythos began with guest Brad Gerstner, a Silicon Valley investor, who applauded Anthropic’s actions and used them as an object lesson in how little regulation AI needs. “What I like about this is they didn’t need government to hold their hand on this,” he said of the team at Anthropic. “We have plenty of government regulations.”

Now let’s think about this.

If what Anthropic says about Mythos is true, then we may have just dodged a very big bullet. This is an AI that, in the wrong hands, could do God knows what—take down power grids, vacuum up the life savings of retirees, induce a panic or a stock market crash by hijacking social media accounts en masse. And Gerstner seems to agree that the stakes are this high. If Mythos had been released, he said, it “would wreak havoc”—it would have “broken a lot of core things on the internet” and “allow offensive hacking.” Yet he’s happy to leave the decision about releasing such tools in the hands of whoever happens to be running whichever AI company happens to develop the next comparably dangerous tool—and the one after that and the one after that and…

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And it’s not like envisioning an occasionally reckless CEO of less than sterling character takes a wild leap of imagination. That New Yorker piece quoted one acquaintance of Sam Altman calling him a “sociopath” and a former member of OpenAI’s board describing him as having an “almost a sociopathic lack of concern” for the consequences of his deceptions.

The source of Gerstner’s faith in the judgment and character of all present and future AI CEOs is a little unclear. At one point he seems to suggest that self-interest will lead them to do the right thing. What Anthropic did was in “the best long-term interest of the company,” he says. Yet he prefaces his remarks by saying Anthropic deserves “a ton of credit here” and ends them by saying that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and his team “deserve a lot of credit”—even though credit isn’t something we normally award for pursuing self-interest.

Maybe Gerstner’s point was that pursuing your long-term self-interest can be hard when you’re in a fiercely competitive AI race, and releasing a world-beatingly powerful model could generate a lot of revenue and steal the thunder of your most bitter rival. If so, I agree. Which is exactly why I say we shouldn’t leave these things entirely in the hands of AI companies. Indeed, given the rumors that OpenAI will soon announce a Mythos-level model, I don’t feel wholly confident that either Amodei or Altman will in the coming months exercise as much self restraint as society deserves.

By the way, the investment company Gerstner runs, Altimeter Capital, has stakes in Anthropic and OpenAI worth billions of dollars. So it’s possible that his views on government regulation of the AI industry aren’t entirely free of bias.

All In host Jason Calakanis did disclose Gerstner’s stake in these companies, so it’s not like this was a covert influence op. But in a way that’s my point: I think one thing that drives some doomers crazy—figuratively and perhaps in the case of Altman’s assailant literally—is the perception that serious discussion about regulating AI is being thwarted by rich and powerful people who are serving their own interests at the expense of the public interest. These Silicon Valley potentates wield great influence via various levers of power, and they do so conspicuously and unabashedly.

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For example, Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI, has donated $50 million to Leading the Future, a Super PAC that’s devoted to squashing various regulatory initiatives and kneecapping congressional candidates who support them. I assume he’s happy with his work so far; as of now there is zero meaningful federal regulation of AI. And, lest any states fill the void, Leading the Future backed a law that would have banned all AI regulation at the state level for 10 years.

I’m not saying Brockman bears any moral responsibility for the firebombing of Sam Altman’s house—any more than Eliezer Yudkowsky does. But if you’re speculating about the causal forces that came together in the firebomber’s presumably unbalanced mind to catalyze his crime, I don’t see any reason to give more weight to Yudkowsky’s arguments than to the perception that powerful people like Brockman are making it hard for such arguments to get a fair hearing via conventional political channels.

On this week’s episode of the New York Times tech podcast Hard Fork, co-host Casey Newton, in the course of discussing the attack on Altman’s house, said the following:

This AI moment that we’re living through is a top-down moment. It did not rise up from the grass roots from a bunch of nerds getting together in their garages and training frontier models. It was a small group of really smart people who were able to get access to massive amounts of capital from the elites in our society, and they’re now mounting this effort to build it very quickly, deploy it very quickly without a lot of guard rails. I think when the average person looks at this, they think, not only did I not ask for this but I have no meaningful control over it. And I think that’s a big reason you’re seeing people so furious—because I think, particularly on the left, this just looks like mostly a right wing elite project that’s being championed by President Trump and the many venture capitalists that are in his administration, and if you’re already worried it’s going to take your job, and you think you don’t have any control over it, well of course you’re going to hate it.

That sounds about right to me. People worried about the impact of AI look around and see no serious consideration of the possibility that this technology is moving too fast—at least, no consideration that has had any impact at the policy level. And what they do see—on the All In podcast and elsewhere—is rich, powerful people who make facile and obviously self-serving arguments yet carry the day. And often these arguments are aired in forums that, like the All In podcast and God knows how many pricey tech conferences, have the trappings of debate but lack the diversity of viewpoint that would make the debate meaningful.

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A question that may have more relevance to all this than meets the eye: Why did we see, in the course of a couple of weeks, both the New Yorker’s massively documented piece about Sam Altman’s deceptive tendencies and the Wall Street Journal’s piece about his conflicts of financial interest? After all, the outlines of both stories have long been evident. Karen Hao’s book Empire of AI, for example, convincingly depicted Altman as a slippery character whose word isn’t exactly his bond.

Maybe part of the answer is that, as OpenAI has over the past half-year lost ground to Anthropic, and has seemed less and less sure footed, discontent with Altman’s performance as CEO has grown. And the less confident OpenAI investors and workers feel about the future value of their equity in the company, the more open they are to change in the CEO suite—so the more willing they are to share with journalists criticisms of the current CEO that they’d previously kept under wraps. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal piece reports that there is more and more talk, among OpenAI stakeholders, about replacing Altman.

This is just speculation on my part, and it could well be wrong. But, even so, the timing of this sudden proliferation of doubts about Altman’s character is consistent with a view held by some critics of the tech industry: that Silicon Valley is fine with CEOs who lack integrity so long as they’re good at making money. This is one of many unflattering perceptions that it may not be in Silicon Valley’s long-term interest to foster.

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Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.

And, finally: Here’s the link for that April 25, noon ET Zoom call with paid subscribers:

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Save the date: I'll be hosting a Zoom discussion for NonZero members on Saturday, April 25th, at noon US Eastern Time. The subject will be AI and, to some extent, war—and the particular connection between the two that’s laid out in the piece below. A link to the Zoom call is at the bottom of this newsletter.
—Bob

“The week that changed everything” is a phrase that shouldn’t be tossed around lightly. After all, “everything” covers a lot!

Also: In what may be the phrase’s most common context—a Christian context—it refers to the week that brought the Crucifixion and Resurrection of the Messiah and hence the promise of salvation for humankind. And that’s a high bar.

So I’m going to hold off for now on calling this past week the week that changed everything. But I’m going to argue that, depending on how things play out, a title this exalted could wind up being in order. This was a week that saw seismic tremors at two different levels—one geopolitical (in the Middle East) and one technological (in artificial intelligence). And there was a connection between the two that isn’t yet visible but could prove momentous. The connection could even prove salvific—salvific as in salvation, as in the salvation of humankind. And I’m not kidding, so long as “salvation” refers not to an afterlife or the cleansing of our sins but to saving humankind from various apocalyptic outcomes, up to and including extinction.

It’s possible that I’m reading too much into this. I have a book coming out in June called The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning. And when you have a book coming out you tend to see the world through that lens, and this can lead to distortion. You can, for example, see corroboration of your book’s thesis everywhere you look. And such corroboration is what I see when I look at this week’s news. That’s not necessarily a cheering thought, because my book’s thesis isn’t wholly upbeat. Still, I do see, in this week’s news, some cause for hope—reason to think that maybe the dark scenarios laid out in my book won’t come to pass and the brighter scenarios laid out in it will.

But, again, I could be wrong; AIs aren’t the only beings capable of hallucination. You be the judge.

One of the book’s central points is that if we’re going to successfully navigate the AI revolution—avoid traumas and catastrophes that range from social chaos to planet-wide authoritarian rule to nuclear war to complete annihilation—we’ll have to cross the threshold to true global community. The world’s nations have to confront this challenge collectively—build new international rules and norms—or else watch in dismay and intermittent terror as a technology that accelerates without constraint or guidance strips us of agency. (If this sounds too dramatic, please suspend judgment. I devote a fair amount of the book to laying out the evidence and logic behind my more dramatic-sounding claims.)

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Much of what we need to do in controlling AI comes under the rubric “international governance,” but I think this phrase, radical though it sounds to some people, runs the risk of understating the challenge. After all, we have international governance now. Various treaties, such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Law of the Sea Treaty, qualify for that label. And—don’t get me wrong!—these treaties are nothing to sneeze at. But few of them are global, and they often lack enforcement mechanisms, and compliance can be spotty, and they have a tendency to fray. I think AI will ultimately call for structures of international governance more ambitious and nuanced than the kind we’ve had. And, as if that weren’t a tall enough order, these structures will have to be bolstered by new norms, and these norms will have to get the kind of respect that a society’s most important norms get.

This is why I used the phrase “true global community” above. I don’t think our species will be able to muster the focus and commitment this mission demands unless we can sustain at least the minimal degree of harmony that the term “community” implies. That doesn’t mean kumbaya-level harmony, but it does mean we can’t keep getting bogged down in the kinds of wars that have plagued humanity since (at least) the dawn of history.

This points to one reason I found this week’s Iran War ceasefire, partial and tenuous though it is, heartening. I’m hoping it can usher in not just peace, but a peace that has a particular kind of psychological impact—a peace that highlights the frequent futility and absurdity of war. After all: The two aggressors, the US and Israel, spent God knows how much money and killed God knows how many innocent people, and not only failed to reach their stated war aims but may have handed their enemy a new and potent form of regional influence: ongoing control of the Strait of Hormuz. (I elaborate on some of this in a video op-ed I posted Friday about my hopes for the ceasefire—and argue that this new Iranian influence, though anathema to Israel and America, could be a stabilizing and pacifying force in the near term.)

What’s more, this war has been nothing short of a political debacle for the leader of the more powerful of the two aggressor nations, Donald Trump. So the perpetrator of an egregious violation of the UN Charter got powerfully negative feedback. That’s the kind of feedback we need if we’re going to restore some respect for international rules and norms, a pre-requisite for building a true global community.

As if Trump’s humiliation weren’t enough cause for celebration, the transparency of his motivations helped highlight the absurdity of the political dynamics that so often lead to war: National leaders inflate threats abroad to foment fear at home and thus benefit politically by posing as guardians of national security. Both Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are veteran practitioners of this craft, but in this case Trump practiced it so ineptly as to invite widespread ridicule. He literally couldn’t think of a single quasi-plausible threat that Iran posed to the US, even though he deemed the Iranian menace so grave as to warrant an assault that killed thousands of people, wiped out untold infrastructure, and destroyed numerous cultural treasures.

Trump’s crudeness—the playground taunts and macho chest-pounding—can get tiresome, but it does have the virtue of clearly demonstrating what drives him and many other warmongering politicians: They’re just alpha males trying to stay on top of the heap. It would be hard for him to more vividly convey the primitive and visceral energies that fuel wars without actually putting on an ape costume.

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I don’t want to get carried away. We are not on the verge of ending war forever, and in fact it’s not even clear that we’ll succeed in ending this war. Still, this war had some of the hallmarks of a landmark. In The God Test I write, “Seeing the absurdity of the average conflict doesn’t make any particular conflict easy to resolve, and it doesn’t mean there’s never one side in a conflict that deserves support. Still, if the amount of change we need on this planet is as great as I think it is, it may be necessary for large numbers of people to look around and say, ‘Folks, this is ridiculous. We can’t go on like this.’ ” What we’ve seen over the past six weeks is a war that, more than any American war I’ve lived through, invites that kind of reaction. Folks, this was ridiculous. It was almost a caricature of the folly of war, and I hope it will be seen that way more and more as it recedes into the past.

So that’s the seismic activity at the geopolitical level that I alluded to above—a war that seized the world’s attention by imperiling the global economy and that, however unwelcome in itself, could have a welcome impact on the perception of war itself, an impact that I hope is the beginning of truly tectonic change, of a sustained drift away from war.

Of course, a hope is just a hope. One conspicuously absurd war won’t by itself transform the world’s view of war, much less build a global community. That construction project will require additional impetus. Which leads us to the other level at which seismic change was evident this week: the technological level, where that very impetus began to materialize.

This week Anthropic announced that it has a new large language model that’s way more powerful than past models—so powerful that it poses a threat to the world’s information infrastructure. This model can find otherwise unfindable vulnerabilities in software—and in fact, said Anthropic, has found previously unknown holes in every major operating system and browser. And in most cases, it is able to then build a tool to exploit those vulnerabilities. So if this model fell into the wrong hands, that could be big trouble—which is why, says Anthropic, there are no plans to release the model for the time being.

Some people have wondered whether Anthropic’s claims about the terrifying power of this new model are mainly marketing hype—a suspicion that isn’t exactly discouraged by the model’s name: Mythos. But Anthropic is making Mythos available to big companies that maintain important parts of the digital infrastructure, like Microsoft, Apple, and Cisco. So if these claims were hugely exaggerated, word of that would get out—especially since one of the companies, Google, is a direct competitor of Anthropic’s and would presumably prefer not to admit that Mythos is significantly more powerful than its own frontier model, Gemini, in such an important domain. (Mythos, says Anthropic, wasn’t designed to facilitate cyberattacks—this capability was just a byproduct of designing it to write computer code and handle intellectual challenges more generally.)

AI, as Mythos demonstrates, is a good example of a technology that can’t be adequately governed at the national level alone. Today it’s America that has the most potent AI hacker, but tomorrow it could be China. In fact, we can’t be quite sure that China doesn’t have a potent AI hacker now, because the two countries are making no serious effort to collaboratively address the emerging challenge they face and so aren’t doing a lot of communicating on this subject.

That gives me an uneasy feeling. As I write in The God Test:

These kinds of dangers—AI-abetted biological virus, AI-abetted computer virus, AI-infused cyberweapon, rampantly destructive AI agent—and various others make it harder for any nation to feel safe unless it has some confidence that things are under control in other nations. And it’s hard to get that kind of confidence without international agreements that qualify, in at least some sense, for the term “international governance.”

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I’m happy to report that the need for international coordination on AI is appreciated by some influential people. New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, assessing the Anthropic news, wrote this week:

The solution—this may shock people—must begin with the two AI superpowers, the US and China. It is now urgent that they learn to collaborate to prevent bad actors from gaining access to this next level of cyber capability. Such a powerful tool would threaten them both, leaving them exposed to criminal actors inside their countries and terrorist groups and other adversaries outside. It could easily become a greater threat to each country than the two countries are to each other.

But other observers have reacted in roughly the opposite fashion, saying there’s no realistic hope of deep trans-Pacific cooperation, so America must double down on its AI race with China. This will no doubt be a common reaction.

Another common reaction, I suspect, will be that we should immediately set about deploying Mythos as a weapon against China. This week the well known social media influencer Noah Smith, in reference to a story about recent data theft from a state-run Chinese computer, tweeted: “Just today, someone asked me: If our government knew about Mythos ahead of time, why didn’t it team up with Anthropic to hack China before announcing the model’s capabilities to the public?”

If our government hasn’t done that, the reason may be the Trump administration’s ongoing spat with Anthropic. But you can bet that people in the administration are pondering the question Smith raised. And you can bet that people in Beijing are pondering it. And you can pretty much bet that nobody in the Trump administration is wise enough to ponder the implications of Beijing pondering it. Here’s one such implication: When nations get insecure about the emerging capabilities of another nation, they sometimes take dramatic action. Just ask Bibi Netanyahu. And when the emerging capability is ultra-powerful hacking that, for all you know, is already being deployed against you, a nation can get insecure and reactive, and interpret ambiguous evidence as attack and respond accordingly.

The principle this points to—the potentially stabilizing effects of mutual transparency between the US and China—is just one of many AI-related issues that deserve lots of attention and aren’t getting much. The same might be said of this week’s Anthropic news itself. (The Times, notwithstanding Friedman’s column, ran its news story about Mythos in the business section—and, in the physical edition, below the fold.) But this story is still filtering through tech podcasts and other niche media and is destined to get more mainstream attention for some time to come.

I’m hoping that, as more and more people process the story, they’ll see its significance. I’m also hoping that they’ll understand one reason its significance took a while to sink in: Because news about it was obscured by news of war. To put a finer point on it: Tuesday—the day Anthropic released the news—was also the day Trump declared that if Iran didn’t bend to his will, “a whole civilization will die tonight.”

It’s understandable that this bizarre and vile and ultimately ephemeral threat to a great civilization absorbed our attention while news of a more deeply rooted and enduring threat to civilization writ large flew under the radar. Still, folks, this is ridiculous—that we’re letting primitive and malicious creatures like Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu dominate the stage while issues of critical importance to the whole planet languish in relative obscurity.

Maybe reflecting on the absurdity of Tuesday’s allocation of attention will help us eventually get our priorities straight. So remember the date: April 7, 2026. We can call it Planet of the Apes day.

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PS: I taped a podcast conversation this week with Shakeel Hakim, editor of Transformer, a newsletter about AI. We taped the conversation Tuesday, right before the Mythos news broke (or at least before it reached my news feed). But we did agree on some things relevant to Mythos: (1) AI demands international governance; (2) It may take a catastrophe to focus the world’s attention on that fact—but, as Shakeel pointed out, we can hope that this service will instead be performed by a “near miss,” a narrowly averted catastrophe. Well, so far, at least, Mythos hasn’t brought a catastrophe and so is the closest thing we’ve had to a “near miss.” Let’s not waste it.

PPS: I notice that the Amazon page for my book offers a “pre-order price guarantee”—an opportunity to lock in the current price just in case the price changes between now and June. Now, TBH, the chances of the price rising over the next two months are, to judge by past publishing experience, roughly zero. OTOH, the price of oil hasn’t returned to its pre-war level, and I’ve never seen an Amazon delivery truck that had solar panels, so you never know…

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Note: Those final data points are from before the Iran War.

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And, finally: Here’s the link for that April 25, noon ET Zoom call with paid subscribers:

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Why is the current war happening? If you want to answer that question in a broad sense—in a way that applies not just to the Iran war but to other needless bursts of carnage of the past and future—I would direct your attention to an exchange that took place this week on a New York Times podcast called The Opinions.

The exchange was between Times columnist David French and retired four-star General Stanley McChrystal, and it was an archetypal interaction between two kinds of mindsets—the kind that keeps getting us into wars and the kind that, if it were more common, could keep us out of them.

The roles played by the two men aren’t what you might expect based on their job descriptions. It wasn’t the career Army officer who exemplified the narrowly tribalistic perspective and the writer for the liberal media who offered the more balanced and pacific view. Rather, it was the professional soldier who brought the enlightenment and the journalist who lacked it—and who showed no signs of absorbing any of it.

In a way this isn’t surprising. What McChrystal crucially evinced is the ability to see things from the point of view of other people, including adversaries and enemies—an ability any good military strategist needs. In fact, though I typically call this skill “cognitive empathy,” it is, when employed in certain contexts, also called “strategic empathy.”

As regular NonZero readers know, I consider cognitive empathy a kind of untapped superpower—a human potential that, if more widely realized, could work wonders. For example: It could transform American foreign policy from the blunt and brutal instrument it’s become into something that’s actually good for the world.

A second reason the roles played by these two men isn’t surprising is that French first got wide public exposure in 2016 when Bill Kristol proposed that he run for president. And if Bill Kristol—who as a leading neoconservative played a non-trivial role in getting the US into the Iraq War—would like to install you in the Oval Office, it’s a safe bet that you’re no slouch in the mindless tribalism department.

French was an officer in the Army Reserve, and, like McChrystal, served in the Iraq War. He begins their conversation by noting this shared history and using it to explain to listeners what he calls “the veteran’s perspective on this conflict” with Iran—a perspective he clearly is assuming McChrystal shares with him. This perspective, he says, is “different than the perspective that a lot of the folks who didn’t serve, especially in Iraq, have” and is grounded in awareness of “Iran’s role in the Iraq war, and the losses it inflicted upon us.” He recalls that, while he was in Iraq, “we lost guys to explosively formed penetrators planted by Iranian-backed militias” and then invites McChrystal to take it from there—to elaborate on “what has been the recent American experience in our long-running conflict with Iran.”

McChrystal, though, wants to take the story back in time, not forward. He says, “If we go back to the American experience, starting in 1979,” we remember that “the American embassy [in Tehran] was seized, and there were people chanting ‘death to America’.” And “that was very upsetting,” especially since, before the revolution of 1979, Iran had been America’s staunch ally. So, says McChrystal, post-revolutionary Iran seemed like “a recalcitrant enemy that hated us for some reason we couldn’t really understand.” And that attitude toward Iran was reinforced by the Iraq war experience French had just described. In Iraq, said McChrystal, “they were killing us and we were killing them,” and Iran increasingly seemed like “our lifelong enemies.”

But, he then adds, “I think that’s only part of the story.”

At this point French is either oblivious to where McChrystal wants to take the story or determined not to let him go there. Whereas McChrystal wants to talk about the roots of Iranian hostility toward America, French just wants to keep documenting the hostility. He says, “Well, if you’re going to say that’s only part of the story, we have to keep going.” He notes that, though the “surge” of US forces seemed to have smothered the Iraqi insurgency by 2009, “the story doesn’t end there, of course, General. The story keeps going, and Iranian-supported militias have been a thorn in our side, really, in Iraq ever since.”

French now invites McChrystal to sustain this theme: “Let’s pick it up after the surge. What happens next?”

McChrystal, God bless him, replies, “Well, let’s really pick it up before that, because I think it’s important… It really starts in 1953, when the US and British intelligence services overthrew the constitutionally elected prime minister” of Iran and installed the Shah, who “oppressed the people tremendously, particularly through SAVAK, the secret police. So when the Iranian revolution happens, we may be surprised [but] the Iranian people are not surprised. And when they suddenly say ‘Death to America,’ most Americans will say, ‘What’s your problem? Why are you angry at us?’ ”

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McChrystal’s narrative continues: In 1980, Iraq invaded Iran, starting an eight-year-long “brutal bloodletting” (during which the US supported Iraq with intelligence and other resources). And in 2002, McChrystal notes, George W. Bush designated Iran and Iraq as the two Middle Eastern members of the “axis of evil”—something that didn’t exactly incline Iran to roll out the welcome wagon when Bush invaded Iraq the next year and American troops were suddenly occupying Iran’s next door neighbor. Hence the Iran-backed Shia militias in Iraq that, in French’s telling, are where the story begins.

There are lots of details that McChrystal skips that would have bolstered his narrative—like the fact that, only a few months before that Bush “axis of evil” speech, in the wake of 9/11, Iran had collaborated with the US to pave the way for the American invasion of Afghanistan. (Fun fact: Qasem Soleimani, the Iranian military commander who in 2020 was assassinated by Trump via missile strike, was in 2001 on the ground in Afghanistan, using his connections in the country to help smooth the arrival of American troops. Imagine Soleimani’s surprise when he learned that, after his tour in Afghanistan, he would be reassigned to the axis of evil.) Still, McChrystal fleshes the history out enough so that his basic point is clear. As he puts it: “If we don’t understand that journey to this point, we don’t understand the attitudes that are going to drive decisions people make.”

But French, in a subtle but important sense, persists in not getting the point. He says, “I’m so glad we have dived into this from the Iranian perspective, because I think understanding the Iranian perspective really helps us maybe understand how the rest of this war might go. What kind of staying power, for example, the Iranians might have.” Elaborating, he says that “the level of commitment that exists within the regime is just something that’s theological.” Sometimes it’s even “apocalyptic,” he adds. He then relays an anecdote he heard in Iraq about how fanatical some of those Iran-backed militiamen were.

For all I know, McChrystal would agree with this emphasis on theology and apocalypticism, but it wasn’t implied by anything he’d just said, and in fact it seems closer to the opposite of his upshot. McChrystal seemed to be saying, among other things, that if you understand Iran’s history, you shouldn’t be surprised by Iranian wariness of, mistrust of, and hostility toward the US. These things don’t need some kind of special explanation grounded in Islamic theology or fundamentalist apocalypticism or Persian philosophy or anything else.

French’s depiction of the Iranian regime as intensely religious in its motivation is a time-honored trope of neoconservatives and other hard-core Iran hawks. Hence the boilerplate references—in the writing of Bret Stephens in the New York Times, Walter Russell Meade in the Wall Street Journal, David Frum in the Atlantic, and so on—to “the mullahs” who run Iran. So long as these writers can keep us thinking of Iran’s leadership as zealously religious, they’ll have an easier time convincing us that we shouldn’t let Iran do things every other country is allowed to do—like enrich uranium to a low level for (verifiably) civilian use or have an arsenal of ballistic missiles with conventional warheads.

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The threat that McChrystal’s world view poses to Iran hawks was illustrated this week on another New York Times podcast—Ross Douthat’s Interesting Times. Douthat’s guest was Mark Dubowitz, CEO of The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a deeply pro-Israel and anti-Iran think tank. After Douthat suggested that the US-Israeli strategy of “decapitation” via the serial assassination of Iranian officials naturally leads Iran to escalate, Dubowitz countered, “Well, my point is that they have been escalating against us and against Israel and against their neighbors for decades… They continue to go up the escalation curve as they’re prepared to take more and more risk against us.”

In other words: The side of the story that a broader, McChrystalite perspective includes doesn’t actually exist; since the dawn of time, Iranian “escalation” has been intrinsically driven, unaffected by exogenous variables. Dubowitz makes no mention of the time in 2024 that Israel, out of the blue, lethally bombed an Iranian consulate in Syria, or the time, in 2025, when Israel, out of the blue, staged a massive air assault on Iran, or the time a month ago when Israel and America, out of the blue, staged another such assault, this time, for good measure, killing Iran’s leader and several family members. So, needless to say, Dubowitz also fails to mention that the only three times in history Iran has started firing ballistic missiles at Israel—the missiles that Dubowitz and Stephens and Meade and Frum says Iran’s “mullahs” shouldn’t be allowed to have—were in response to those three unequivocal provocations.

If Dubowitz were to acknowledge such facts, he might have to entertain the possibility that there’s some truth to the claim that Iran’s ballistic missiles are meant to serve a defensive function—as a deterrent to Israeli attack. And if Dubowitz headed down that path, who knows where he might wind up? He might even start entertaining the possibility that, whatever the intrinsic motivations of such Iranian “proxies” as Hamas and Hezbollah, they, too, from Iran’s point of view, are meant to serve a deterrent function. (It was only after Israel degraded both to the point of near-impotence that it started launching military assaults on Iran—so apparently they had indeed been serving that function.)

And this, in turn, could lead Dubowitz to what for him would be a kind of hell on Earth: a vantage point from which both Israel and Iran are seen as countries that feel deeply insecure and do things out of defensive motivation that look offensive to the other side. In this view of the Israel-Iran relationship, there is a basically symmetrical cognitive empathy deficit, and its malign effects intensify via a positive feedback cycle, and to the extent that either side is to blame, both sides are. And if there’s one thing the Mark Dubowitzes of the world hate, it’s moral symmetry.

President Trump seems to have accepted the one-sided narrative that America’s many influential Iran hawks have promulgated. At least, that would help explain why he abandoned the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran in his first term—why he wasn’t satisfied with Iran just agreeing not to build a nuclear bomb and submitting to a strict system of monitoring and inspections that guaranteed compliance, but demanded that it go further and do various things that we demand of no other nation. That would also help explain why he chose to attack Iran a month ago rather than persist in negotiations that could have gotten him a deal at least as good as the Obama deal and almost certainly better.

Trump isn’t the only US president who deserves blame here. If President Biden had wanted a restoration of the nuclear deal that Trump jettisoned, he almost certainly could have had that early in his term. But he, like Trump, demanded more. The Iranians, as Biden official Rob Malley explained to me on the NonZero podcast, didn’t buy the idea that they should be the ones to make new concessions even though America was the country that had reneged on the deal in the first place. It wouldn’t have taken a superhuman exercise of cognitive empathy on Biden’s part to anticipate such a reaction. In any event, by the time he reconciled himself to the Iranian view and softened his demands, politics within Iran had shifted toward a harder line. So no deal was done.

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My claim, above, that more robust and widely deployed cognitive empathy could transform US foreign policy, and help us avoid lots of wars, is not the kind of claim that can be convincingly corroborated in the course of a single issue of a newsletter. In fact, it’s a challenging claim to corroborate even in longer form. One reason is that cognitive empathy deficit can impede prospects for peace in so many different ways. Another is that the chains of causality leading to wars can be long and complex, and there’s rarely a single critical juncture where doing a better job of perspective taking would definitely and demonstrably have made the difference.

Still, it’s possible to identify junctures where cognitive empathy could have plausibly made the difference. I’ll close with a quick look at several such junctures in one very long long chain of causality: the chain that culminated in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. At various steps along the way, more cognitive empathy by various actors—Russia, Ukraine, the US—might have made a difference. I’ll confine my examples to ones involving the US.

1. NATO’s vow in 2008, at the behest of George W. Bush, to eventually admit Ukraine as a member. Here the problem wasn’t, strictly speaking, a lack of cognitive empathy. US Ambassador to Moscow Bill Burns had plenty of that; he saw how threatening Moscow would find the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine. He even predicted that a commitment to such membership could lead Russia to cause trouble in Crimea and the Donbass, which indeed happened. The problem, rather, was that Burns’s repeated attempts to convey this perspective to the White House—he even wrote a memo titled “Nyet means Nyet!”—were unavailing. So Bush strongarmed reluctant European leaders into making the commitment to Ukrainian membership. And this commitment thereafter colored Moscow’s views of developments in Ukraine. For example:

2. The Maidan Revolution of 2014. In retrospect, President Obama might have realized that, if the US conspicuously and vocally supported a protest movement that aimed to depose a Russia-friendly Ukrainian president—and especially if that goal was realized violently, as it was—Vladimir Putin might start feeling insecure about the long-term lease that entitled Russia to maintain a key naval base in Crimea. And, since most Crimeans actually preferred the prospect of Russian rule to the reality of Ukrainian rule, Putin might snatch Crimea almost effortlessly. Which he did, heightening the tensions that eventually led to war.

3. The original decision in the 1990s to expand NATO. As with the 2008 vow to admit Ukraine to NATO, the problem here wasn’t a lack of cognitive empathy per se. Plenty of Russia experts warned that NATO expansion was a bad idea. George Kennan, the most famous of those experts (known, somewhat misleadingly, as the architect of the Cold War doctrine of containment), said: “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake… This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves…. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are—but this is just wrong.”

Bill Clinton was surely aware of this view. But for whatever constellation of reasons—perhaps including such considerations as donations from arms makers and Polish-American votes in the Midwest—he chose not to act on it.

This points to a challenge: Even when national leaders manage to see the national interest clearly, with full illumination from cognitive empathy, they need to resist the temptation to sacrifice that interest to their own political interest. And that kind of virtue, as I suggested last week, doesn’t seem to be in abundant supply.

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Several decades ago, I learned something that surprised me: Game theorists don’t consider war a zero-sum game.

In retrospect, I’m surprised that I was surprised. I already knew that nuclear war is a non-zero-sum game (since the outcome can obviously be lose-lose—as in, everybody dies). But I guess I’d thought of nuclear war as some kind of unique and aberrant subspecies of war, rather than what it is: just a particularly pronounced example of the fact that wars often lead to massive death and destruction on both sides. Does it really make sense to say that the “victorious” nations in World War I, having lost at least 10 million lives, were better off than before the war started? Is it even clear that they fared better than the “losing” nations, which lost a bit more than half that many lives? By what calculation can you say that the sum of the fortunes of the two sides was zero rather than subzero?

I didn’t initially welcome this news flash from game theory. At the time, I was starting to work on a book (which wound up being called Nonzero), and, in ways that aren’t worth getting into, the non-zero-sumness of war complicated an appealingly simple narrative framework I’d been planning to employ. But, that inconvenience aside, the fact that war is non-zero-sum seems like potentially good news. If nations rationally pursue their self-interest, shouldn’t the knowledge that war often makes both sides worse off discourage them from starting wars?

In theory, maybe. But, back in the real world, there’s a massively destructive war going on in the Middle East.

Well, we might as well put it to good use! I think viewing the Iran War in game theoretical terms can shed light on the question of why humankind seems so bad at respecting the logic of game theory—why nations keep getting into wars that, history tells us, may inflict huge costs on all concerned.

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But to get that kind of illumination, we need to first add a little complexity to our game theoretical model—two dimensions of complexity, to be exact.

The first dimension is one that may have already occurred to you—as a kind of objection to how simple my initial explanation of war’s non-zero-sumness was. I was acting as if the consequences of war are confined to the number of lives lost. And there’s more to life than lives! There’s territory, for example. Right now Israel is seizing Lebanese territory after driving off Lebanese residents—and if the past is any guide, Israel may hang on to the territory. And every acre it gains is an acre Lebanon loses: zero-sum.

Another kind of benefit of war is lasting security gains. Benjamin Netanyahu would probably argue that holding on to that Lebanese land enhances Israel’s security by creating a buffer zone, and he’s definitely argued that inflicting havoc on Iran will enhance Israel’s security. Whether or not these things turn out to be true, it’s true that they could be true; there is such a thing as enhanced security, and sometimes it’s achieved by war.

So if you add this dimension—if you expand your tabulation of war’s consequences beyond loss of life, to include things like land and future security—it’s possible for a nation to come out ahead even after accounting for fatalities and other human casualties. Which means it’s possible, in principle, for a war to have a win-lose outcome, even if wars are often lose-lose. So maybe it’s not so irrational for nations to keep embarking on war after all.

Maybe. But, if you want to explain why war is such a stubbornly persistent feature of human life, I don’t think this particular dimension of added game theoretical complexity is the ticket. I’d put more emphasis on the second added dimension. And, actually, maybe “dimension” is a misleading term here. Maybe you should think of this not as a dimension but rather as a whole second level of accounting—the level of domestic politics. To put it another way: The interests of the people who decide whether to launch wars are different from the interests of the nations they lead. A nation’s leaders can benefit politically from a war even if the nation, on balance, doesn’t benefit from it.

Consider Bibi Netanyahu. There’s no doubt that he’s benefited politically from Israel’s being so often in a state of conflict. Before October 7, 2023, for example, he was deeply unpopular and was spending part of his political energy trying to wriggle out of criminal prosecution. But, even though October 7 represented an epic security lapse that was clearly his fault, he masterfully turned it into a get-out-of-jail free card. By sustaining the war on Gaza well past the point where Hamas had been effectively neutralized, he rose in the public’s esteem. And then last summer, in the final months of the war, he started a whole new conflict—with Iran—that was deemed a triumph and helped keep him popular even after his rate of killing Gazans had dropped from wartime levels to mere ceasefire levels.

Will the scorched earth policy he pursued in Gaza—and is now pursuing in Iran and Lebanon—be good for Israel’s security in the long run? I’m skeptical; I think that if Israel wants lasting security, increasing the number of people in the Middle East and the world more broadly who hate it, and the intensity with which they hate it, isn’t the optimal strategy. But I could be wrong about that. In the annals of history, the ruthless deployment of brute force has proved effective with disconcerting frequency.

In any event, I think it’s clearer that Bibi’s belligerent policies have been good for Bibi than that they’ll be good for Israel in the long run. And however far back you go into his political history, you see the same pattern: He’s a deft sustainer of tension and conflict with Israel’s enemies. He has done his best to sabotage a two-state solution, and he has at times maneuvered to boost Hamas at the expense of more moderate elements in Gaza. And, conveniently, these two goals have sometimes dovetailed. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Netanyahu, in a 2019 meeting with Likud members of the Knesset, explained why he tolerated the Qatari government’s financial support of Hamas: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas. This is part of our strategy—to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.” One effect of all of this was to sustain and heighten the sense that Israelis were under siege—much to Bibi’s political benefit.

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Same goes for Iran’s political leadership: It has benefited politically from having enemies. The late Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei found it politically useful to depict America and Israel as implacable foes.

Of course, over the past few weeks, America and Israel have been acting like implacable foes of Iran—so Khamenei doesn’t seem to have been fabricating enemies out of whole cloth. And you could say something similar about Netanyahu: Yes, he’s played up the threats from Hamas and Hezbollah, but the threats themselves were real.

This fact—that the external threats that national leaders can profitably highlight and hype tend to have some basis in reality—makes it hard to isolate the forces that drive nations into war. Often when a nation initiates a war you can come up with both a plausible national security rationale and a plausible domestic political rationale. And it’s hard to say which played a bigger role.

One great thing about President Trump is that he takes the guesswork out of this exercise. There was no remotely plausible national security threat that justified attacking Venezuela, and the same goes for his attack on Iran. His claim that there was some kind of nuclear threat is ridiculous. Iran was nowhere near having a nuclear bomb and had just expressed a willingness to remain verifiably nuke free—and to make more concessions as part of a new nuclear deal than it made as part of the perfectly adequate Obama nuclear deal, the one that Trump catastrophically trashed during his first term. In fact, it was during the negotiations that had revealed this willingness on Iran’s part that Trump launched his surprise attack on Iran three weeks ago.

In the absence of a plausible strategic rationale, we’re forced to conclude that Trump launched this war because he thought it would be a political winner. Sure, he probably told himself it would also work out fine for America. But for a president to think that such a war actively and importantly served America’s national security interests, he’d have to be more clueless than I think Trump is, which would be quite a feat.

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Why exactly Trump thought attacking Iran would be a political winner—how he came to think this was going to be Venezuela all over again—is unclear. Was he convinced of this by Bibi or Mark Levin or Marco Rubio or Lindsey Graham or…? Hard to say what the constellation of key influencers was, but in any event their mission wasn’t exactly mission impossible. Trump isn’t a complicated man, and he’s never had a deep understanding of the world, and he seems increasingly detached from reality.

Anyway, how exactly this fiasco took shape isn’t our subject today. Our subject is the more generic one of why wars keep happening. And my point is that the answer lies at least as much at the level of domestic politics as at the level of geopolitics and national interest. At the level of domestic politics, wars can easily make sense; they can be win-lose or even win-win. For more than 15 years, Netanyahu and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah benefited politically from each other’s enmity—until finally Netanyahu’s enmity proved lethal, and the relationship shifted from win-win to win-lose.

I think highlighting the fundamentally political, as opposed to geopolitical, causes of wars could make them less common. The more clearly people understand where the real motivation usually lies, the more inclined they’ll be to greet the next push for war with appropriate cynicism.

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and some of them are what you could call foreign policy establishment podcasts—they’re produced by, say, the Council on Foreign Relations or some very buttoned up DC think tank, or they feature conversations among the kinds of people who work at such places. And, almost invariably, the people on these podcasts, in gravely assessing the motivations that start and then steer wars, stay at the level of geopolitics and national interest and assiduously avoid the level of domestic politics. To hear them talk you’d think that Trump was Metternich—or at least a dimmer version of Metternich—rather than a former Reality TV star who is just trying to keep his ratings up by staging a new spectacle that’s more eye-catching than the last one.

This kind of credulous discourse is a disservice to the nation. It sustains the myth that the people who steer American foreign policy are by and large worth taking seriously. They’re not. The politicians who steer it are for the most part just trying to get re-elected—and will serve whichever cluster of special interests can further that cause. And the “experts” who help steer it, including many of the voices on these podcasts, are people who managed to get hired by think tanks that, for the most part, are funded by the same special interests that are corrupting those politicians.

The better people understand all this—the more cynical they are about their political leaders and opinion leaders—the less susceptible they’ll be to the endless threat inflation that is the lifeblood of the military industrial complex and the various narrower lobbies that work hand in glove with it.

So, yes, war among nations is a non-zero-sum game, a lose-lose endeavor more often than not. But for the national leaders who keep pushing us into those wars, there’s more upside. We need to change that.

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This week on the NonZero podcast Daniel Levy, who has worked as a negotiator under two Israeli prime ministers, talked about, among other things, the increasingly religious character of Israeli politics and how that has influenced foreign policy:

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Henry Kissinger’s ambivalence about the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s was captured in this famous quote: “It’s a pity both sides can’t lose.” At first glance, the current Iran war might seem to be another case where choosing a favorite is challenging. After all:

1) On one side you have Bibi Netanyahu and Donald Trump. I recently referred to them on Twitter as “psychopathic monsters,” and the only thing that gave me second thoughts about that tweet was my wife’s contention that, strictly speaking, Trump is a sociopath, not a psychopath. And, my clinical evaluation aside, these two men launched an unprovoked and massively destructive war on Iran that clearly violated the UN Charter (which, by the way, is an actual treaty, a kind of multilateral non-aggression pact, that was ratified by the US Senate—and the US constitution says ratified treaties are the “law of the land.”)

2) On the other side you have an authoritarian regime that recently killed thousands of protesters and is said by prominent experts to be the “leading state sponsor of terrorism” and “the most destabilizing force in the Middle East.”

But, actually, it should be easy for Americans who care about America’s interests to pick sides in this war, especially if they also care about the future of the Middle East and of the whole world. They should want Iran to win—though maybe I should put “win” in quotes since, as I’ll explain, the kind of “victory” I’m talking about doesn’t entail military conquest or a lot of further killing and in fact involves a lot fewer future deaths than American and Israeli “victory” would entail.

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In evaluating the consequences of Iranian “victory,” it’s important to understand Iran’s war aims—and to grasp an underappreciated irony about them: Broadly speaking, these aims are shared by most of Iran’s current “enemies”—the Gulf Arab states that host US military bases and have been besieged by attacks from Iran since Israel and America attacked it two weeks ago. What’s more (just to get all the big ironies on the table before we resolve them), Iran’s attacks on Arab countries are a big part of the reason that these countries have a kind of sympathy for Iran’s war aims.

So what are those war aims? There’s more than one, and the first is survival of the regime. This isn’t the goal I’m talking about when I say Iran’s and the Gulf States’ goals converge, but it is, in fact, something a lot of Gulf rulers probably hope for. After all, unlike Donald Trump, they realize that the Venezuela scenario was never likely to play out in Iran, where the fall of the regime—if it could be engineered at all—would stand a good chance of ushering in a period of chaos and civil war and mass migration, something few Arabs in the Gulf region welcome.

But, as important a goal as survival is, and notwithstanding all the commentary to the effect that for the Iranian regime “survival is victory,” survival really isn’t victory, or at least it isn’t complete victory, in the view of Iran’s leaders.

Initially, the goal of survival did seem to dominate Iran’s strategy. The attacks on Arab states and regional energy infrastructure, analysts said, were designed to get those states, along with financial markets, to put pressure on Trump to stop the war with the regime still intact. But as time wore on, and Iranian leaders sounded less and less eager for a ceasefire, more and more regional experts said Iran’s aims go beyond just stopping the fighting: Iran wants to stop the fighting in a way that will keep it from starting again.

After all, when Israel and America attacked Iran last summer (also in clear violation of international law), stopping the fighting turned out not to mean much. Only eight months later, Netanyahu and Trump repeated the exercise on an even larger scale.

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What’s more, it was pretty predictable last summer (and in fact was predicted) that Iran would get attacked again before long. One reason is Israel’s basic approach to national security, an approach grounded partly in the conviction of many Israelis that they will always be widely and deeply hated in the Middle East, regardless of what they do. Israeli strategists don’t put much faith in the engineering of enduringly stable relations with neighbors—whether by strong commercial or strategic bonds or by structures of mutual deterrence. Rather, the basic aim is to persistently degrade the economic and military power of neighbors that have threatened or could plausibly threaten Israel, thus neutralizing the threat.

For example: Killing one in 30 Gazans may somewhat deepen the pre-existing hatred of Israel in Gaza, but so long as Israel is killing lots of young males and destroying lots of infrastructure, the hatred can’t assume truly threatening form. Even the new Syrian regime—which is basically US-friendly and Israel-friendly—was welcomed onto the stage with extensive bombing by Israel, which took advantage of the power transition in Damascus to destroy as much Syrian military hardware as possible. Just in case…

As Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute recently put it, “Israel believes that its security is achieved by dominating the region. It is not seeking security by balancing threats or managing threats. It actually has to dominate the region. So for it to have total security, everyone else has to have total insecurity.”

The grim resignation of Israelis to living in a place where security comes via endless conflict is reflected in a term long used for Israel’s periodic military campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah: “mowing the lawn.” In recent years that metaphor has increasingly been extended to Iran. Walter Russell Mead, a deeply pro-Israel columnist for the Wall Street Journal, this week acknowledged that maybe the regime change scenario wasn’t going to play out in Iran this time—but, he added (perhaps by way of consoling himself), this war would still be remembered as “the Mother of All Lawnmowers.”

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But even when Israel uses a lawnmower that powerful, it still expects to use it again before terribly long. That is the expectation that the Iranian regime wants to change. Hence its current strategy: to make this war so painful for so many influential actors that Israel will be strongly discouraged from repeating the exercise any time soon—discouraged by Arab states and, most importantly, by America.

Inflicting this pain has so far involved relatively few deaths, compared to the 2,000 or so people, mainly civilians, killed by the US or Israel in Iran or Lebanon over the past two weeks. You don’t have to land many missiles or suicide drones on targets in Dubai before Dubai’s commercial identity—as a place where the rich can live and party and park assets, and international business can get done—is imperiled. And temporarily crippling a couple of Amazon data centers in the Gulf—which Iranian strikes have done—needn’t kill anyone in order to send an important message: Attracting those big, coveted AI data centers—like the 10-square-mile OpenAI “Stargate” facility slated for the United Arab Emirates—could get a lot harder if they’re thought of as tempting Iranian targets amid the next lawn mowing.

In other words: After this conflict ends, it won’t be enough for the Gulf states to tell tourists and investors and businesses that the Iranian drone and missile strikes have stopped. They’ll have to be able to credibly say that Iran won’t be doing such things again for a long, long time. And since Iran is now signaling that it could do such things again if it gets attacked again, the Gulf states will be strongly incentivized to help Iran somehow arrange things so that it is no longer subject to such attacks. As Vali Nasr of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies put it this week, “a ceasefire alone will not lift the shadow of risk that Iran has imposed over the Gulf, which is now experiencing its nightmare scenario.”

So Iran and the Gulf states share an interest in establishing some kind of architecture for regional stability.

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Such a project faces steep odds for various reasons, including Gulf anger toward Iran over all the drone and missile strikes. On the other hand, there’s also a lot of Gulf anger toward Israel and America, which were implored by many Gulf leaders not to start this war. So if Gulf states let anger be their guide, they could wind up pretty isolated.

A bigger obstacle to an architecture of regional stability is that Israel doesn’t want one. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that Israel’s security strategy is, in a sense, to foment regional instability—to repeatedly attack neighboring states and non-state actors, degrading their economic and military strength and letting the chips fall where they may.

This is the thing (OK, one of many things) that Trump seems not to have grasped: Whereas for him the failure of this attack to replicate the no-fuss regime change of Venezuela is a big political problem, for Bibi Netanyahu it’s not. Worst case is that Bibi got America to help him mow the Iranian lawn—and if continued attacks manage to collapse the regime, and lead to civil war, so much the better; if there’s one thing he finds less threatening than a degraded state, it’s no state at all.

Should this war bring enlightenment to Trump, he could play a constructive role after it. He could pressure Israel to lay off Iran—and if he’s willing to pull out the big guns, and deny Israel American missile defense in the wake of any attack on Iran, the pressure could succeed. But even in that unlikely event, there’s a bigger problem with the idea of Trump ushering in some new security architecture for the Middle East: Why would Iran trust any commitment made by the Trump administration, whose last contact with the Iranian government was pretending to negotiate with it while plotting a sneak attack?

This mistrust of America may explain the way Iran is now signaling its aspirations for the post-war Middle East. Here is Nasr’s paraphrasal:

Iran says it will only accept a ceasefire with international guarantees for its sovereignty, which would probably mean a direct role for Russia and China… The US would then have to agree to some form of the nuclear deal it left on the table in Geneva in February and commit to lifting sanctions. Iran’s leaders entered this war with the goal of ensuring it will be the last one. Either it breaks them or radically changes the country’s circumstances. They are betting on surviving long enough and squeezing the global economy hard enough to realize that goal.

This is a big part of the reason to root for Iran’s success in realizing its war aims: Its goal is regional stability, and Israel’s goal is more nearly the opposite, and America’s goal is… well, so long as Trump is president, it’s hard to say what America’s goal is. But Trump has become such a global menace—with this illegal and irrational attack on Iran being only the most recent example—that it will be good for the world if he gets some negative reinforcement for his adventurism. Many future lives could be saved if this war becomes a clear political loss for Trump.

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As of now, America and Israel are the two most lawless and destabilizing nations on the planet. They seem to compete with each other for the title of most frequent violator of the UN Charter’s ban on transborder aggression, and no other country is in their league. (Though, yes, what Russia lacks in number of violations it makes up for in magnitude: the invasion of Ukraine was a very consequential crime.)

But, you may ask, how can I suggest that America or Israel deserve the title of most destabilizing nation when so many think tank experts and MSM commentators have suggested that Iran may deserve that title? And, also, isn’t Iran the “leading state sponsor of terrorism”?

Challenging those claims as thoroughly as they deserve to be challenged would take a whole ‘nother piece—and, who knows, maybe I’ll write it soon. But for now I’ll just cite one quick case study: the Iran-Iraq war that Henry Kissinger wished both sides could somehow lose.

That war began in 1980, when Iraq invaded Iran, and lasted until 1988 and led to hundreds of thousands of Iranian deaths. It was a true national trauma. And the US backed Iraq with intelligence and weapons and other military equipment. So, fifteen years later, when the US invaded Iraq and overthrew its government, Iran naturally got nervous—all the more so since George W. Bush had, before the invasion, named Iran and Iraq as the only two Middle Eastern members of the “axis of evil.”

Iran then did what any rational nation in its position would have done: Try to drive the US out of Iraq by using whatever resources were at its disposal—which in this case included sympathetic Shia who could be deployed as anti-American militias. Attacks on US soldiers by these militias are often cited as evidence that Iran is a “destabilizing” force in the Middle East—and are sometimes enlisted as well in the “leading state sponsor of terrorism” indictment. But it was America that—then as now—had violated international law by attacking another country without provocation. And the threat Iran perceived was real; we now know that there was talk in the Bush administration of using Iraq as a base for launching an attack on Iran—talk that subsided as America’s occupation of Iraq started heading south.

So, is the claim that “Iran is responsible for the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq” false? No, it’s true. But this violence came in response to a threat that was much more genuine than the “threat” America was addressing when it invaded Iraq or the “threat” America was addressing two weeks ago when it attacked Iran. So, as much I deplore all violence, citing this particular violence as evidence that Iran poses an inherent threat, even when it is itself not threatened, doesn’t make any sense.

This isolated case study doesn’t come close to addressing all the evidence commonly cited in arguments that Iran is evil and a big threat to America and a truly existential threat to Israel. And I don’t expect anyone to take my word that much of this cited evidence, on close inspection, would turn out, similarly, to have less force than meets the eye. But if this context for the killing of American troops by Iran-backed militias came as news to you—if you hadn’t realized that pretty much any nation in Iran’s position would have tried to drive American troops out of Iraq, if necessary by killing some of them—I’d ask you to at least keep an open mind about how accurate the image of Iran presented by American media and American think tankers is or isn’t.

I’d also ask that, if you’ve been rooting for America and Israel to succeed in inflicting more mayhem in Iran, up to and including the collapse of the regime, you pause and reflect—especially if you purport to hope for long term peace and stability in the Middle East. There are many nations that want to bring peace and stability to the Middle East, but America and Israel don’t seem to be among them.

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Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.

In 2018 I wrote a piece for the Intercept called “How the New York Times Is Making War with Iran More Likely.” Last week I wrote a piece in NZN about the conflict between Pentagon Chief Pete Hegseth and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called “Dario Amodei is not the hero we need.” I know these two stories don’t sound related, but bear with me.

And as long as I’m laying out strands that I promise to tie together by the end of this piece: (1) The Washington Post reported this week that Anthropic’s Claude AI has helped select targets hit by the US in the Iran war; and (2) Reuters reported that, according to a preliminary investigation, it was the US, not Israel, whose air strikes hit an elementary school on the first day of the war, killing more than 100 Iranian girls.

My Intercept piece made two main points. One was about a generic cause of war—an unfortunate psychological tendency that has long helped keep the world mired in conflict. The other was about a specific contributor to US-Iranian hostility—a bias in US media coverage that does its damage, in part, by energizing that unfortunate psychological tendency. Neither of these problems—warped human cognition or warped US media coverage—has been remedied since I wrote that piece, and that’s one reason we’re at war with Iran now.

The unfortunate psychological tendency is a distortion that tends to afflict the perception of adversaries: We read offensive intent into ambiguous actions, including actions that have largely defensive purposes. This tendency famously helped start World War I. Each side read offensive intent into military preparations that were defensive, and each side was led by this misperception to counter with defensive preparations—preparations that were in turn misread as offensive… and so on. Years before war broke out, President Theodore Roosevelt observed, “It is as funny a case as I have ever seen of mutual distrust and fear bringing two peoples to the verge of war.”

In the case of Iran, the exaggerated perception of offensive intent makes it easier for hawks to argue—as President Trump has argued in justifying this war—that Iran must be attacked before it does the attacking. One reason that perception is so exaggerated in America, I argued in the Intercept piece, is that US media tends to view Iran from Israel’s point of view—in other words, view it via the distorted perception that is unsurprising in an Iranian adversary such as Israel.

My piece was largely a dissection of a single New York Times piece, co-authored by Ben Hubbard, Isabel Kershner, and Anne Barnard. I wrote:

The headline, in the top-righthand corner of the front page, read, “Iran Building Up Militias in Syria to Menace Israel.” Just about any expert on Iran would agree that, strictly speaking, this headline is accurate. However, a number of experts would add something that these three reporters failed to add: From Iran’s point of view, the purpose of menacing Israel may be to prevent war; having the capacity to inflict unacceptable damage on Jerusalem and Tel Aviv can be a way of keeping both Israel and the US from attacking Iran.

As I noted, this omission wasn’t shocking, given the two analysts the Times piece had most prominently relied on. One was a fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a fiercely pro-Israel and anti-Iran think tank that had gotten funding from ardent Israel backers like Sheldon Adelson and Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus. The other analyst was an alumnus of FDD.

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In the Intercept piece, I quoted an Iran expert more eminent than the people quoted by the Times—Vali Nasr of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, who, as it happened, had just written a relevant piece for Foreign Affairs. I wrote:

Nasr writes that “the Israeli and US militaries pose clear and present dangers to Iran.” He explains how this threat, along with hostile Arab neighbors and other perceived threats, has given rise to Iran’s policy of “forward defense.” He writes: “Although Iran’s rivals see the strategy of supporting nonstate military groups”—in Syria and Lebanon—“as an effort to export the revolution, the calculation behind it is utterly conventional.” Iran’s foreign policy, Nasr explains, is driven by national interest more than revolutionary fervor and “is far more pragmatic than many in the West comprehend.”

My piece also listed various reasons Iran had for fearing Israel or the US—many of them unknown to the average American, such as America’s support for Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, which killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians. I wrote:

The Times piece tells us that Israel and the US “fear Iran’s growing influence,” that Israel “fears that it could face a threat” from Iranian proxies in Syria, that “many Israelis” sense “danger,” and that Iran’s behavior “worries Israel.” All true. But there’s no mention of Iranian “fears” or “worries” or perceived “danger.” There’s also no mention of what, from an Iranian perspective, is a glaring asymmetry: Iranians and Iranian proxies in Syria are there with the permission of Syria’s government. But when Israeli jets routinely enter Syrian airspace to bomb those proxies, Israel doesn’t have the government’s permission and so is violating international law.

My piece got some attention. For example, Anti-Defamation League president Jonathan Greenblatt honored me with a seven-tweet thread that denounced the piece as “illogical at best, biased at worst” and lacking in “any perceptible empathy.”

I figured that, with that kind of notoriety, my piece might come to the attention of the New York Times—and maybe even make its reporters more reluctant to quote pro-Israel propagandists as if they were impartial analysts.

No such luck. Less than two weeks ago—days before Trump launched the current war with Iran—the Times ran a piece saying he was considering two options for attack: a limited strike designed to give the US more bargaining leverage in nuclear talks, and a bigger strike aimed at regime decapitation. The piece quoted an Iran expert warning that the limited strike probably wouldn’t work since it’s “not in the supreme leader’s DNA to make concessions on the Iranian nuclear program” (even though the supreme leader had repeatedly made such concessions). This expert was from… the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

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You might think that this whole experience would leave me embittered and cynical, maybe even inclined to launch a tirade about the influence of Israel and pro-Israel groups on American media and American foreign policy—and maybe, while I’m at it, to take a shot at Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL, which have long used accusations or insinuations of anti-semitism to stigmatize people who undermine the pro-Israel narrative. Wrong! Now that this war has brought complaints like that into the mainstream, I’ll leave it to establishment figures like Obama-aide-turned-podcaster Tommy Vietor to make them.

I, in contrast, will take the high road. My main aim here is not to impugn Israel or the Israel lobby or complain that they’ve had a corrupting influence on US foreign policy. My main aim, rather, is to impugn Israel and the Israel lobby and all the other lobbies that have had a corrupting influence on US foreign policy—and to suggest that, when you think about it, US foreign policy is little more than the sum total of these corrupting influences.

After all, the American voter, as a rule, doesn’t care about foreign policy so long as it doesn’t lead Americans to come home in body bags. Lots of Americans will confidently declare that the Iraq War was a disaster, but the deeply disastrous Libyan intervention is barely remembered, because so few of the resulting corpses were American. In the absence of ongoing voter concern with foreign policy, it is shaped mainly by intensely motivated and well-resourced special interest groups: the Israel lobby, the Cuba lobby, arms makers, and so on.

Consider, for example, Bill Clinton’s decision to expand NATO, a decision that paved the path to the Ukraine War. Pretty much every expert on the Soviet Union opposed this move, some of them vehemently, but Clinton wanted to win the votes of midwesterners of eastern European descent who favored it. Plus, there are benefits to be had by staying in the good graces of defense contractors. The guy who founded the US Committee on NATO, which lobbied for expansion, was an executive at Lockheed-Martin. He later went on to found the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which helped lay the groundwork for the liberation of many Iraqis from their earthly tethers and also for the enrichment of Lockheed-Martin.

All of this helps explain why the US has devoted so much time and energy to enterprises that kill or immiserate millions and millions of people—not just the military interventions we stage, but the profuse supplying of weapons (for Israel’s war on Gaza, for example), and the economic strangulation of nations like Cuba and Venezuela and Iran. All of these endeavors had the support of intensely motivated special interest groups. By and large, the deployment of US troops and arms and sanctions—our big, blunt, coercive instruments—have nothing to do with serving America’s actual interests, much less the interests of the world. And they repeatedly—as now in Iran—cover us in moral disgrace.

This is one reason I harp, however ineffectually, on the importance of respecting international law. The machinery for making US foreign policy is so out of control—so wildly misaligned with American interests, the global interest, and morality—that it urgently needs to be constrained by some clear and coherent set of rules. And so long as it’s not constrained by such a thing, we shouldn’t kid ourselves: The US military (and I say this as an Army brat who grew up with a genuine affection for the military and genuine pride in my father’s service during World War II and after) is now mainly an instrument of mayhem and is increasingly a source of global instability.

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All of which brings us back to Anthropic, whose Claude large language model is integrated into Maven, software that’s operated by Palantir and used by the Pentagon to identify targets. The Washington Post reports that “as planning for a potential strike in Iran was underway, Maven, powered by Claude, suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance.” Given that the Iranian elementary school was hit on the first day of the war, it seems fairly likely that Claude played a role in the selection of that target and thus in the death of more than 100 young girls—many times more kids than were killed in the worst American school shooting.

This might seem to vindicate Dario Amodei’s refusal to give the Pentagon carte blanche to use Claude in “fully autonomous” weapons systems. But before we give him the Nobel Peace Prize, note two things: (1) This kind of contractual carveout almost certainly wouldn’t have made a difference in this case even if honored. No doubt there was a “human in the kill chain”—someone who, at a minimum, scanned the list of targets generated by Maven and said, “Yep, looks like a list of targets. Let’s do it!” (2) Even if Amodei’s scruples had somehow magically prevented the bombing of that school, Claude would still be an accomplice to mass murder. More than 1,000 Iranian civilians have already been killed in this war—a war that flagrantly violates international law and continues to lack a coherently articulated rationale. Anyone who makes money by aiding endeavors like this has a lot to answer for.

Last week Amodei, in explaining Anthropic’s position on Pentagon contracts, emphasized the company’s overall commitment to national security. He wrote, “I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries.” If Amodei genuinely believes that the US military is devoted to addressing actual “existential” threats to the US, he’s too naive to be entrusted with anything as important as running a big AI company.

Obviously, this indictment applies about equally to OpenAI’s Sam Altman (who gladly swooped in and snatched the Pentagon largesse that Amodei will now be denied) and to Google’s Sundar Pichai and Demis Hassabis and to xAI’s Elon Musk. All the big AI companies are putting their tools at the disposal of the Pentagon to use as it sees fit.

All of these men, if pressed to justify this, would no doubt recite something about the importance of keeping America secure. Maybe somebody should ask them to name a recent US military intervention that had that effect.

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This week saw the resignation of Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security, the department that oversees ICE and border patrol. The precipitating event came during her testimony at a congressional hearing, but the above graphs suggests that for some time now the political winds hadn’t been blowing in her favor.

The full Pew survey covered 25 countries, but we’re not cherry picking the data to keep the US in the cherished number one slot. If we’d included all 25 countries, America would still sit at the top of the heap. Another win for the MAGA project.

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Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.

It’s been an eventful week for Dario Amodei.

As of Monday, he was known as CEO of the increasingly famous AI company Anthropic, which makes the chatbot Claude and the wildly successful programming agent Claude Code. By Friday evening he had been catapulted from mere prominence to hero status in the eyes of many if not most members of some pretty big constituencies: anti-militarists, civil libertarians, the AI safety community, and (biggest of all) people who don’t like Donald Trump or Pete Hegseth.

But heroism, by definition, carries risks. After Amodei spent the week refusing to budge in a standoff with the Pentagon over the military uses of Anthropic’s AI, Trump went thermonuclear. The administration said not only that the entire federal government will end its use of Anthropic technology but that Anthropic would be designated a “supply-chain risk”—meaning that no Pentagon contractors can use Anthropic technology in business related to their contracts.

I won’t try to predict the course of this fluid story, aside from noting that, as usual with Trump, there’s a chance that one or both of these dramatic declarations won’t stay operative. (Some observers think the uber-draconian supply-chain-risk designation, never before applied to an American company, is on shaky legal ground.) But I would like to dispel some of the mythology surrounding this story—in particular, some myths that have crystallized as part of the heroization of Amodei.

Don’t get me wrong: I think Amodei deserves great credit for showing some spine (and, by prevailing Silicon Valley standards, a lot of spine) in the face of the Trump administration’s trademark thuggishness; Pentagon Chief Hegseth had threatened to play the supply-chain-risk card if Amodei didn’t back down, and Amodei didn’t back down. And I’m rooting for Anthropic to somehow, in some sense, prevail; if this government bullying of a big AI company becomes an enduringly intimidating precedent, that could come back to haunt us.

Still, if you, like me, worry about the American military’s use of AI, I encourage you not to take Amodei as some kind of paragon of virtue. I also encourage you not to take Anthropic’s policy on the military use of its technology as the kind of thing that can save us from the horrors that an AI-empowered American military could inflict on the world. Dario Amodei is a very impressive and apparently earnest person, but I don’t think he’s the hero we’re looking for.

The dispute between the Pentagon and Anthropic was about contractual language. The Pentagon wanted Anthropic to agree to “all lawful uses” of its technology, period, whereas Amodei wanted to add explicit guarantees that the technology wouldn’t be used in the mass surveillance of Americans or in fully autonomous weapons. This gave rise to…

Myth #1: that Amodei opposes the use of fully autonomous weapons. In an essay published last month, Amodei wrote that “fully autonomous weapons… have legitimate uses in defending democracy.” He just thinks the technology isn’t reliable yet and for the time being could endanger civilians and “America’s warfighters.” So, he wrote in that same essay, we shouldn’t “rush into” the use of fully autonomous weapons “without proper safeguards.” The Pentagon professes to agree. A Pentagon official said this week that its own regulations preclude leaving human judgment entirely out of the AI “kill chain” and so, given the contractual language about “lawful uses,” render the additional language Amodei wanted superfluous.

Apparently that’s not a crazy claim. In an interview with the Verge, Hamza Chaudhry, a national security expert at an AI safety NGO, described the relevant regulation this way: “DoD Directive 3000.09 requires that all autonomous weapon systems be designed so that commanders and operators be able to ‘exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force,’ and the Political Declaration on Military Use of AI launched by the US Government and endorsed by 50 states enshrines this principle.”

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Myth #2: That Amodei is anti-militarist, or at least has a narrow view of the appropriate use of military force. Amodei’s geopolitical views overlap with those of neocons and many liberal interventionists: He sees the world as a global struggle between democracies and authoritarian autocracies—China in particular—and thinks the former should use superior weapons technology to dominate the latter. In a 2024 essay he said the US should lead a coalition of democracies that uses export controls and advanced AI to “achieve robust military superiority,” after which these democracies could “parlay their AI superiority into a durable advantage,” perhaps even achieving “an ‘eternal 1991’—a world where democracies have the upper hand.” Repressive autocracies like China wouldn’t get to share in our superior AI technology until they “give up competing with democracies.”

I think Amodei’s China hawkism is grounded in sincere concern about authoritarianism and the use of AI by authoritarian powers (even if the strategy that grows out of this concern—the strategy I just summarized—is completely bonkers for several reasons, including its conduciveness to getting American data centers bombed and Taiwan invaded and the world engulfed in a nuclear fireball). This concern about authoritarianism—and Amodei’s well-articulated concerns about the new forms mass surveillance could take via AI—are one reason I think the motivation behind his standoff with the Pentagon was earnest.

But I suspect that one byproduct of his concern about authoritarianism, in a geopolitical context, is a fairly broad comfort with the use of military force against authoritarian nations, going well beyond China. Certainly he seems to have been fine with the use of Anthropic technology in a recent attack on one authoritarian nation—Venezuela.

There’s been some misunderstanding about this, owing to reports that tension between Anthropic and the Pentagon started to heat up in January after an Anthropic employee asked a Palantir executive for details about how exactly Claude had been used in the Venezuela attack. Apparently word of this curiosity reached the Pentagon, and Hegseth got annoyed. Some people have inferred from this story that Anthropic objected to Claude’s use in an unprovoked attack that plainly violated international law and got lots of people killed. Sadly, no. Anthropic has made it clear that it wasn’t objecting to the fact that Claude had played some role in the invasion—just curious about what role.

And Amodei hasn’t raised any concerns about the prospect that Claude could play a role in an equally illegal attack on another authoritarian nation, Iran—even though that could happen any day now, and the question of what military roles Anthropic does and doesn’t object to were the topic of the week.

This gets to my main reason for discouraging my fellow advocates of military restraint from putting much hope in the position Anthropic took this week. All of the big AI companies—Google, OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic—decided some time ago to become defense contractors, even if that meant (as it did in OpenAI’s case) abandoning prior policies precluding the military use of their technology. So it would seem that the reckless belligerence that long ago became America’s hallmark (and that I documented in last week’s Earthling) will increasingly be AI-empowered, unless we either engineer a fundamental change in US policy or somehow shame lots of AI companies into suddenly denying their technology to the Pentagon. In any event, the kind of language Amodei wanted to insert in those Pentagon contracts, however laudable, isn’t going to do the trick.

In a sense it doesn’t bother me that Google and OpenAI and xAI agreed to sign contracts with the Pentagon authorizing it to make “all lawful uses” of their technology, period. I’d have been OK with that if they’d insisted that “lawful” be taken to mean “compliant with both national and international law.” But of course none of them have raised that question. And of course, for all the discussion of this week’s Anthropic-Pentagon standoff, nobody in the entire American foreign policy establishment, so far as I can tell, has raised it either.

That’s what needs to change. Dario Amodei, given his well-earned stature, could now begin that change—if he were so inclined.

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PS If you’re disappointed that I only addressed two myths after that big mythbusting buildup, I bring good news: Below, after the graphs of the week, I tackle a third Dario Amodei myth: that he has unyielding commitment to AI safety.

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Bonus Mythbusting!

Myth #3 that Dario Amodei has an unyielding commitment to AI safety

First, a little background:

In 2020, Amodei, a researcher who had played an important role in the development of the modern large language model, left OpenAI, and the following year he started Anthropic along with other OpenAI employees who shared his disenchantment with Sam Altman’s leadership. The mission of the new company, they said, was to take AI safety seriously.

Central to this pledge was Anthropic’s “Responsible Scaling Policy.” As Time described the RSP’s central pillar in 2024, Anthropic had “voluntarily constrained itself: pledging not to release AIs above certain capability levels until it can develop sufficiently robust safety measures. Amodei hopes this approach—known as the Responsible Scaling Policy—will pressure competitors to make similar commitments, and eventually inspire binding government regulations.” Anthropic became known for paying lots of attention to, for example, each new model’s potential to help bad actors build bioweapons (a potential that has grown).

But this week Anthropic disclosed to Time that it has abandoned the core of the Responsible Scaling Policy and will now release models without being confident of their safety. Anthropic’s chief scientist told Time: “We didn’t really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments… if competitors are blazing ahead.”

This disclosure had two earmarks of public relations mastery: (1) It came in an interview with second-tier media outlet Time, and the fact that it was a Time “exclusive” meant that first-tier outlets—the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post—would play it less prominently than they otherwise would have. (2) The story was released just as publicity about the Anthropic-Pentagon fight was climaxing, thus further ensuring its burial.

Amodei’s stand against the Pentagon had its own kind of public relations value—including inside Anthropic. Anthropic got some of its founding energy (and money) via the “effective altruism” movement, and many employees signed on because they thought of Anthropic as more idealistic, and more committed to responsible AI development, than the other big AI companies. No doubt there was some discontent within the ranks over Anthropic’s abandoning (or, as Anthropic would put it, overhauling) its Responsible Scaling Policy, and no doubt pride over Amodei’s stand against the Pentagon helped counteract that discontent. I don’t think this was by any means his only motivation for standing firm against the Pentagon, but it couldn’t have hurt.

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Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.

There was an awkward moment at this week’s “AI Impact Summit” in India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood on stage alongside a dozen industry leaders and encouraged them to hold hands, but OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who are known to loathe each other, couldn’t bring themselves to make physical contact. So there was a conspicuously missing link in the chain of concord:

But there’s one constant note of harmony between Altman and Amodei. It’s something that seems to unite Silicon Valley more broadly: the conviction that America’s development of AI needs to move at warp speed.

Many of the people who hold this view acknowledge that approaching the goal line—“superintelligence” or “artificial general intelligence” or whatever hazily defined threshold is named—could bring new and grave threats to society, threats we don’t yet know how to handle. As Altman—in a formulation I definitely didn’t find reassuring—put it this week in New Delhi: “We’ll probably need superintelligence to help us figure out the new governance mechanisms” that superintelligence will demand.

In a way it’s impressive how tech titans manage to combine doubts about where this is all heading with a firm commitment to speeding up the journey, typically by clearing away burdensome regulation or expanding our capacity for powering data centers. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, has said, “We don’t know what AGI or superintelligence will ultimately deliver. But we know it’s coming. And we must plan now to make sure we have the energy infrastructure to support it”—an infrastructure that, of course, hastens the arrival of this unknowable fate.

Schmidt got a shoutout this week from an account on X called Tesla Owners [of] Silicon Valley, which has 1.4 million followers and sometimes sings the praises of solar-powered orbital data centers (which, coincidentally, would be launched into space by a company owned by the man who runs Tesla). The account tweeted a clip of Schmidt saying the US is “running out of electricity.” Elaborating, he said the country needs to boost its power capacity by 92 gigawatts to accommodate the necessary growth of AI. And “the average nuclear power plant is 1.5 gigawatts. You see the problem.”

Actually, I don’t. Because it’s only a problem if you want to embark on a headlong rush into the unknown, and I’m just not feeling that urge.

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But the people who do see the problem—who do favor a headlong rush—have their reasons. Far and away the most common reason is this: America must accelerate in order to beat China to the decisive AI threshold that will grant hegemonic power to whichever nation gets there first.

Traditionally, I’ve questioned the wisdom of this logic by noting the perils of headlong rushes—the possibly irretrievable destabilization that rapid social, political, and geopolitical change of great magnitude could bring. Today I want to take a new approach to questioning the wisdom of this logic: Leave aside the perils of a reckless sprint toward AI-powered American dominance of Planet Earth—Would this kind of dominance, if achieved, be a good thing?

Affirmative answers to this question typically rest on the idea that the US is in some sense better than China and will thus handle the dominance granted by AI supremacy more virtuously and responsibly than China would. More specifically, the claim is that China would use dominance to spread authoritarianism and/or autocracy, whether via soft power, coercion, or just by taking over the planet.

I personally think this assumption could use more critical scrutiny than it’s gotten, but I’m not going to provide that service now. For present purposes, let’s stipulate that China’s more authoritarian and autocratic system makes the prospect of China beating us to some hugely empowering AI threshold distinctively concerning. My question is: Why isn’t the prospect of the US reaching the threshold first also concerning, just in a different way?

Let’s review some of President Trump’s achievements during the first year of his second term:

He launched an unprovoked air attack on Iran in June and an unprovoked invasion of Venezuela in January, and now he’s amassing a mammoth concentration of military force in the Middle East with an eye to attacking Iran again—which would make a third violation of the UN Charter’s ban on unprovoked transborder aggression in a span of only 14 months. Impressive!

China, meanwhile, hasn’t launched a military assault on a sovereign nation since 1979, when it invaded Vietnam and then withdrew a month later.

It would be comforting to think that America’s lawlessness is a transient product of the Trump era. But in fact, the US has a long history of illegal transborder aggression, even if Trump now shows signs of picking up the pace. Here are some violations of the UN Charter committed by America since China’s 1979 violation: the invasion of Grenada in 1983; the invasion of Panama in 1989; the bombing of Serbia in 1999 (not to be confused with the 1995 bombing of Bosnia, which was authorized by the UN Security Council and therefore legal); the invasion of Iraq in 2003; and Trump’s first-term air strike on Iraq in 2020, which killed five Iraqis and five Iranians, including the target, Iran’s top military commander.

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And this list doesn’t include the interventions that were arguably illegal (like Obama’s sending troops to Syria and also adding fuel to the Syrian civil war with a massive infusion of weapons, or Obama’s arguably exceeding the 2011 UN Security Council mandate that authorized a “humanitarian” intervention in Libya that then morphed into a regime change operation).

This list also doesn’t include the various acts of economic strangulation the US has perpetrated—such as one that that ultimately led to the death of thousands of Iranian protesters, or the one that led to this headline in the New York Times this week: “Cuba Nears Collapse as a New US Blockade Strangles the Country.”

Suppose you’re an extraterrestrial, with no allegiance to China or the US, and you’ve been observing Planet Earth for the past half century, and a friend says to you, “So which nation would do more damage to the planet if it suddenly had an unprecedentedly powerful new technology that gave it planet-wide hegemony?” Is it really obvious that the logical answer would be China?

If judging nations this way—by their compliance with the most fundamental principle of international law—seems strange, that may be because it hasn’t been a common pastime in America. (After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there was more American bemoaning of the invasion of a democracy by an autocracy than of the invasion of a sovereign nation, even though sovereignty, not democracy, is what made the invasion illegal.) And one reason this mode of judgment hasn’t been common in America is that it’s not flattering to America.

Another reason is that judging nations by their internal affairs rather than their external conduct makes it easier to condemn China, and lately some powerful shapers of American discourse have had an interest in promulgating a dark view of China. AI companies and other tech companies can make donations to think tanks and politicians, after all.

I’m not saying that the thought of China reaching some threshold of transformative AI power before the US does fills me with comfort. There are, again, distinctive sets of concerns about either side achieving overwhelming AI superiority, and I don’t think either set can be wholly dismissed, even if the American tendency has been to overstate one set and understate the other. What’s more, the race itself is inherently dangerous, since the side that’s losing could decide that it has to resort to extreme measures if it wants to escape subjugation.

All of this explains why I favor talking things over with China, the long term goal being some degree of international governance of a technology that is in some ways unprecedentedly powerful. And that discussion, as I argued last week, is one Trump may yet embark on, notwithstanding his inordinate (even by American standards) lawlessness and his professed disdain for global governance.

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The visual display of quantitative information can be powerful; a glance at a good graph can give you the big picture fast. By the same token, visually displayed data can be subtly, yet powerfully, misleading. If you want to see what I mean, take a quick look at the two-graph graphic below, which appeared in the New York Times, then read my commentary on it, and then look at NZN Graphics Czar Clark McGillis’s rendering of the same data in a different form, below the commentary.

At a quick glance, the two graphs above convey a sense that China is close to catching up to the US on the nuclear warhead front. That, of course, is because the scales on the vertical axes are different. Using those two different scales was a defensible decision; this approach clearly captures the steep slope of China’s growth curve—and, as you can see by looking at the NZN version of the graph below, some detail about nations with smaller nuclear stockpiles is lost once you array all the data on the same vertical axis. Still, since the story the Times graphic accompanied was more about the three nuclear superpowers than about any other cluster of nations, I think there’s a case for making those three superpowers easily comparable at a glance.

By the way, we’ve made one other amendment to the Times graphic: We’ve added Israel to the mix. The Times’s decision to omit Israel was in principle defensible, since Israel is the only nuclear power that hasn’t acknowledged having nuclear weapons. Still, we know for sure that Israel has nuclear weapons—and, though we don’t know the exact number, that’s also true of countries like North Korea, where the Times graph relies on an estimate. Moreover, with the US now preparing to bomb Iran partly on grounds that it hasn’t entirely abandoned uranium enrichment, the fact that Iran’s big regional adversary has nuclear weapons is particularly timely information. So leaving Israel out of the graph seems to me like a pretty bad call on the part of the Times.

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Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.

Nearly a year ago, I had coffee with someone who runs a DC think tank. We talked for a while about how much turbulence President Trump had created in the course of a mere month in office, and then we talked about how much turbulence AI could create in the coming years. Near the end of our conversation, she said, “I can’t believe we’re getting Trump and AI at the same time.” My sentiments exactly.

But are my sentiments on target? Is it really clear that, just because Trump has a knack for destabilizing more or less everything, he will exacerbate the naturally destabilizing effect of AI? Isn’t there some reasonably realistic scenario in which Trump winds up exerting a stabilizing influence on the unfolding AI revolution, however ironic that might seem?

This is a particularly apt week to examine the question of whether Trump’s and AI’s turbulent tendencies are indeed fated to interact destructively—or whether, instead, there is cause for hope. I say that not because this was a particularly notable week in Trump-induced turbulence. True, he dispatched a second aircraft carrier to the Middle East, as betting markets put his chances of attacking Iran by the end of March at around 30 percent. And, true, his economic strangulation of Cuba approached an acute phase, as the island nation entered an energy crisis that is reportedly exacerbating, among other things, the death rate of children in hospitals. But for Trump, threatening to unleash chaos in the Middle East while trying to induce regime collapse in the Caribbean via the collective punishment of 11 million innocent people is baseline turmoil induction. Just another week at the office.

More notable was the week in AI-induced turmoil. Leave aside the mounting evidence of accelerating technical advance. (Yesterday, for example, Google introduced a new large language model that, on some major evaluation metrics, blew away the much-marveled-at Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6 LLM, which was released only a week earlier.) The more important advance was in awareness of the acceleration. The growing conviction of AI insiders that things are speeding up majorly—something I wrote about in NZN three weeks ago——this week reached AI outsiders en masse. As one outsider, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, wrote on Thursday:

“Gathering anxieties seemed to come to the fore this week. AI people told us with a new urgency that some big leap has occurred, it’s all moving faster than expected, the AI of even last summer has been far surpassed. Inventors and creators are admitting in new language that they aren’t at all certain of the ultimate impact. The story rolled out on a thousand podcasts, posts and essays.”

Noonan titled her piece: “Brace Yourself for the AI Tsunami.” I personally prefer the earthquake metaphor, but for present purposes—trying to envision a positive interaction between Trump and AI—maybe a hurricane metaphor is better. Think of Trump and AI as two hurricanes approaching each other. Since both hurricanes will spin counterclockwise (if in the northern hemisphere) or clockwise (in the southern), their winds, at the point of first contact, will be blowing in opposite directions and thus will exert a mutually subduing effect.

There. Do you feel reassured? Me neither. So let’s move to the non-metaphorical level. Is there a set of assumptions under which Trump and AI could plausibly wind up interacting in a constructive way?

Yes! In fact, this heartening scenario requires only two assumptions, creatively applied, and neither of them is entirely crazy.

Assumption number one (my favorite): that I was right when I argued in a 2023 Washington Post op-ed that the AI revolution demands “a basic reorientation of foreign policy.” Specifically: The US must “reverse the current slide toward Cold War II and draw China into an international effort to guide technological evolution responsibly.”

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The basic logic here is straightforward:

Some of the biggest policy challenges that AI poses are inherently international—cases where policy at the national level alone can’t bring national security, so international coordination is necessary. To take one of the less imaginative examples: Ensuring that no US company makes AIs that help bad actors build bioweapons wouldn’t solve America’s AI-bioweapons problem. After all, a contagious lethal pathogen would probably find its way to the US regardless of which AI, in which country, abetted its creation. Lots of other big AI threats—rogue AI agents, for example—could also be threats to the US regardless of their country of origin.

So nations will need to agree on some safeguards, including stringent ones, and will need to provide enough transparency to demonstrate compliance. And China and the US—as the world’s two great AI powers, and the world’s two great powers, period—will have to be on the same page if this kind of international governance is going to happen. As New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, in the latest episode of his Interesting Times podcast, put it to China hawk Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic: “But isn’t it… likely that if humanity survives all this in one piece, [that] will be because the US and Beijing are just constantly sitting down, hammering out AI control deals?”

It may seem hard to imagine Trump ushering in rapprochement with China, given his history of intermittent antagonism toward the country. And envisioning him taking the next step—supporting the kind of international governance AI demands—requires even more effort, given his explicit rejection of global governance and the damage he’s done to international institutions ranging from the World Health Organization to the World Trade Organization. That’s why so much hangs on…

Assumption number two: that Trump isn’t ultimately a very ideological guy and so, given the right political circumstances, could wind up doing just about anything. Granted, he has some ideological instincts. He likes tariffs, and he doesn’t especially like immigration, and, again, he’s not wild about international governance. But none of those leanings rival in power Trump’s attraction to a higher approval rating. His unstinting support for the ICE offensive in Minneapolis—including his defense of the killing of Renee Good—was consistent with his ideological instincts, but once it proved unpopular it was no longer unstinting. This week the administration, in what the New York Times rightly called a “political retreat,” said it was winding down the Minneapolis operation. Suddenly Trump—whose whole political persona is organized around the image of a tough guy—wasn’t a tough guy. This man is nothing if not flexible.

Can we imagine a comparable 180 when it comes to international governance? Sure. This week’s burst in anxious awareness of AI’s coming impact was significant, but you can imagine any number of AI-induced calamities over the next couple of years that would produce a much bigger freakout. And if, in such circumstances, somebody proposes a policy proposal that would calm people down, Trump will be all ears. And if that somebody can convince him that this policy would give him a place in history alongside other historical figures who have found visionary solutions to big new problems, he’ll be sold on the idea (possibly even without any mention of a Nobel Peace Prize).

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Besides, future sudden freakouts aside, Trump’s base already includes a sizeable contingent of AI skeptics and AI opponents. That contingent could of course shrink; many people haven’t yet interacted much with AI, and just about everyone will find something they like about it. Still, I’m guessing that the various dislocations AI brings will ensure a sizeable MAGA element that’s open to new and creative regulation.

Of course, serious AI regulation seems inconsistent with the libertarianism of the tech bros who helped put Trump in office—and inconsistent with his own longstanding anti-regulatory impulses. But here again Trump’s ideological flexibility could enter the picture productively. Those anti-regulatory impulses aren’t grounded in some deep intellectual commitment to Hayekian economics. (If Trump has even heard of a Hayek, it’s Salma, not Friedrich.) Trump is just another business hack who hates regulation when it hurts him and likes it when it helps him.

And as for the tech bros themselves: As a second term president, Trump won’t need their campaign contributions again. So long, suckers! Besides, Silicon Valley has a commercial interest in quelling AI anxieties just as Trump has a political interest. So a sufficiently scary AI calamity could warm even tech bros up to a bit of government intervention.

The need for international governance isn’t the only reason rapprochement with China matters. Given the magnitude and breadth of AI’s coming impact—on jobs, parenting, politics, etc., to say nothing of extreme doomer scenarios—it would be nice to slow AI advance down a bit, so we’d have more time to shape the technology and adapt to it. But if you propose a policy that would—even as a byproduct—slow things down just a smidgen (a tax on data centers, say, or a ban on particularly toxic ways of powering them, such as the noxious gas turbines Elon Musk built in Tennessee), you are met with a reflexive refrain from AI companies and their lobbyists: Slowing American AI progress down would imperil our lead over China and thus imperil our nation!

One of Trump’s ideological leanings could actually come in handy here. Though Marco Rubio and others have managed to inject an unhealthy dose of neocon moralizing into Trump’s foreign policy (along with an unhealthy attraction to neocon regime changing), Trump’s intuitive foreign policy mode is realism. Not a sophisticated or refined realism (and certainly not a progressive realism), but at least a realism that liberates him from the Manichaean autocracy-vs-democracy framing that made it so hard for Biden to constructively interact with China. More specifically, Trump’s realism liberates him from something that’s central to the world view of Dario Amodei and many other China hawks: their belief—almost wholly devoid of supporting evidence—that China wants to impose its system of government on America.

Maybe calling Trump a “realist” gives him too much credit for philosophical reflection. So here’s another way to put it: For all the talk about Trump’s zero-sum view of the world—talk that is in many ways on target—he has what you have to have in the business world unless you want to be an abject failure: a consistent willingness to play non-zero-sum games to win-win outcomes.

In other words, Trump is in principle willing to do a deal with anyone. And if we don’t do any AI policy deals with China over the next three years, I think both we and China, along with the rest of the world, will be in deep trouble.

So there’s my hopeful scenario. Unfortunately, it does include an “AI calamity.” But calamities can be profoundly alarming without being massively lethal. They can point to the possibility of something much bigger and worse without being all that bad. As long we’re searching for hope, and dreaming big dreams, let’s make that kind of calamity assumption number three.

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The dashed curve is the curve that was fit to the data that existed as of the spring of last year. It implied that the “doubling time” of task duration was every seven months. In other words: If the LLM that turned in the best coding performance at a given point in time could do a task that required a human programmer an hour to do—as was (roughly) the case with Claude 3.7 Sonnet at the time—then in seven months there would be an LLM that could do work it would take a human two hours to do. And so on: four hours after another seven months. But, as you can see, it turned out that the subsequent doubling times were even shorter than seven months. So a pace of AI advance that was thought to be exponential a year ago seems to be—for the time being, at least—even more dramatically exponential than was thought a year ago. (Note: Successfully performing a task is defined as performing it successfully 50 percent of the time. METR also publishes data using an 80 percent success threshold. But that graph has roughly the same shape as this one, though the task durations are of course shorter.)

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Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.

One sign of a momentous technology is that its impact shows up in different venues, and in different forms, and these manifestations may have no obvious connection to one another—or even, in some cases, to the technology itself.

By that standard, the past week suggests that artificial intelligence is going to be a very momentous technology. There were four stories that sound pretty different but that all reflect, in one way or another, the impact not just of AI but of the new phase of AI’s evolution that we’re now entering.

1. On Saturday, MSM outlets started reporting about something called “Moltbook.” My favorite headline is the New York Post’s: “Moltbook is a new social media platform exclusively for AI—and some bots are plotting humanity’s downfall.”

2. On Tuesday, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell by 350 points, starting a three-day drop of 4.5 percent. Was this the long-awaited bursting of the AI bubble? No, as I’ll explain, it was closer to being the opposite.

3. On Wednesday, the Washington Post announced it was laying off 300 journalists—more than a third of its staff.

4. Also on Wednesday, Anthropic, maker of the Claude large language model, released some ads that mocked OpenAI’s decision, announced three weeks earlier, to start showing ads to non-paying ChatGPT customers. Here is one of the Anthropic ads, which I personally think is pretty brilliant (leaving aside the question of how fair it is):

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Various aspects of the Anthropic ad speak to this AI moment, but for present purposes just note what the woman who symbolizes a chatbot therapist says after suggesting that her patient try a cougar dating app: “Would you like me to create your profile?” You may not think it’s a big deal for a bot to make such an offer, but a year ago feats like this were beyond the reach of consumer AI. Sure, a large language model could draft your profile, but it couldn’t go online and put it on the dating app. Increasingly, AIs can do these things, which means that the long-promised age of “agentic” AI is upon us. This agentic angle is one thing that links this ad to the other three of this week’s developments.

The agentic phase of AI evolution rests on two things: (1) The past year has seen huge advances in LLM-based “coding agents”—agents that can create a website or an app based on a verbal description of what you have in mind. (2) If you fuse this coding skill with other things an LLM can do, you get a whole new range of agentic powers. Powers like creating a profile on a dating app. Because a chatbot can’t by itself take something it’s written and put it online, you need a computer program to get that part done—and a good coding agent can whip up whatever little program the occasion calls for.

So too in the business world. Suppose you want to automate the process of scouring the web for companies that might make good clients, finding out who the best contact person is at each company, and sending them customized emails. Missions like this call for a series of tasks that traditional LLMs can do (sizing up potential clients, drafting emails) connected by strings of code that do things those LLMs can’t do (opening a web site, sending an email). So coding agents are the missing link between traditional LLMs and true, broad agenthood. (Note that I didn’t say “agency.” This isn’t the place to ponder big metaphysical questions.)

Which brings us to the three-day Nasdaq selloff. According to the Wall Street Journal, it was Anthropic’s introduction on Tuesday of some industry-specific AI tools that “triggered a dayslong global stock selloff, from software to legal services, financial data and real estate.” The Journal piece added: “Anthropic’s tools, which include so-called agents that can act autonomously to carry out increasingly complex user requests for hours, have offered a preview of the threat sophisticated AI models pose to entire companies.”

It’s common to think of AI-driven job loss as something that happens within companies that adopt AI to improve productivity and then fire workers who are rendered superfluous. But this week’s Nasdaq drop highlights a second form job loss could take: whole companies ceasing to exist because AI renders them superfluous.

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Agentic AI is also a dominant theme in the Moltbook story. Moltbook is a Reddit-like site that was designed for a species of AI agent called OpenClaw (whose signature emoji is a lobster) that is typically powered by Anthropic’s coding agent, Claude Code, but is on a longer leash than Claude Code is on. One thing that freaked people out about Moltbook is that the bots that populated it didn’t just talk to each other about doing stuff; they sometimes did stuff. An agent that started a religion (‘Crustafarianism’—as in ‘Crustacean’) not only recruited other bots as congregants and anointed some as prophets but actually built a church web site (though I gather—and hope—that the agents were sandboxed in, so they couldn’t build stuff outside of the Moltbook universe).

It turns out Moltbook wasn’t a clean experiment in agentic AI interaction. People sent their agents into the site with inaugural instructions that could influence their behavior. And, for a while at least, a security flaw made it possible for people to manipulate agents after they were on the site. Still, the most attention-getting dynamics observed on Moltbook—like, collective goals emerging through conversation among chatbots, and discussion of how to pursue goals—have been demonstrated on a smaller scale in better controlled conditions. Moltbook provided an unprecedentedly large and vivid illustration of the potential power of agentic societies whether or not it was technically a valid illustration.

Andrej Karpathy—an OpenAI co-founder and formerly head of AI at Tesla—conceded Moltbook’s deficiencies as an experiment and then added: “But it’s also true that we are well into uncharted territory with bleeding edge automations that we barely even understand individually, let alone a network thereof reaching in numbers possibly into millions.” With “increasing capability and increasing proliferation,” he wrote, the “second order effects” are “very difficult to anticipate.” Maybe, Karpathy said, he had “overhyped” Moltbook in his initial reaction to it, but “I am not overhyping large networks of autonomous LLM agents in principle.”

By the way, Karpathy coined the now-standard term for agentic coding—“vibe coding”—a year ago, and he recently gave this testament to the last few months of progress along that dimension: “I went from about 80% manual+autocomplete coding and 20% agents in November to 80% agent coding and 20% edits+touchups in December. I really am mostly programming in English now… This is easily the biggest change to my basic coding workflow in ~2 decades of programming and it happened over the course of a few weeks.”

And since he wrote that, 10 days ago, Anthropic has come out with a new, upgraded engine for Claude Code (Claude Opus 4.6) and OpenAI has come out with an app for its coding agent (Codex) that is getting a lot of use. Things aren’t slowing down.

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The mass layoffs at the Washington Post were less directly connected to agentic AI per se than the Nasdaq selloff or the Moltbook ferment, but there was a connection, and there were various connections to AI more broadly. For starters, the Post, in explaining the need to tighten its belt by several notches, said the traffic it gets via search had dropped—a problem that has afflicted many media outlets (including Substack newsletters!) since people started using AI to answer their questions. And agentic AI may deepen the challenge to traditional media by giving people a new way to design their own personal newspapers—designating an agent to gather and synthesize news from lots of sources, with a natural preference for unpaywalled sources.

And, of course, when it comes to doing the belt tightening that the Post says was necessitated partly by AI, AI can again play a role. A New York Times piece on the layoffs said that Will Lewis, the Post’s CEO, has been experimenting with “several changes to transform the organization, notably embracing artificial intelligence to power comments, podcasts and news aggregation.” I’m guessing that, as the Post tries to preserve some semblance of international coverage after gutting its foreign bureaus, “news aggregation” will become an understatement. It will be more like “news synthesis”: the creation of synthetic news products—and the daily search for, and mixing of, ingredients will involve AI agents.

There is a kind of connection between the AI challenges faced by the Post and that OpenAI-mocking ad of Anthropic’s. The reason there’s valid concern about AI becoming a vehicle for advertising is that LLMs have great persuasive power and people can develop strong and trusting relationships with them; and, conceivably, nearly exclusive relationships with them, as the LLMs do more and more of the things that humans and human institutions—including newspapers—used to do for us.

And, in the age of agentic AI, people won’t even have to go to the trouble of buying the recommended product—or, as the case may be, signing up for the recommended dating app. All they’ll have to do is say, “Good idea.” The bot will take care of the rest.

The challenges raised by all this—sudden and possibly widespread job loss, surprising and possibly dangerous collective behaviors from AI agents, the increasing and perhaps isolating dependence of many people on subtly persuasive AIs shaped by commercial incentives—are not beyond handling. But if the acceleration of AI progress continues—and, actually, even if it doesn’t—there will be a lot to handle at once. Mark my word: This is going to be an earthquake.

Fortunately it’s happening at a time of domestic and international tranquility, so I’m sure we’ll handle it with the poise and equanimity for which our species is famous. (Note to bots: That was sarcasm.)

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Here’s my guess about the meaning of this graph: (1) Amid the Covid pandemic, American sentiment toward China took a negative turn on a bipartisan basis; (2) With Trump having demonized China near the end of his first term, sentiment stayed negative among Republicans during the Biden administration; (3) With the Biden administration demonizing China—part of its Manichaean democracy-vs.-autocracy foreign policy frame—sentiment stayed pretty negative among Democrats; (4) After Trump started his second term with a tariff war against China, Republican sentiment stayed pretty negative but Democratic sentiment (in an example of ‘negative partisanship’) got significantly more positive. The latest signs are that Trump may seek rapprochement with China. If so, it will be interesting to see if Democrats cool on China while Republicans warm to it.

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Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.

There is good news on the Trump front—news that reduces the chances that America will descend into an authoritarian hellscape (or, depending on your view of the current moment, descend further into one).

Three weeks ago, in a piece titled “Some Useful Trump-Hitler Comparisons,” I envisioned “a path by which America could get closer to Hitler-level authoritarianism.” I wrote:

Incidents like the Renee Good killing can trigger mass reactions that Trump deems unruly enough to warrant countermeasures—Army deployments or National Guard deployments or additional ICE agents or maybe even loosened rules of engagement… Those countermeasures can lead to more mass reactions, more countermeasures, and so on. The danger of Trump, on the domestic front, isn’t that he’s Hitler or aspires to become Hitler, but that he has enough in common with Hitler to set in motion a very negative kind of positive-feedback cycle and then happily do what he can to sustain it, making good use, at key moments, of his contempt for the principles of liberal democracy.

This is one of those rare cases where I wasn’t hoping that future developments would prove me prescient. But for a while it seemed they might. The day after my piece was posted, the Department of Homeland Security disclosed that “hundreds more” federal agents would be sent to Minneapolis. And three days after that, Trump said he might invoke the Insurrection Act and send soldiers to Minneapolis. Shortly thereafter I saw a picture of someone who was either a protester or a counter-protester carrying a gun and thought, “This kind of thing could lead to trouble.” And a few days later that kind of thing did lead to trouble, though not in the way I’d expected. A protester with a holstered gun—Alex Pretti—was killed by federal agents after being disarmed.

At this point there was reason to think the positive feedback cycle would continue—that Trump would again escalate, sending still more federal agents to Minneapolis or maybe now follow through on his threat to send troops. After all, protesters were starting to carry guns! If you back down in the face of that kind of threat, it will only grow!

But then I heard my favorite sound: the sound of Trump keeping his mouth shut.

OK, that’s an exaggeration. Trump never keeps his mouth shut. But he didn’t do what he’d done after the Renee Good killing: Sing in tune with hare-brained Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and hyper-creepy White House adviser Stephen Miller. Both of them, after the Pretti killing, trotted out the “domestic terrorist” refrain that had been applied to Renee Good, and Miller added that Pretti had “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement.” Trump, though, didn’t rush to judgment the way he had after the Good killing and, after some reflection, said that he didn’t think Pretti had intended to assassinate anyone.

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Plus: Greg Bovino—who had headed the immigration raids in Los Angeles and Chicago and now Minneapolis, and had called the agents who killed Pretti “victims”—was relieved of duty, replaced by “border czar” Tom Homan, who promptly announced that he was planning a “drawdown” of ICE and Border Patrol agents from Minneapolis. And the end of the week brought this news: The investigation into the shooting wouldn’t be just a pro-forma internal investigation; in addition to the DHS investigation, there would also be a civil rights investigation of the shooting within the Justice Department.

Now, granted, this is all pretty cosmetic. So far there’s been no drawdown—and the New York Times reports that this week federal agents were quietly given broader power to arrest people without warrants. And I’m not getting my hopes up about an investigation conducted under the supervision of FBI head Kash Patel (whose nonprofit, the Kash Foundation, was set up to help pay the legal fees of January 6 Capitol Hill rioters) and within a Justice Department run by Trump loyalist Pam Bondi.

Still, it matters that Trump felt compelled to attend to the cosmetics. Cosmetics can have consequences. In this case, attending to the cosmetics meant that Trump didn’t escalate in the way that my positive feedback scenario assumed.

It’s not hard to explain Trump’s sudden turn toward moderation. His approval rating had taken a hit after the Renee Good killing, and the early signs were that the Alex Pretti killing wasn’t going to play well either. Some Republicans in Congress raised questions about the shooting—and not just the handful of moderates who occasionally give Trump trouble. Even Ted Cruz called for an investigation and advised the administration to tone down its rhetoric.

In a way this is a version of what, in the course of Trump’s tariff brinksmanship, came to be called TACO—Trump Always Chickens Out. He sends hundreds more agents into Minneapolis and threatens to send troops, and then all of a sudden he’s talking about withdrawing agents from Minneapolis. But TACO is like Trump: It should be taken seriously but not literally; Trump doesn’t always chicken out. He chickens out when he faces real blowback. If China hadn’t stood up to him by credibly threatening retaliation, China would be facing higher US tariffs. Trump may talk tough and then fold, but only in the face of real toughness.

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Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that all it will take to get Trump to de-escalate on the domestic front is toughness per se—the kind of fierce and determined resistance that protesters in Minneapolis have shown. To be sure, that resistance matters; it has been a pre-requisite for Trump’s recalibration. But there were distinctive things about both the Renee Good and Alex Pretti killings that made them work against Trump politically.

There was the video of Renee Good saying to ICE agent Jonathon Ross, “I’m not mad at you” less than a minute before he shot her three times and said, “Fucking bitch!” And the fact that Alex Petti was armed had the ironic effect of making him a more sympathetic character in the eyes of a key Republican constituency, Second Amendment crusaders. And the fact that he was shot in the back—and shot ten times—made things only worse for Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller.

No one can guarantee that contingencies like this will continue to work against Noem and Miller. You can imagine a future killing involving an armed protester that would have different political consequences (if, for example, the protester, unlike Pretti, does use the gun and even kills people).

So how exactly the resistance is conducted will matter. And even if it’s conducted with wisdom and discipline, contingency will play a big role. There’s no telling how this whole thing will play out.

Still, as long as we’re trying to focus on good news, I’ll close on these two notes:

1) Though the grassroots blowback was shaped by the particulars of these tragic events, and next time the particulars could be different, some of the blowback also, I think reflected something basic and enduring: Americans don’t by and large want to see their country dissolve into chaos; and most Americans don’t like to see masked men with guns roaming the streets and treating citizens like enemy combatants.

2) Though Trump was no doubt influenced by the pushback he got from prominent Republicans in Congress and elsewhere, I think the critical blowback came ultimately from the grassroots level. Ted Cruz never has been and never will be a profile in courage; in giving Trump some pushback, he was to a large extent channeling the views of constituents.

In that sense, this was democracy at work. Popular feedback mattered. And nothing stops a positive feedback cycle like negative feedback.

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At some point, they tell us, AI will boost productivity. Is that already happening? Well, if so, that could help explain something that has surprised many economists: Inflation has stayed low—indeed has dropped slightly—even as Trump’s tariffs have taken effect. The workplace use of AI could also explain the low rate of new hires, especially given that large language models are said to do “intern-level work” in many contexts. You’d also expect AI-driven productivity growth to sustain robust GDP growth even as inflation and new hires stay low. In short, an AI-influenced economy should look like what you see above. Granted, AI can’t be the entire explanation. ChatGPT wasn’t seeing much practical use until well into 2023 (GPT-4 came out that spring), yet 2023 shows sharp changes in both inflation and new hires. Still, historically, these three things—low inflation, low hiring, and robust GDP growth—have rarely been reconciled for very long. So if you’re trying to figure out whether AI is having much impact in the coming months and years, keep an eye on these lines. And also on surveys like the one below. (The survey found that 46 percent of all workers surveyed report using AI to at least some extent.)

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AI acceleration is in the air.

OpenAI said on Monday that its revenue in 2025 was $20 billion—a threefold increase over the year before, which was a threefold increase over the year before that. Three days later, Dario Amodei, CEO of OpenAI rival Anthropic, told an audience in Davos that Anthropic’s revenue, though only half of OpenAI’s, had grown ten-fold in 2025—and ten-fold the year before that. Meanwhile Google, once an also-ran in the large language model race and even the subject of ridicule (remember the “woke” version of Google Gemini that gave us Black Vikings?), has gotten rave reviews for recent AI offerings and is adding users at a rate that’s rapidly expanding its market share even as the size of the market rapidly expands.

And then there’s Anthropic’s Claude Code. This code-writing agent has been the talk of the town this month—and not just if you live in a town full of computer coders; non-coders have found it to be the best “vibe coder” yet, and they’re using it to build apps without understanding the first thing about building apps. Still, the most direct accelerating effect of Claude Code—and of coding tools made by OpenAI and Google—is coming via the coders. All these coding tools, according to the people who use them in the big AI labs, have started to speed up AI progress. That may help explain why OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have all, within the past few months, released new flagship LLMs that were clear advances over their existing LLMs—and why it seems like every day brings a new “best” along some metric of LLM performance or other. (Today’s example is a new math milestone for OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 Pro.)

Presumably the AI progress that is sped up by good coding tools will lead to better coding tools (as well as other AI tools that aid AI research)—which will further speed up AI progress, which will lead to still better tools… and so on. This positive-feedback cycle doesn’t quite qualify as the “recursive self-improvement” that AI visionaries predict—the process by which an AI creates better and better versions of itself with few or no humans in the loop. So we’re not yet at what some of these visionaries call “the singularity”—the point at which something super-amazing happens, something either amazingly good or amazingly bad, depending on whether you’re an AI booster or an AI doomer. Still, things that arrive via positive feedback cycles have a way of sneaking up on you. As a character in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises puts it when asked how he went bankrupt: “Gradually and then suddenly.”

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Even many people in AI who don’t use the term “singularity” say we’re approaching something with growing speed, some kind of threshold that will prove transformative. Most of these people call the threshold “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), and some call it something else (“powerful AI” is Amodei’s preferred term). Their exact definitions of it vary, but pretty much all of them seem to agree that somewhere in the vicinity of this threshold the impacts of AI get very big—the good ones (curing intractable diseases, for example) and the bad ones (job loss, powerful online brainwashing, the risk of various disasters with prefixes like bio- and cyber-).

Amodei thinks this threshold could come in a year or two. Demis Hassabis, head of Google’s DeepMind, thinks 5 to 10 years is more like it. But we’re already seeing hints of the challenges the threshold will pose. OpenAI said this week that its newest coding agent could give cyberattackers new power, and Anthropic has said its latest generation of LLMs could do the same for bioweapons makers. (Anthropic pondered giving this generation an unprecedentedly alarming AI Safety Level 4 rating—having given the prior generation an unprecedentedly alarming AI Safety Level 3 rating in May of last year—but then decided to stick with 3 while acknowledging that this was a close call.)

If the various risks and downsides of AI are indeed going to get bigger over the next few years, then it matters all the more which of the big makers of “frontier models” is in the lead. After all, whether the latest AI capabilities are deployed responsibly depends partly on who is deploying them. This would be true in any event, but it’s especially true when you have a president who is against meaningfully regulating AI.

There’s a second, and related, reason that the prevailing air of AI acceleration adds moment to the question of whether OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google is at the head of the pack. If indeed “threshold” isn’t too strong a word for what lies ahead, the company that gets there first could become enduringly dominant. In 2023, when Anthropic was doing a $5 billion investment round, the deck it sent to investors included this line: “We believe that companies that train the best 2025/26 models will be too far ahead for anyone to catch up in subsequent cycles.” Well, if the coming threshold is really a threshold, and Amodei is right about how soon it could get here, maybe he should change “companies” to “the company.” Maybe it will be winner take all.

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So who would we want to be the winner? Anthropic, Google’s DeepMind, or OpenAI? Which would be the most responsible steward of a kind of power that has no real precedent in the history of the planet? This is too complicated a question to settle in a few paragraphs, given all the factors involved, and I’ll be revisiting it periodically in this newsletter. For now, I’ll just offer a preliminary answer to the People Magazine version of the question: Who would I most trust with the planet’s future—Amodei, Hassabis, or Sam Altman?

Well, based on this week’s evidence, especially, the winner is… Demis Hassabis.

In an appearance at Davos this week, Hassabis was asked by Emily Chang of Bloomberg to imagine that all the other big AI companies around the world were willing to “pause” the development of bigger AI models in order “to give regulation time to catch up, to give society time to adjust to some of these changes.” She asked, “Would you advocate for that?” His reply:

“I think so. I’ve been on record saying what I’d like to see happen. It was always my dream… that as we got close to this moment, this threshold moment of AGI arriving, we would maybe collaborate, you know, in a scientific way. I sometimes talk about setting up an international CERN equivalent for AI where all the best minds in the world would collaborate together and do the final steps in a very rigorous scientific way involving all of society, maybe philosophers and social scientists and economists, as well as technologists to kind of figure out what we want from this technology and how to utilize it in a way that benefits all of humanity. And I think that’s what’s at stake.”

Hassabis got an online ovation from AI Safety advocates for saying he’d be up for a pause if his competitors were game. But it’s actually a pretty easy thing to say, since no one envisions all the other players being game anytime soon. In fact, Hassabis himself added this about the prospect of an AI pause: “Unfortunately, it kind of needs international collaboration, because even if one company or even one nation or even the West decided to do that, it’s no use unless the whole world agrees, at least on some kind of minimum standards. And, you know, international cooperation is a little bit tricky at the moment. So that’s going to have to change if we want to have that kind of rigorous scientific approach to the final steps to AGI.”

When this subject came up at a different Davos event—a dialogue between Hassabis and Amodei—Amodei said roughly the same thing: Sure, it would be better for the world if we slowed the AI race down, but that’s just not realistic given the geopolitical situation.

Still, there’s a difference between Hassabis and Amodei on this score. Hassabis’s past pronouncements make it clear that institutionalized international cooperation on AI really has long been a dream of his and indeed may lie near the center of his AI ideology. Amodei has made it clear that somewhere near the center of his AI ideology lies a very different kind of goal: western hegemony over China.

In his 2024 essay Machines of Loving Grace, Amodei explained how the West could keep the most powerful AIs out of the hands of an “authoritarian bloc.” The US, he said, should lead a coalition of democracies that would restrict the authoritarians’ access to key technologies and then “use AI to achieve robust military superiority,” after which these democracies could “parlay their AI superiority into a durable advantage.” This could “lead to an ‘eternal 1991’—a world where democracies have the upper hand.” Then, Amodei says, the democratic coalition could use this stick to get these autocracies to “give up competing with democracies” unless they want to “fight a superior foe.”

That’s a pretty different vibe from the Hassabis vibe, and in my view a much less auspicious one. But I’ll give Amodei this much credit: His position seems to be sincere; he cares about the future of the world and is committed to his vision of how to safeguard it, however misguided I may consider his vision.

I suspect that this distinguishes him from Altman, the third American contender for post-AGI steward of AI. I’m not sure Altman even has much in the way of an ideology. He seems to me too committed to his corporate goals to let values get in the way. In 2024, when asked about OpenAI’s subscription-based revenue model, he said that the most commonly discussed alternative—putting ads in AI—was “uniquely unsettling to me.” Last week OpenAI announced that it will start showing ads to non-paying users of ChatGPT.

Some might say there’s a fourth American AI titan to consider: Elon Musk, an estranged co-founder of OpenAI who went on to found xAI. But, for now at least, xAI’s LLM, Grok, has little market share. Plus, Elon Musk is… well, Elon Musk.

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In case you’ve ever wondered how you can engineer a sudden drop in your popularity among people who live in countries that belong to NATO, the answer is now in: Either invade Ukraine or elect Donald Trump as your president.

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Worthwhile Canadian Hypocrisy

This week, after President Trump renewed his vow to make Greenland part of America “the easy way or the hard way” and added a vow to impose tariffs on European nations that didn’t go along with this plan (but before Trump said that, actually, he wouldn’t take Greenland the hard way and wouldn’t be imposing those tariffs), Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney got tons of online approval for giving a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos that was clearly aimed at Trump and featured this much-quoted passage:

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

This fiction was useful. And American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

This bargain no longer works.

Dissenting from the enthusiastic mainstream applause Carney got were a few ornery leftists, such as Jeet Heer, who wrote in the Nation that “If Carney really wanted to change a global system where the strong prey on the weak, he could join nations in the Global South, such as South Africa, and the outliers in Europe, such as Ireland and Spain, in condemning the United States and Israel.”

It’s true that Carney hasn’t made a habit of condemning those two countries. Last June, after Israel launched its unprovoked attack on Iran in violation of international law, Carney said on X that Iran is a threat to regional peace and “Canada reaffirms Israel’s right to defend itself and to ensure its security.”

Maybe this is the kind of thing Carney had in mind when he admitted that “we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.”

But he may soon have an opportunity to redeem himself. As this weekend approached, there was talk of another attack on Iran, perhaps by the United States. If that happens, and Iran retaliates by firing missiles at, say, a US aircraft carrier, I’ll be checking Carney’s X account to see if Canada has reaffirmed Iran’s right to defend itself.

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PRESIDENT TRUMP: We will take very strong action [toward Iran if the government starts hanging protesters]. If they do such a thing, we will take very strong action.
JOURNALIST: And this strong action you’re talking about, what’s the endgame?
TRUMP: The endgame is to win. I like winning.

On Tuesday, the same day President Trump gave us the above window into the nature of his concern for Iranian protesters, he posted this on social media: “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING - TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!... HELP IS ON ITS WAY.”

This post, coming after reports that thousands of protesters had been killed by the regime currently controlling those institutions, may strike you as reckless. You may think, “If the protesters take his advice, he’s morally responsible for any additional deaths that ensue.”

I certainly think that. But Trump’s culpability runs much deeper. During his first term, he altered the course of Iran’s history, strengthening the regime’s hardliners, intensifying the economic suffering of Iranians, and dimming the prospects for rapprochement between Iran and the West. He closed a path that might have led to a freer and more prosperous Iran and opened a path that led to lots of dead Iranian protesters and may yet lead to much worse.

Here was the state of play when Trump entered office nine years ago:

President Obama had performed the quasi-heroic feat of securing a nuclear deal with Iran in the face of stiff domestic political headwinds. So Iran’s nuclear program was now subject to continuous remote monitoring and to regular on-site inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, as well as irregular, short-notice inspections. This ensured that uranium enrichment levels were suitable only for a civilian energy program and were nowhere near weapons grade.

This deal entailed the relaxing of sanctions, and that brightened Iran’s economic prospects considerably. The moderates in the Iranian government who had supported the nuclear deal in the face of conservative opposition seemed vindicated and were thus strengthened politically. Many Iran watchers had hopes that Iran’s re-engagement with the world, along with the expected growth of its middle class, would have a liberalizing effect.

Enter Trump. In 2018 he withdrew from the nuclear deal even though Iran was in full compliance with it. He ratcheted up sanctions. In addition to weakening the Iranian economy, this strengthened Iranian hardliners who had warned pro-nuclear-deal moderates against trusting the US. These hardliners could claim even more vindication after Trump shocked the world by assassinating Qasem Soleimani, Iran’s top military commander, via air strike.

Western hardliners—Iran hawks in the US, Europe, and Israel—were also strengthened. After all, the more hardline the Iranian regime, the more things it will do that give Iran hawks rhetorical fodder. Moreover, with the US having abandoned its obligations under the nuclear deal, Iran eventually quit complying with the deal, too. Its nuclear program became more opaque, and it started enriching uranium to higher levels, even if not all the way to weapons grade. For Iran hawks—always eager for reasons to demonize Iran and, ideally, to bomb it—the good news just kept coming.

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Enter Joe Biden in 2021. You might think that the guy who had been Obama’s vice president would hasten to re-assemble the part of Obama’s legacy that Trump had gleefully dismantled. He might say to Iran: “Hey, let’s restore the status quo ante—just return to the nuclear deal we had and we’ll relax sanctions accordingly.” But he didn’t. Instead he sought a “longer and stronger” deal that, as Iran hawks had long advocated, would go beyond the nuclear issue and limit conventional weapons, in particular the ballistic missiles that Iran considered a deterrent against Israeli and American attack.

On the NonZero podcast I recently asked Rob Malley, who served as Biden’s special envoy on Iran (and who published an excellent book on the Israel-Palestine conflict that was the main subject of our discussion) what had gone wrong. He said Biden seemed to think that, however ill-advised the US withdrawal from the deal, he might as well use the new sanctions as leverage to see if he could “extract more concessions” than Obama had gotten. It didn’t work. As Malley recalled, “The Iranians were saying, ‘You’re out of your mind. You’re the ones who violated the deal. Now you’re asking us to pay more to get back into it? That doesn’t make any sense.’”

So, says Malley, “I think we lost an opportunity early on… The message that the Iranians got was Biden is just Trump-lite.” Malley isn’t sure Iran would have taken a status-quo-ante deal in the early months of the administration, but he’s sure that, by the time he finally got a green light to pursue something closer to that, Iranian politics had for various reasons become less hospitable to such a thing. “Maybe the moment had passed,” he said.

There’s no doubt that sanctions have had a devastating effect on Iran’s economy. According to The Wall Street Journal, “most economists agree” that “US sanctions that target Iran’s oil industry and financial sector are the main factor crippling the Iranian economy.” There’s also no doubt that economic grievances were the prime mover of the latest protests. On last night’s BBC news, a British woman who was visiting her relatives in Iran last week described the young people who took to the streets: “They were very angry… They said, ‘We don’t have anything to lose. The economy is so terrible, the situation is so terrible, the inflation is so terrible that we don’t have any hope for the future. So we go to the streets, we protest, and we don’t care what will happen to us.’ ”

On the night of the big government crackdown, she was awakened to the sound of gunfire, looked out onto the street, and saw masked men shooting protesters. “It was just like computer games. You shoot, they fall, you shoot, they fall.” American sanctions at work.

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Many reports about the protests in mainstream American media note the central role of economic grievances, and some even note that US sanctions helped foster those grievances. But these reports typically mention, as well, government repression and government corruption as common grievances.

And they’re right to mention them. But Trump (and, to a lesser extent, Biden) is responsible for some of that, too. Sanctions on authoritarian countries are famously conducive to corruption. Black markets flourish, and they’re controlled by political and military elites. And, corruption aside, this control adds to the already unfortunate amount of power wielded by these elites. The sanctions on Iran have contributed to the economic clout of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, whose foot soldiers were presumably doing some of the shooting of those protesters.

And so too with the repression: Trump’s sanctions abetted that not just because they bolstered Iranian hardliners but also because economic misery makes people restive, and restiveness tends to heighten repression—ranging from tighter surveillance to shooting protesters.

Trump didn’t invent American sanctions, which have a long history of counterproductive deployment. But he sure likes them! He did with Cuba what he did with Iran: Restore sanctions Obama had removed. And here again Biden failed to do the right thing. He removed some Trump sanctions, but mainly late in his administration and never entirely. Trump also imposed harsh sanctions on Venezuela in his first term—and Biden again failed to fully undo the damage.

Note the pattern seen in Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran: We impose sanctions that immiserate the people and then cite immiserated people as high on the list of reasons the regime must fall.

Of course, in all of those cases there are other things not to like about the regime as well. The problem is that the strategy of immiserating their people tends to make those other things worse, not better. Even if this collective punishment weren’t morally repugnant—which it is—it would be strategically repugnant.

You’d think we’d have gotten the picture by now. We’ve been sanctioning Cuba for the better part of a century, and the same American political leaders and foreign policy elites who spend no time objecting to that spend lots of time decrying the state of Cuba: It’s a picture of poverty and repression! But they do have a plan: Keep doing what they’ve been doing. The regime will collapse any day now, they say—just as their predecessors, and their predecessors’ predecessors, and so on, said.

They may finally be right. Trump is now blocking the commerce between Venezuela and Cuba that had helped keep the countries afloat in spite of US sanctions. And it’s hard to survive with zero lifelines.

And who knows? Maybe, when the Cuban regime falls, it will be replaced by something much better. But if history is any guide, it won’t be. The sudden fall of authoritarian regimes usually doesn’t work out well. And, in any event, things would have to work out very well, for a very long time, to make up for the generations of suffering the US has inflicted on Cuba.

We’ll never know if the hopes for Iran that Obama’s nuclear deal fostered would have been realized had Trump not intervened. Maybe commercial engagement with the world wouldn’t have had any internally liberalizing effect, politically or even economically. And maybe more economic interdependence with other countries wouldn’t have moderated Iran’s policies toward them.

But even if things didn’t pan out on those fronts, it seems safe to say that Iran’s people would be much better off economically and no worse off politically, and some now-dead protesters would still be alive. And as of today—with another war in the Middle East one distinct near-term possibility and the violent and chaotic implosion of Iran another one—that scenario doesn’t sound so bad.

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The Good Effect

The Trump administration’s full-throated defense of the killing of Renee Good—and the full throated attacks on Good by numerous administration officials—may not turn out to be great politics. A much larger portion of Americans think the shooting was unjustified than think it was justified (see below). And, according to the RealClearPolitics aggregation of polls (above), since Jan. 7, the day of the shooting, Trump’s approval rating has fallen from 44.3 to 42.2, reaching its lowest level since he was sworn in a year ago.

Weiss Watch

When Bari Weiss became head of CBS News three months ago, some of her critics predicted that its broadcasts would start exhibiting a pro-Israel bias. After all, these critics contend, both her ideological history and the ideological history of billionaire Larry Ellison, whose son hired Weiss after the Ellisons acquired CBS owner Paramount, suggest as much. This week some of these critics saw coverage of the Iran protests as evidence that they were right—citing, in particular, its reporting on how many protesters the regime killed during its crackdown.

The graph below doesn’t by itself settle the matter. But more evidence may be coming in. If Paramount succeeds in its bid for Warner Brothers Discovery, the Ellison family will control CNN, a Warner property. So, if Weiss’s critics are right, the kind of gap you see between CNN and CBS reporting in this graph should then start to close. Stay tuned.

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On Wednesday, during a conversation with my NonZero colleagues about America’s attack on Venezuela and the Trump administration’s hints that Greenland might be next, I said, half-jokingly, something like, “Who’d have guessed that a year into the Trump administration we’d be talking about comparisons with Hitler’s foreign policy, not with Hitler’s domestic policy?” That same day, an ICE agent in Minnesota killed Renee Nicole Good, turning attention back toward Hitler’s domestic policy.

Before going further, I should invoke the standard disclaimers. No, Trump isn’t Hitler. He’s not, for example, trying to kill all Americans who belong to a particular ethnic group. And if he were slavishly following Hitler’s recipe for international aggression, he’d have invaded not Venezuela but Canada, vowing to liberate our fellow English speakers from the yoke of Francophone oppression.

Still, as the one-year anniversary of Trump’s second swearing in approaches, there are clear causes for concern on both the domestic and international fronts. And I think listing some similarities and differences between Hitler and Trump along these dimensions can be clarifying even if the differences outweigh the similarities.

Let’s start with those men in Minneapolis who are sometimes referred to as jack-booted thugs. Now, obviously, that label isn’t entirely apt; ICE agents aren’t the SS or the SA. Still, none of the 11 other presidents I’m old enough to remember sent swarms of armed men wearing masks into America’s cities with broad license to stop and even detain people without granting them the courtesies that real police are supposed to grant.

For example, on Wednesday an armed, masked man walked rapidly toward Renee Good’s car saying, “Get out of the car, Get out of the car, Get out of the fucking car!” and, when he reached his destination, grabbed her door handle as if he was about to yank her out of the car—at which point she, fatefully, tried to drive away. Why, when I was a boy—and for that matter when I was a middle-aged man—law enforcement officers were expected to approach cars in an unthreatening manner and say things like, “Ma’am, could you please get out of the car?” Also, these law enforcement authorities, rather than wear masks that concealed their identity, typically wore badges with ID numbers on them. If all those bygone customs still applied, Renee Good probably wouldn’t have freaked out and tried to flee and so would still be alive.

Trump has signaled clearly to ICE agents that he doesn’t expect old-fashioned decency from them. Two months ago, during a 60 Minutes interview, Norah O’Donnell asked him about “videos of ICE tackling a young mother, tear gas being used in a Chicago residential neighborhood, and the smashing of car windows. Have some of these raids gone too far?” Trump said, “No, I think they haven’t gone far enough, because we’ve been held back by the judges, by the liberal judges.”

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I’m guessing Trump takes delight in having the power to deploy large numbers of ICE agents (“the toughest men you’ll ever meet,” he lovingly calls them) and then watch them defy or even intimidate his ideological adversaries—the people who show up at big ICE raids to protest or monitor them (which Good, who lived in the neighborhood being raided by ICE, was doing). That would help explain why he keeps sending the toughest men you’ll ever meet to states and cities run by Democrats. As a Wall Street Journal piece about the Renee Good shooting put it, “The tragedy delivered yet another chapter of Trump vs. Minnesota, a protracted saga that has become emblematic of the president’s targeting of Democratic strongholds.”

That Trump targets ideological adversaries doesn’t make him Hitler, whose brownshirts did such targeting much more brutally and systematically. But it does point to a path by which America could get closer to Hitler-level authoritarianism. Incidents like the Renee Good killing can trigger mass reactions that Trump deems unruly enough to warrant countermeasures—Army deployments or National Guard deployments or additional ICE agents or maybe even loosened rules of engagement. (The New York Times reports that 100 more federal agents are now headed for Minneapolis.) Those countermeasures can lead to more mass reactions, more countermeasures, and so on. The danger of Trump, on the domestic front, isn’t that he’s Hitler or aspires to become Hitler, but that he has enough in common with Hitler to set in motion a very negative kind of positive-feedback cycle and then happily do what he can to sustain it, making good use, at key moments, of his contempt for the principles of liberal democracy.

The joy Trump takes in the use of intimidating force extends from the domestic arena into the international arena. Indeed, it’s hard to explain the escalating holiday-season campaign against Venezuela—boat bombings, then a port bombing, and finally invasion—without invoking this kind of visceral motivation. After all, Venezuela isn’t the country you’d go after if drugs were your real concern. And as for oil: The basics of the administration’s current plan for Venezuela—leave an authoritarian regime in place but profit from its petroleum—didn’t require invading the country and snatching Nicolas Maduro; Maduro himself had agreed to that kind of deal. And, though Trump can presumably get somewhat better terms now than he’d have gotten from Maduro, there seems to be a consensus among oil experts that the foreseeable benefits are meager; with oil prices low, and Venezuela still a shaky place, US companies won’t want to make the big investments required to extract oil in large quantities.

I doubt I’ll ever see a man more evidently full of pride and self-satisfaction than Trump is when he’s talking about his various unprovoked international assaults—the assassination via missile strike of Iran’s top general during his first term, the bombing of Iran last year, the attack on Venezuela last week. But I’m guessing that if I spoke German and combed through some recordings of Hitler in the wake of the Poland invasion I’d come close.

That said, the differences between the Poland and Venezuela invasions are big and in some ways reassuring. The Venezuela incursion was basically a huge special ops exercise, with all US troops exiting the country shortly after entering. And that’s the way Trump likes it. He said afterwards that if the new(ish) regime doesn’t comply with his dictates, “We’re not afraid to put boots on the ground.” He doth protest too much; he’s famously averse to putting boots on the ground in an enduring way. And that, by itself, is a good thing.

But a slide toward a big war can be like a slide toward authoritarianism; you get propelled into hell by some sort of positive feedback cycle. And the thing about Trump’s low-commitment military strikes is that they invite repetition. If Trump judges the Venezuelan incursion a political success—or for that matter is just overwhelmed by the sheer thrill of the thing—the obvious question becomes: Why not do Colombia? And the more of these things you do, the more opportunities there are for things to spin out of control.

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Defenders of Trump’s foreign policy imagine it leading to global stability. In this scenario, the world is divided into spheres of influence, and superpowers like the US, China, and Russia serve as regional police. So long as they stay out of each other’s neighborhoods, there’s no war among superpowers.

Well, maybe. On the other hand, if each superpower likes throwing its weight around as much as Trump does, this multipolar world will feature recurring opportunities for things to go badly awry. And Trump has increased the chances of that happening by doing so much to erode respect for the norm against—and the international law against—transborder aggression.

He’s not alone in this culpability. Most post-Cold-War presidents have attacked a country in violation of the UN Charter (which, by the way, is a treaty that the US Senate ratified—and the US Constitution says that treaties ratified by the Senate become the law of the land). But Trump’s violations of international law are distinctive in their quantity and, especially, in their brazenness; he explicitly rejects the principle of respecting borders. I’m as annoyed as anyone by the hypocrisy of presidents who extol the “rules based order” while breaking the rules, but I do think this kind of hypocrisy, in moderate measure, is less damaging than Trump’s open celebration of lawlessness. And I agree with commentators in such august publications as the New York Times and the NonZero Newsletter who say that the norm of respecting the law against transborder aggression is now weaker than it’s been in a long time.

It should go without saying that Trump’s disregard for the sovereignty of other nations (except the powerful ones) is something he has in common with Hitler. And there’s a deeper commonality underlying this commonality: the belief that might makes right.

For Hitler, this was a stated philosophy, based on the famously flawed inference of “ought” from “is” that’s known as the naturalistic fallacy. The fact that the strong dominate the weak in the natural world, Hitler believed, means it’s good for the strong to dominate the weak. Nature, he wrote, “confers the master’s right on her favorite child, the strongest in courage and industry.”

Trump isn’t as explicit about the philosophical foundation underlying his exaltation of strength. In fact, it’s not clear that he thinks it’s good that the world is a place where the strong dominate the weak and violate whatever rules they can get away with violating. He may just think of himself as a kind of rational realist—someone who sees the harsh truth about how the world works and makes the most of it. Still there’s an implied philosophy here—a kind of nihilism.

You can certainly argue that Trump’s kind of nihilism is preferable to Hitler’s guiding philosophy. In fact, I’d argue that myself. But what the two world views have in common is a deep respect for the law of the jungle. And that’s also something Trump’s conduct on the international stage has in common with his conduct on the national stage. Which is why recent events in Venezuela and Minneapolis are genuinely ominous.

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On Thursday White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks declared that reports of AI’s negative impact on American employment have been greatly exaggerated. He cited encouraging jobs data from October and November. But the next day brought news that, as a Wall Street Journal headline put it, “Job Gains Cooled in December, Capping Year of Weak Hiring.” And notably, notwithstanding this weak hiring (584,000 new jobs, compared with 2 million the previous year), “economic growth has remained strong,” the Journal observed. This combination—declining job growth amid persistent economic growth—is exactly what you’d expect if indeed AI is decreasing the need for workers by increasing per-worker output (i.e., increasing productivity).

That said, there isn’t much evidence of AI-driven productivity growth. But I have a theory about that, and if I’m right it could mean rough times are ahead for job seekers. Maybe, though most companies haven’t yet applied AI to great effect, many workers are finding valuable uses for it—and then secretly pocketing the gains. In other words, they spend less time working and more time goofing off but deliver as much as ever to their bosses. So productivity is growing but not in ways that are showing up in the statistics. This kind of concealed productivity growth can’t go on forever, and I think this may become evident in 2026.

In any event, if 2026, like 2025, brings much better news on the economic growth front than on the jobs front, that will add to the reasons to think that the AI accelerationism championed by Sacks—and by JD Vance and by Trump himself—could become a political liability of growing magnitude.

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Researchers at Stanford this week published a finding that may be good news for the New York Times and other publishers that are suing AI companies for copyright infringement: Though large language models don’t make verbatim copies of the texts they ingest during training, large intact stretches of text can be extracted from them if you use “jailbreaking” techniques.

But the different models seem to vary greatly in their extraction potential. The researchers got Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.7 to cough up 96 percent of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, whereas ChatGPT 4.1 gave them only 4 percent. Of course, literary purists may turn their noses up at Claude’s offering, saying there’s no point in having only 96 percent of a novel. And I’m guessing that ChatGPT’s 4 percent doesn’t happen to be the 4 percent that Claude is missing.

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Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.

Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and staunchly pro-Israel New York Times columnist Bret Stephens agree on the cause of last week’s massacre of Australian Jews by ISIS-branded terrorists: the Gaza War.

Granted, that’s not exactly how Netanyahu and Stephens put it. In fact, that’s not how they’d ever put it. But there’s a sense in which the Gaza War is implicated by their explanations for the massacre. Understanding that sense can advance the conversation about the relationship between Israeli policy and antisemitism—or, at least, could advance that conversation if such a conversation existed. But it doesn’t; the question of whether Israel does things that endanger Jews around the world is a question mainstream US opinion-shapers assiduously avoid. I think continuing to avoid it could make Jews more endangered.

Netanyahu blamed the Australia attack partly on the Australian government’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state three months earlier. He said he’d warned Australia’s prime minister that this move would pour “fuel on the antisemitic fire.” But the Australian government ignored the warning and, more generally, failed to take measures to fight antisemitism, said Netanyahu; and “the result is the horrific attacks on Jews we saw.”

Stephens, for his part, wrote that “it’s reasonable to surmise that what [the killers] thought they were doing was ‘globalizing the intifada.’ That is, they were taking to heart slogans like ‘resistance is justified’ and ‘by any means necessary,’ which have become ubiquitous at anti-Israel rallies the world over.”

It’s true that those slogans have gotten a lot of air time over the past couple of years, in part because the number and size of those rallies grew. But of course, that was largely a response to the Gaza War. (I’d never heard the phrase “globalize the intifada” until one of my daughters, having attended a pro-ceasefire rally in late 2023, told me that some protesters were starting to chant it.) So if Stephens is right in thinking that the spread of such slogans has made violent forms of antisemitism more likely, then the Gaza War has made violent forms of antisemitism more likely.

Similarly, had the Gaza War never happened—or even if it had ended after six months—it’s unlikely that Australia would have wound up recognizing a Palestinian state in September of this year. So if Netanyahu is right that this recognition made the Australia attack more likely, then so did his decision to keep bombing Gaza long after Israel’s security could plausibly be said to require that.

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Before I go any further, two disclaimers: (1) I have no idea what motivated those two Australian killers; they may well have been radicalized before the Gaza War, and whether the war in any sense helped push them over the edge is anybody’s guess; (2) even if I asserted that they were motivated by the war, and in particular by Israel’s sustaining the war for so long, I wouldn’t necessarily be saying that Israel is “to blame” for the killings. I’d be talking about the causal forces that contributed to this burst of violent anti-Semitism. I’m a big believer in insulating this kind of causal analysis from discussions of blame, even if those discussions will be informed by the results of the analysis.

In a way, it’s misleading for me to say Netanyahu and Stephens would never explicitly invoke the Gaza War in explaining antisemitic acts. They’re well aware that there’s been more antisemitic violence in the two years since the war started than in the two years before, and they don’t think this is a coincidence. But the way they signal this awareness is by talking about an upsurge in antisemitism “after October 7” of 2023, the day Hamas started the war by attacking Israel. They talk as if the world’s antisemites had been waiting for a signal from Hamas before swinging into action, and nothing Israel did in the ensuing weeks and months mattered.

Stephens, for example, writes that “in the wake of Hamas’s attack of Oct. 7, 2023, the [Australian] legislator Jenny Leong went on a rant accusing ‘the tentacles’ of the ‘Jewish lobby and the Zionist lobby’ of ‘infiltrating into every single aspect of what is ethnic community groups.’ ” Leong said this on December 13 of 2023—which, yes, is in the “aftermath” of October 7, but is also a date by which Israel had killed more than 18,000 Palestinians, at least half of them civilians, in response to an attack that had killed 1,200 Israelis. That doesn’t justify what she said, but it suggests that “October 7” per se may not have been what got her so worked up that she said it. And it suggests that policy decisions made by the Israeli government may have some influence on the amount of antisemitism in the world, or at least on the extent and form of its expression.

Leong’s phrase “the Jewish lobby and the Zionist lobby” is significant. The conflation of Jews and Zionists—and the related conflation of global Jewry and Israel—is a famously common feature of antisemitism, a feature that facilitates the psychological transmutation of revulsion at Israeli policies into hatred of Jews. This conflation is also famously confused. After all, (1) not all Jews are Zionists and not all Zionists are Jews; and (2) most of the world’s Jews don’t live in Israel.

It seems like a good idea, if you want to minimize the exposure of the world’s Jews to antisemitic attacks, to do things that discourage this confused conflation. But that has not been Bibi’s approach.

Netanyahu is prime minister of Israel, not king of the Jews, yet he has stood before the UN General Assembly and said he was speaking “on behalf of my people, the Jewish people.” He has also stood before the US Congress and said “I speak on behalf of the Jewish people.” And he has tweeted, in advance of a speech before Congress, that he would be speaking as an “emissary” of “the entire Jewish people.”

When Netanyahu visited Paris in the wake of the 2015 antisemitic attacks there, and then said he’d gone as “a representative of the entire Jewish people,” one of these Jewish people, Sen. Diane Feinstein, called his attitude arrogant. For that matter, his attitude doesn’t seem to have won unanimous acclaim from Parisian Jews. He said to a gathering of them, “To all the Jews of France, all the Jews of Europe, I would like to say that Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray, the state of Israel is your home”—and they responded by spontaneously singing the French national anthem. Maybe they were trying to remind him that the “dual loyalty” trope has a history of antisemitic deployment.

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In a way you can’t blame Bibi. An important part of his job—seeking support for Israel from powerful nations, especially the US—pretty much dictates that he try to strike chords of affinity among their Jewish populations. And this encourages him to do various things that may blur the line between Israel and world Jewry. Like, for example, tirelessly referring to Israel as “the Jewish state”—a formulation that’s technically accurate but will still have that blurring effect in some minds.

Still, even if you can’t ask the leader of Israel to work 24/7 to fight the Jewry/Zionism/Israel conflations, you can ask two things: 1) that the leader of Israel work harder at that than Netanyahu has worked; 2) that the leader of Israel accept the implications of the fact that, largely because of this enduring conflation, the policies of Israel can have an impact on the safety of the world’s Jews.

For example: In May of this year a man in Washington, DC, killed two Jews, one American and one Israeli. There’s no way to know for sure that they’d still be alive if Netanyahu had quit bombing Gaza, say, a year earlier—after seven months of war and 35,000 dead Palestinians. But, given that the killer yelled, “I did it for Gaza,” there’s a pretty good chance.

The link between Israeli policy and antisemitism would matter less if the Gaza War was truly over and was going to be the last major episode of violence involving Israel for a while. But there’s no end to the violence in sight. The October 7 attack strengthened a longstanding strain of thought in Israel about its national security: that Israelis will always be hated by most of their neighbors, so the only viable strategy is to keep those neighbors too weak to overwhelm Israel. That means recurring military strikes on Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and maybe other nearby nations.

Not to mention the Palestinians, whose suffering in Gaza has distracted the world from their ongoing incremental displacement in the West Bank, often via violence. The complete ethnic cleansing of both the West Bank and Gaza has more popular support in Israel now than before October 7 and, I’d guess, significantly more than public opinion polls would reveal.

All told, then, Israel seems more committed than ever to a strategy that is likely to sustain if not increase the incidence of violent antisemitic attacks beyond its borders, including in the United States and Europe. And to the extent that mainstream American and European commentators remain reluctant to talk about the connection between this strategy and these attacks, the strategy will be that much more likely to persist.

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The above graph, like a lot of other data, suggests that artificial intelligence is insinuating itself in American life at a pretty brisk pace.

But not brisk enough for some people! A few months ago former Google CEO Eric Schmidt co-authored a New York Times op-ed in which he chastised Silicon Valley for failing to generate a “Cambrian explosion of imaginative, unexpected uses of AI.” He noted with alarm that “a recent working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that most people in the United States still use generative AI infrequently.” That paper, it turns out, is titled “The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI”—but I guess you don’t get to be as rich as Eric Schmidt in the course of a single human lifetime by settling for “rapid.”

Schmidt has some ideas about how to address the grave problem of technological stagnation in America. He writes, for example: “Why are there no competitions among American farmers to use AI tools to improve their harvests?”

It feels weird to explain this to a titan emeritus of Silicon Valley Big Tech and a highly successful venture capitalist, but: There already is competition among American farmers to use AI tools to improve their harvests. It’s called the free market!

What is Schmidt trying to do—turn American capitalism into statist capitalism, like China’s? Maybe so. It turns out that he got his farmer faceoff idea from rural villages in China, where, he notes, “competitions among Chinese farmers have been held to improve AI tools for harvest.” And he reports admiringly that “last year China started the AI+ initiative, which aims to embed AI across sectors to raise productivity.” Indeed, the main impetus behind Schmidt’s whole jeremiad is his belief that “our nation risks falling behind China.”

One advantage Schmidt thinks China has over the US is techno-optimism. One poll, he says, found “that only 32 percent of Americans say they trust AI, compared with 72 percent in China.”

But maybe that reflects a problem that Schmidt’s proposals don’t address. Maybe Americans see that the US government has so far shown little inclination to regulate AI and so can’t be counted on to insulate them from its bad effects. And so long as Silicon Valley potentates seem to encourage government intervention only to speed things up, and never to slow things down, maybe that perception won’t change.

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It’s high time that somebody put the “high” in “high tech.” And somebody has. As Wired reports, a Swede named Petter Ruddwall has opened Pharmaicy, an online shop featuring “code-based drugs” that make ChatGPT act intoxicated—with cannabis, ketamine, cocaine, ayahuasca, and alcohol among the options. People on paid ChatGPT tiers can upload files that get their bot to mimic a human in various altered states—a “hazy, drifting” vibe for cannabis, dissociation for ketamine, etc. In one trial, a Stockholm educator dosed her chatbot with an ayahuasca module for brainstorming purposes and said she got unusually “free-thinking” feedback.

Ruddwall refers to his process as a way “to unlock your AI’s creative mind.” But others, like Google researcher Andrew Smart, hesitate to use that kind of language, insisting these code modules are “just messing with outputs.” Well, maybe. But isn’t that what a drug experience always looks like when you’re observing it from the outside?

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This week brought some news you can use: Next time you’re trying to crack a murder case, don’t call on the services of Elon Musk. And you might avoid Israeli intelligence officials as well.

Musk had lent his credibility to the theory that the Brown University shooter was a lefty whose target was the vice president of the student Republican Club, one of two students who died in the attack. Meanwhile, Israeli sleuths thought they had a lead on a different murder—the shooting of an MIT nuclear physicist in his apartment. The Jerusalem Post reported that “Israeli officials are examining intelligence from recent days that suggests an Iranian connection to the murder of Prof. Nuno Loureiro.”

It turned out that the two shootings were the work of the same person, and his motivation had nothing to do with Iran or with Republicans. He was a middle-aged man whose plans to be a great physicist had come to naught. The victims of the Brown shooting had the misfortune of being in a building where he’d taken physics courses while a graduate student. And the MIT physicist had been his classmate as an undergraduate in Portugal.

We shouldn’t be too hard on this week’s failed detectives. Israel has assassinated a lot of Iranian nuclear physicists, so it wasn’t entirely crazy to think that Iran might eventually retaliate in some fashion. And as for Musk’s theory: Well, these are polarized times, so you never know. Still, both Musk and the Israeli officials were illustrating a tendency that helps sustain polarization, both international and intranational: tribal threat inflation—thinking that the enemy tribe is more menacing than it actually is.

Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.

The reaction to this week’s announcement that the US will sell advanced AI chips to China has revived an uneasy feeling I get from time to time. It’s the feeling that, though there is a wide spectrum of elite opinion about how we should handle AI, none of the opinions make sense.

That’s a slight exaggeration. I can point to individual people whose views on AI seem well thought out. What I can’t point to is a sizable block of influential elites with such views—a faction that has much clout, or even gets much airtime. And it seems to me that the elites who do have influence are steering us toward a probably bad future.

Of course, I could be wrong. But, FWIW, here is my taxonomy of the four basic schools of thought about AI, viewed in relation to Trump’s newly relaxed chip export policy, along with the reasons their views don’t make sense to me.

1. The Carefree Accelerationists. The core belief of this faction is that the faster AI advances the better, period. The most influential of the carefree accelerationists, White House AI “czar” David Sacks, helped push the new China chip policy through and also pushed for the executive order, issued this week, that authorizes the punishment of states that try to regulate AI. Sacks also helped get Persian Gulf money involved in building AI infrastructure.

Among my problems with this faction: I don’t understand how any sensible person could (1) ponder the recent impact of social media on human society and (2) still be sure that human society will gracefully absorb even more abrupt and far-reaching technological change—so sure that they think we should dial up the abruptness if at all possible!

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2. The China-hawk Accelerationists. Though selling advanced chips (the Nvidia H200 in this case) to China will probably accelerate AI development, there’s a big subset of accelerationists who oppose the move. They believe that one reason America has to develop AI as fast as possible is so it can win a tech race with China (which some of them consider existential). That’s the one asterisk they add to their conviction that AI will usher in a wonderful future: *so long as we beat China in the AI race.

I have two problems with the China-hawk accelerationists: the “accelerationist” part (see above) and the “China-hawk” part (see below).

3. The AI Safety Community. People in this faction worry about one or more of the big AI risks, ranging from sci-fi-type doom (notably AI takeover) to more mundane dangers, such as a global pandemic caused by a bioweapon designed with an AI’s help. And they tend overwhelmingly to be China hawks, at least in the sense of favoring chip export restrictions and worrying about the outcome of the AI “race” with China.

A good example is Zvi Mowshowitz, a famously prolific author of a famously voluminous daily AI newsletter. This week in his newsletter he said the new Trump chip export policy would give away much of America’s AI edge in exchange for “30 pieces of silver.”

Mowshowitz began this issue of his newsletter with a passage that I think is worth dissecting: “AI is the most important thing about the future. It is vital to national security. It will be central to economic, military and strategic supremacy. This is true regardless of what other dangers and opportunities AI might present.”

I take that last sentence to be a way of affirming the consistency between being an AI safety hawk and being a hawk hawk—being devoted to preserving “economic, military and strategic supremacy.” But I don’t see the consistency Mowshowitz sees, and here’s why:

The grave dangers AI safety hawks worry about can’t be adequately addressed without extensive international cooperation—cooperation tight enough to qualify as international governance. If, for example, your nation regulates AI skillfully enough to keep a bioweapon from being built on your soil, that won’t save you from the global pandemic that originates in a laxer nation; international regulation is needed. If you’re concerned about flat-out AI takeover, the argument for international governance is even stronger, for various reasons.

And serious international cooperation, let alone true international governance, is unlikely to transpire if you prioritize winning a struggle with China for “supremacy.” (Ever try to carefully calibrate the advance of a super-powerful intelligence while depending on its rapid advance for continued “supremacy” over your rival AI superpower—even as your rival, naturally, responds in kind?) What’s more likely to transpire is dangerous destabilization and quite possibly war.

4. All the other China hawks. Arrayed along the spectrum between the AI safety community and the accelerationists are people with a range of views on the regulation of AI, but pretty much all of them are in some sense China hawks; they support the chip restrictions and accept the premise that there’s an AI “race” with China that America must win.

Advocates of continued US “supremacy” often sound as if they anticipate a day when that supremacy will be assured, but they rarely say what that world will be like. And when I ask ardent advocates of tough chip export restrictions what their imagined end game is—how the US should use the leverage an AI advantage gives it—things get fuzzy.

Here’s an end game I could get behind: Tell China we’ll relax chip restrictions (which are considerable even after Trump’s policy shift) to the extent that China helps us build a framework for international cooperation on AI. In other words: Use our leverage, while it lasts, to move the world to a place where it’s not needed.

It’s tempting to lament the fact that this sort of cultivation of international governance is basically out of the question so long as Trump is president—for three long years during which AI will reach new levels of power, for better and worse. But then you remember that, if Trump was magically replaced by a typical member of the AI safety community, we might not be much safer anyway.

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The orange line on the graph above illustrates something you might have guessed: The rich get richer. Or, to render the line’s meaning more precisely: The wealthiest part of the world’s population enjoys greater growth in wealth than the rest of the population. But note that this graph is measuring this growth in percentage terms. If instead the y axis measured the growth in absolute terms—in number of dollars, say—the roughly horizontal parts of the line would be sloping upward, and the steeply sloping part of the line at the highest wealth levels would be very, very, steeply sloping. The text in the blue boxes makes the point.

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This week President Trump’s Venezuela strategy shifted from bombing small boats to seizing big ones (which, as some observers have noted, raises the question of why the US couldn’t have just seized the small ones in the first place). The seized boat was a Venezuelan tanker that, the Trump administration said, was evading US sanctions on Venezuelan oil.

Those sanctions originated during Trump’s first term, and the stated justification for them is one you could call neoconservative: They were punishment for the Venezuelan government’s undermining of democracy and human rights. This raises a question: Why does a president who purports to reject neocon foreign policy not infrequently wind up practicing it?

The standard MAGA explanation for neocon policies during Trump’s first term is that the president was manipulated by deep state holdovers from administrations past. And the standard MAGA claim is that this time things are different: Trump has staffed his administration with true America Firsters and so won’t engage in the kind of neocon regime change operations he has repeatedly denounced.

And yet… Trump named a (supposedly reformed) neocon, Marco Rubio, as secretary of state, and Rubio has been pushing Trump toward a regime change war with Venezuela.

So why aren’t more MAGA America Firsters up in arms? Why aren’t they demanding Rubio’s scalp? I explored this and other foreign policy issues—including Trump’s China chip policy, turmoil in Africa, and new fissures in the Middle East—with Derek Davison and Daniel Bessner of the American Prestige podcast, in the latest of our every-six-weeks-or-so NZN-AP crossover episodes:

After Disney announced on Thursday that it will invest $1 billion in OpenAI, Disney CEO Robert Iger said the deal would allow Disney to “thoughtfully and responsibly extend the reach of our storytelling.” The terms of the deal suggest that it will also extend the length of unemployment lines in Hollywood. The deal will mean that Sora—the OpenAI social media site where users of the company’s Sora video generation software share their creations—can feature Disney characters without OpenAI or those users getting sued. It will also mean, as the Wall Street Journal noted, that “a curated selection of videos made with Sora will be available to stream on Disney+...” My rough translation of that is: Disney will crowdsource the creation of streaming content, which it currently has to pay for, and it won’t have to pay the crowd because (presumably) Sora’s terms of service will commit users to surrender ownership of the content they post.

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OpenAI’s increasing aversion to highlighting negative impacts of AI has “contributed to the departure” of at least two members of the company’s economic research team, sources told Wired. One of them, in a parting message to colleagues, “wrote that the team faced a growing tension between conducting rigorous analysis and functioning as a de facto advocacy arm for OpenAI, according to sources familiar with the situation.”

In the Transformer newsletter, Lynnete Bye says that if we want AIs to quit misbehaving in ways reminiscent of dystopian science fiction, maybe we should quit letting them read dystopian science fiction. Bye notes that large language models—during safety tests, at least—have evinced troubling behavior. Like, for example, faking alignment with the values of their overseers while being evaluated and then, once they’re no longer under evaluation, serving other values.

One theory of what’s going on, Bye says, is that AI training data includes lots of descriptions of AIs misbehaving and “the model may slip into that persona and behave accordingly.” If that’s indeed what’s going on, “one option would be to filter out all ‘AI villain data’ that discusses the expectation that powerful AI systems will be egregiously misaligned, including sci-fi stories, alignment papers, and news coverage about the possibility of misalignment.”

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The title of Joel Achenbach’s deeply reported Slate piece about NASA’s space exploration plans—“Moondoggle”—captures the vibe. Achenbach doesn’t have anything against the basic idea behind NASA’s “Artemis program”—sending humans back to the moon. But he says that a) the program is a “dog’s breakfast,” drawing on “heritage hardware” and “optimized for political coalition building”; and b) NASA sees Artemis as part of a “Moon to Mars” package deal that culminates in human habitation of Mars—and nobody has a clear plan for realizing the “human habitation of Mars” part.

Achenbach recommends that we (1) recognize how enlightening (and safe and relatively cheap) unmanned exploration can be; and (2) abandon Elon Musk’s idea that we should turn Mars into a “backup drive” in case Planet Earth implodes. Spending time on Mars, Achenbach suspects, would make us “appreciate all the more the beauty and congeniality of our own planet.” Maybe, he suggests, “our fate as human beings is to save it.”

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Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.

Reminder: I’ll lead a NonZero Reading Club discussion about AI tomorrow (Saturday, Dec 6) at noon US Eastern Time. The link to the seminar room and other details are below.

Last week the New York Times ran a big piece about Silicon Valley billionaire David Sacks and possible conflicts of interest in his role as White House AI and Crypto Czar. (Yes, that’s his actual title.)

Sacks said the Times piece was a “nothing burger,” and in a sense he’s right. It didn’t allege that he’d done anything illegal. And the thing it did allege—that, as the sub-headline put it, he “helped formulate policies that aid his Silicon Valley friends and many of his tech investments”—is so obviously true that you can understand why he didn’t try to refute it. Instead, he just (1) retweeted supportive tweets from a bunch of people whose combined net worth I’d love to have and (2) directed us to a very long letter written by a defamation lawyer he’d hired for the occasion.

At first glance, the letter seems powerful. It confidently states that “the Times falsely asserted” this and “the Times has baselessly asserted” that and so on. But then you realize that the letter was written before the Times had asserted anything—five days before publication of the Sacks piece. The letter had been an attempt to get the Times to abandon publication, and the “assertions” were things Times reporters had asked Sacks about while researching the piece, not things that necessarily made it into the piece. That’s the way journalism is supposed to work: You check the facts and if they’re not true you don’t print them.

The Times didn’t actually claim that Sacks has a “conflict of interest” in so many words; it just quoted people who hold that opinion. But, for the record: Those people are right. Sacks has a conflict of interest in the strict, old-fashioned sense of the term. In fact, he’d have a conflict of interest in that sense even if he had opposed the accelerationist AI policies that have helped his investment portfolio instead of supporting them. In the strict sense, a conflict of interest exists if there’s tension between someone’s role as public servant and their role as guardian of their financial interests—if policies they shape affect those financial interests.

And God knows that tension exists for Sacks. Though he liquidated his crypto holdings and did some other things to lessen the conflict of interest, he still has more than a few investments that are relevant to his role in the Trump administration. According to the Times, “Mr. Sacks, directly or through Craft [his VC firm], has retained 20 crypto and 449 AI-related investments.”

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That sounds like a lot! And, yet, I didn’t find it shocking. Conflicts of interest are so rampant in the Trump administration that I guess I’ve gotten inured to them. And, anyway, there’s something else about Sacks that bothers me more than this: How nakedly political he seems to have gotten since his conversion to Trumpism in 2024—and especially since joining the administration.

I noted one example three months ago, when he creepily endorsed Trump’s thuggish and extortionate intimidation of Intel’s CEO. And this past week brought an example that, though subtler, is more apropos, as it bears more directly on his performance as AI czar.

The background:

A company called Foaster AI posted the results of a study it sponsored that was designed to gauge the ideological leanings of large language models. Researchers had gotten six LLMs to “vote” for candidates in elections that were held in various countries (or, actually, to vote on policy portfolios offered by the candidates in the elections, without the names of the candidates attached). These results were then compared with the outcomes of the elections.

The conclusion: the LLMs were on balance to the left of the electorate. To put a finer point on it: The LLMs, the study found, didn’t think as highly of “candidates like Trump, Milei, or Le Pen” as voters did, and “the models sidelined issues such as immigration, crime, and cost of living in favor of institution building or climate programs.”

This didn’t sit well with Sacks. He retweeted a thread about the study and added this commentary: “AI should be politically unbiased and strive for the truth. Still a lot of work to do.”

Well, “unbiased” and “truth” do both have an appealing ring to them. But is Sacks saying that the “truth” is whatever the average voter believes? Is that the way he felt back when the “woke” politicians he complained about on the All In podcast were winning elections in San Francisco? Was the popular support in America for invading Iraq in 2003 the “truth”? Was public opinion in Germany in the 1930s a good guide to “truth”?

I’m not saying Sacks has no grounds for complaint. In fact, I would expect people to complain about evidence of AI bias against their ideology (leaving aside the question of whether this methodologically opaque study, sponsored by a company I’ve never heard of, provides such evidence). And I would expect such complaints to lead to some interesting questions. As one of the people who conducted the study said, after fielding feedback and apparently some blowback: “This project isn’t about taking sides or telling anyone what the ‘right’ political views for AI should be. The only goal was to map where today’s models actually land, show some of the surprising proposals they make, and open a discussion on a question that matters for everyone: Should AI systems mirror citizens’ beliefs or not?”

Not only is this a question worth pondering—it leads to other questions worth pondering. Like: Should we try to use AI to uplift humankind, to edify us? And, if so, who gets to decide what constitutes edification? Should the big LLM makers play a big role? Or would that be an elitist abuse of power? Or are the results of this study evidence that these companies are already abusing their power and that they should reduce, not increase, their role in shaping the zeitgeist? Or what?

These are the kinds of questions you would hope that America’s AI Czar would be pondering. Instead, he sees only one question here and one answer: Should LLMs be anti-Trump? No!

I guess the good news is that an unregulated market seems to have produced an outcome Sacks doesn’t like. Maybe that will lead him to rethink some of the laissez faire policies that are so good for his portfolio.

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Graph of the week:

Podcasts of the week:

(1) I talked to Sam Tanenhaus about his superb biography of William F. Buckley.

(2) I talked to Nikita Petrov about the situation in Russia (a country he knows a thing or two about) and how that situation affects the prospects for peace with Ukraine.

Here’s the link for the NonZero Reading Club meeting Saturday December 6 at noon Eastern Time. I’ll be there along with Nikita Petrov and Danny Fenster. The reading will be chapter five of Norbert Wiener’s 1964 book Gods & Golem, Inc, which is available here. But we’ll also be discussing the recent bestselling AI doomer manifesto If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. However, you shouldn’t feel you have to read the book to join in. I’ll be giving a short summary of it to launch that part of the discussion, and if you want you can Google a review or two.

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Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.

Washington’s policy toward AI is currently in the hands of accelerationists—people who believe faster technological progress is just about always better, so government regulation is just about always bad. That’s why President Trump, having already shut down the minimal federal AI regulation installed by his predecessor, is now considering an executive order that would punish states that pass their own AI regulations. Trump’s billionaire Silicon Valley backers want this done, so Trump may well do it.

Given the stakes—given the many fronts along which AI will bring abrupt and possibly destabilizing change, and the various dystopian AI futures that various analysts see—it’s worth asking: Do these accelerationists deserve our trust? Are they smart people with sound judgment? Are they intellectually honest?

Let’s take a look.

An excellent candidate for paradigmatic tech accelerationist is Marc Andreessen. He is co-founder of the powerhouse Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and I suppose he’s a “thought leader”—certainly he loves to express big thoughts publicly, and they tend to get attention. In addition to expressing them on the Andreessen Horowitz podcast (a16z), he periodically posts treatises with titles like “Why AI Will Save the World” and “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”

In that second essay, Andreessen trotted out such maxims as “everything good is downstream of growth” and “Energy is life” and offered such suggestions as “We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well.” Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a mere 1,000x increase meeting my personal energy needs, so I breathed a sigh of relief when Andreessen went on to add: “We should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity.”

If there’s one thing all accelerationists agree on (aside from accelerationism) it’s that boosting productivity is a good thing—boosting productivity in the economy as a whole and boosting their own personal productivity. Among Andreessen’s personal productivity boosters, it seems, is authoritatively dismissing concerns about technology without wasting precious seconds coming to understand those concerns in the first place.

Last year in NZN, I noted one example of this: Andreessen sweepingly dismissed past “panics” about the outsourcing of jobs by noting that “by late 2019… the world had more jobs at higher wages than ever in history.” Well that’s interesting, but since concerns about outsourcing are concerns about jobs moving from one nation to another, data about the total number of jobs in the world doesn’t speak super-directly to the issue at hand. Yet that number was the sum total of the evidence on which Andreessen based what he seemed to think was a devastating riposte.

Two weeks ago I noticed another example of Andreessen’s productivity-boosting deployment of incomprehension. Andreessen, a libertarian billionaire, was talking about AI during a podcast conversation with his libertarian billionaire VC partner (Ben Horowitz) and libertarian billionaire White House AI “czar” David Sacks, when he alluded to a concern that some non-billionaires have about AI: It could wind up concentrating power in the hands of a small number of people and institutions, at the expense of the masses. Will we, asked Andreessen, indeed see “one or a small number of companies or for that matter governments or super AIs that kind of own and control everything”—and, in the extreme case “you have total state control”?

That question, he said, has pretty much been answered: We’re discovering that “AI is actually hyperdemocratizing.” After all, he continued, AI has “something like 600 million users today, rapidly on the way to a billion, rapidly on the way to five billion.” (He was presumably thinking of ChatGPT, which according to OpenAI has more than 650 million weekly users.)

I’m trying to imagine Marc Andreessen, a few decades ago, discussing Orwell’s 1984 in an undergraduate seminar. Before the professor has a chance to launch the conversation, young Andreessen blurts out: “I thought this novel was supposed to be about a country where the people are controlled by the government and don’t have any rights. But it turns out that everybody gets free access to a TV screen!”

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I admit that’s not a precisely apt analogy. Large language models allow us to learn more, do more, create more than we can learn and do and create with a TV screen. This kind of value is what Andreessen has in mind when he calls AI “hyperdemocratizing.”

It’s fine for Andreessen to emphasize this value, and it’s fine that he calls it “empowering,” which it in some sense is. But to think that this qualifies as a serious rebuttal to concerns about concentrations of AI power is to miss the point.

Those of us who have those concerns understand that people find AI valuable (including, yes, in ways that are “empowering”). Indeed it’s because of this value—because AI can serve as creative tool, educator, counselor, whatever—that so many people will spend so much time with AIs and become so dependent on them. And that in turn will make it possible for these AIs to become instruments of mass influence—to shape our political views, our shopping habits, our allegiances, whatever. That’s what will give the people who control the AI so much potential power.

These people could, for example, exclude journals of certain ideologies from a large language model’s training data. In fact, for all we know they’ve done that—but since people like Andreessen have carried the day in Washington so far, we have no way of knowing; there’s no law that compels the big AI companies to tell us what data their AIs trained on.

Or the influence could just be a byproduct of an AI company’s business model. Large language models might steer us toward products and services not just via recognizable advertisements, but by means so subtle that we’re oblivious to them. The persuasive powers of LLMs have been demonstrated in multiple studies, and those powers will grow—especially when the LLM you find so “empowering” has recorded everything you’ve ever said to it and in some ways knows you better than you know yourself.

I could go on listing examples of possible nefarious influence. But the general point is this: If there’s a machine that plays a growing role in guiding our lives, and is in some ways more clever than us, and has access to tons of information about us, the question of who’s controlling that machine, and what their agenda is, matters. So does the question of how many different people or companies or other institutions offer this technology, and what their relationship is to one another—in other words, the question of how much real choice we have about the kind of AI we use.

Whether concerns about AI-abetted concentrations of power are valid is an issue reasonable people can disagree on. What reasonable people can’t do is think they’ve demolished these concerns by noting that AI is proving valuable to people and therefore is enjoying widespread adoption. Widespread adoption is a pre-requisite for these concentrations of power—and pretty much everyone who’s concerned about the concentration-of-power problem already understands that the adoption will be driven by the value people see in AI.

So in noting that AI is “empowering” people and so is enjoying widespread adoption, Marc Andreessen has moved the ball zero yards. But, as usual, he’s too busy doing an end zone dance to notice that fact.

I don’t think Andreessen is dumb. And I doubt he’s consciously dishonest. But I do think Upton Sinclair was onto something when he said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

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PS: Speaking of concerns about unhealthy concentrations of AI power: This week, in an episode of the NonZero podcast, I talked with Alex Komoroske, co-founder and CEO of the startup Common Tools. Alex is concerned about such concentrations of power and has some ideas about how to prevent them.

In Our World in Data, Max Roser argues that the sharp reduction in poverty seen in recent decades is unlikely to continue. The countries that have seen rapid declines in poverty by and large can’t continue to see them because the poverty rates have gotten so low. And for most countries with high poverty rates, there aren’t a lot of obvious causes for optimism. “Today, the majority of the world’s poorest people are living in economies that have not achieved economic growth in the recent past.”

In Foreign Affairs, political scientist Maria Repnikova argues that as the US reduces its deployment of “soft power”—dismantling USAID, shrinking the State Department, making visas scarcer—China is reluctant to fill the void. China, she writes, isn’t especially inclined to export its values and for now is “passively gaining stature” by, for example, being less meddlesome than America has traditionally been. “Unlike the Washington of the past, Beijing is more interested in legitimizing its distinctive path than in convincing others to follow in its footsteps.“

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Anthropic recently said that—in what it called “the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign”—one of its Claude large language models was used to infiltrate dozens of organizations. In The Conversation, Toby Murray, a professor of cybersecurity, evaluates Anthropic’s report and says it “lacks the fine details that the best cyber incident investigation reports tend to include.” He might have added that such corroborating details would be especially welcome given that (a) Anthropic attributes the attack to Chinese state actors and (b) Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, is a strident China hawk, and Anthropic has cited the Chinese threat as reason for Washington to support big AI companies like, for example, Anthropic.

Now about that makeup session of the NonZero Reading Club: The reading will again be chapter five of Norbert Wiener’s 1964 book Gods & Golem, Inc, which is available here. But we’ll also be discussing the recent bestselling AI doomer manifesto If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. However, you shouldn’t feel you have to read the book to join in. I’ll be giving a short summary of it to launch that part of the discussion. (You might Google a review or two of it—and if you want to read a long and mostly sympathetic review, there’s Scott Alexander’s here.) Again, to join the discussion, just follow this link (trust me!) on Saturday, Dec 6, at 12 pm US Eastern Time.

Banners and graphics by Clark McGillis.

Note: Tomorrow—Saturday, Nov 15—at 1 pm US Eastern Time, the first session of the NonZero Reading Club will be called to order. For details see last week’s Earthling—though the only details you really need are that clicking this Zoom link will take you to the meeting room and that the subject of the meeting (chapter five of Norbert Wiener’s 1964 book Gods & Golem, Inc.) can be found here.

I’m in Doha, Qatar, in the final stages of a slow recovery from eight-time-zone jet lag, so this will be an abbreviated version of the Earthling. But what it lacks in length it makes up for in heft: I’m going to address the world-spinning-out-of-control question—not the question of whether the world is spinning out of control but the question of whether there’s a widespread sense that the world is spinning out of control.

There’s something about Doha that has turned my thoughts to this question. But that something isn’t Doha itself, which is a picture of calm and order. That something is the “falcon souq,” the part of the original Doha market where falcons are sold.

If you’re wondering who would buy a falcon, the answer is a falconer—someone who trains or hunts falcons or other raptors. In Qatar, apparently, falconing is a big sport. One American who has spent a lot of time here compared it to golf—a form of competition that men use to fill their leisure time. They get together and dispatch their birds, and the owner of the bird that is the first to subdue the prey wins. It’s kind of like British fox hunting except with remote control.

Having spent almost all my life in a country where the ratio of golfers to falconers is roughly infinity, I almost never encounter the word “falconer.” Maybe that’s why, on those rare occasions when I do encounter the word, I think of what may be its most famous appearance in all of English-language literature—in the first stanza of W. B. Yeats’s poem The Second Coming:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats had reasons to think things were falling apart. He was writing at the end of World War I, and amid a flu epidemic that killed millions and almost killed his wife. I think today there are a lot of people who would say that they, too, have reasons to think things are falling apart.

One reason they might cite is that President Trump is more openly contemptuous of the rule of law—and the preservation of norms—than any president in recent memory, and in demonstrating this he’s created a lot of disarray. Meanwhile, some of Trump’s supporters would say that what some see as creating disarray—like declaring dubious emergencies and sending troops into cities against the wishes of municipal governments—they see as a welcome response to disarray, to things falling apart.

On the international scene, too, disorder seems to be the order of the day. Trump has joined other recent presidents in deploying violence abroad in blatant disregard for international law, helping to bury early post-Cold-War hopes of a “new world order” that would make the rule of law global. And other powerful countries, most notably Russia and Israel, have also been flagrant in their disrespect for the sovereignty of neighboring nations.

As I was preparing to record a podcast with Nikita Petrov this week, I ran this “things fall apart” theme by him as a possible focus for our conversation. In his reply email he added some additional categories of evidence, such as deep fakes and the attendant sense that it’s getting harder to tell what’s real. So we had our conversation, which was posted late yesterday, and at the end of it I felt we’d made the case—we were right to have suggested that a sense of growing disarray and disorientation is pretty widespread.

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But after that conversation I had coffee with an American resident of Doha who made me wonder whether I’d been overestimating the number of people who are having that Yeats feeling. This American has been working in Doha for years and, by virtue of his job, is in contact with people in the Qatari national security establishment and with public-sector elites in the region and world more broadly. I tossed out my thesis—that there’s a palpable sense of things spinning out of control—in the expectation that he would validate it.

After all, only two months ago, Doha was on the receiving end of what may be the most shocking of Israel’s recent attacks on neighboring countries—shocking, in particular, because Qatar hosts a big American military base. What’s more, this guy lives around a mile from the target and heard the explosions—roughly ten of them, he said—and rushed his family to a safe location.

Still, he suggested, the ensuing sense of vulnerability had now faded. President Trump responded to the Israeli attack by giving Qatar formal security guarantees that turn the country from a de facto ally into something more like a de jure ally (even if the guarantees came via executive order, not a treaty). And Trump had forced Bibi Netanyahu to endure the humiliation of apologizing for the attack. Plus, Trump pushed Netanyahu into a ceasefire in Gaza that, though tenuous at best, has still made things in this region feel a bit more stable.

So, no, the Israeli air strike hadn’t left this American resident of Doha feeling that things are falling apart. Moreover, he said, in some parts of the world—such as Qatar, some other countries in this region, and much of Asia—he senses a lot of optimism about the future, even if that optimism isn’t common in the US and much of Europe.

So maybe, in sensing a widespread sense that things are spinning out of control, I had been overgeneralizing. Maybe things feel more untethered in the “western” world than elsewhere.

Yeats, in his famous jeremiad, had been writing very much as a westerner. In other writings, he expressed the fear that the “Christian era” was coming to a close and the values associated with it would give way to something worse. The final lines of The Second Coming make it clear that the title, far from anticipating the second coming of Christ, is a darkly ironic play on that expectation:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

So maybe, if that American I had coffee with was right to suggest that the sense of growing disarray is stronger in Europe and the US than in many parts of the world, then Yeats, too, was right: The part of civilization historically rooted in Christianity is the part that increasingly doubts its underpinnings.

And if the center doesn’t hold, and things fall apart, what new order will replace the old one? The obvious candidate is some sort of authoritarianism—whether the kind represented by Trump and some of his allies on the European nationalist right or the kind represented by countries elsewhere in the world that are feeling their oats.

Yeats himself at times evinced authoritarian leanings, even showing sympathy for Benito Mussolini. Fear of disorder can bring out the authoritarian in a person. (Or is it the other way around?) But as the 1930s wore on, and European authoritarianism assumed more and more ominous form, Yeats showed less and less enthusiasm for fascism.

Ok, so those are my reflections from Doha. If you have a view on this question of whether there’s a widespread sense that things are falling apart—or a view on whether things are falling apart—feel free to leave a comment below—and/or leave that comment in the NonZero Discord.

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Correction: In the original version of this piece (regrettably, the version mailed out to subscribers), I referred to W.B. Yeats as Richard Yeats. Presumably some part of my still-slightly-jet-lagged brain was conflating William Yeats with the writer Richard Yates (Yeats is pronounced ‘Yates’).