Anthropic Ai CLAUDE
outlier good guy? NOPE 2 PRO REGS? REALLY?
SEE PALANTIR ANTHROPIC ~ MADURO
karen hao coal and clean coal; anthrip is partner in memphis ai plant ~ ej [gerry?!]
===
ACCENTURE AUDIT SAFETY
-=-=
NOT XI BUT SEP DINNER 10 26
-=-=
-=-=
AN KFF 10 26
A cadre of elite techies, financiers, and high-level Trump administration officials have spent a year quietly charting an extraordinary and rapid campaign to persuade Americans to use apps and other artificial intelligence-powered tools to manage their healthcare and medical records.
As that campaign has unfolded, administration officials have granted tech companies an unusual opportunity to nudge the nation’s health department toward a loosely regulated future for AI health apps in which the government reimburses them for services as it does medical professionals.
In February, federal health officials invited those businesses — including tech giants Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI, Apple, and Google — to a listening session on conversational AI products for patients, such as chatbots. Representatives from at least 35 industry organizations attended the meeting held by the Food and Drug Administration, which is responsible for regulating health apps as medical devices. Companies were prompted in advance to explain their AI products and how they access p
MUCH MORE
-=-=
-=-=
10 26 RT LIVELIHOOD
...Timnit, congratulations on the Right Livelihood Award prize. And I’m wondering if we can move right into the content you’ve been most focused on. Your response to President Trump and the world’s wealthiest tech executives signing a voluntary set of safety standards for artificial intelligence this week? If you can talk about your response and what’s happening right now in California, the major meeting that you’re attending?
TIMNIT GEBRU: Well, so, you know, I have been warning that this kind of discussion about the fictional superintelligent machines that don’t exist and the so-called existential risks that they pose has been a ploy for regulatory capture. And I feel like when I saw this meeting announced, with self-policing and self-regulation and relying on the goodwill of these companies to self-regulate, and I — my first thought was that they got what they wanted. You know, this is what they wanted, instead of being held liable through existing laws....
TIMNIT GEBRU: Well, if you speak to any cybersecurity expert, they would tell you that whatever they had in place that they claim to have, the security practices, were laughable. For example, OpenAI was testing the capabilities of their models to find vulnerabilities and exploit them. That is what they trained these models to do, and they were testing the ability of these models to do what they were trained for. But the thing is, if you want to test this and you don’t want to hack other organizations, you should do it in what’s called an air-gapped environment, where there’s no internet access. And so, they did not have a properly air-gapped environment, and so the models ended up being able to have internet access. This is not models going rogue. This is gross incompetence and negligence by a particular company, which actually they could be held criminally liable for.
Lina Khan outlined a whole bunch of ways in which these companies can be currently held liable with current laws. And unfortunately, that’s not what we’re talking about, right? We’re acting like there is some kind of unprecedented thing that has been created for which we have to discuss what to do. But actually, if we did not take these companies’ words for what went wrong, we could have — we could use the legal mechanisms at our disposal to currently hold them accountable.
AMY GOODMAN: Timnit, can you talk about Senator Bernie Sanders’ effort to ban artificial superintelligence? In a recent piece, you described his bill as “well-meaning but ultimately misguided.” Explain.
TIMNIT GEBRU: I think that Bernie Sanders is really leading the left astray, and I’ve been extremely disappointed and, in fact, to be clear, shocked, absolutely shocked, by the kinds of people he’s been surrounding himself with and the kind of advice that he’s been getting.
One of the things that I think people do not realize is that the AI industry is using the exact same playbook from the tobacco and fossil fuel industry. So, for instance, Bernie Sanders has this alliance with Steve Bannon, is very closely working with the Future of Life Institute, which was co-founded by billionaire Jaan Tallinn, the same billionaire, Jaan Tallinn, who’s a leading investor in Anthropic Series A. He led Anthropic Series A. It’s also the same billionaire, Jaan Tallinn, who invests in — invested in a so-called auditing, third-party auditing, organization that claims to audit Anthropic’s models. So, this whole rogue models, you know, agents creating civilizations and all of that lingo came from this very pseudoscientific audit that is by an organization that claims to be a third party, but in fact isn’t, because you see it’s the same investors, the same staff, the same people. So, to the public, it seems like there’s a whole bunch of independent experts coming together, warning about these existential risks, but what is actually happening is regulatory capture. The same way I learned that British Petroleum came up with the term “carbon footprint,” — right? — instead of them being held accountable, now everybody’s conversation about the environment in 2004 got redirected to our individual responsibility and carbon footprint.
So, this is sort of what’s happening in this AI industry. So, instead of Bernie Sanders talking about, for instance, how can we have regulation to prevent the use of these faulty systems, what he’s doing is he’s helping them market their systems as superintelligent, in which case, in my opinion, the real existential risk is like what we saw with the U.S. military almost starting World War III because of the belief that these systems are infallible and actually superintelligent. What we need people to understand is that they are fallible, they’re not superintelligent. And we need to hold corporations liable for unleashing these kinds of error-prone models into the world.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Timnit, could you talk about this idea of yours of stochastic parrots and how it applies to AI, and then respond to the fact that many have said now that that’s an outdated — that that research is outdated because AI has changed so much?...
-=-=
RR AN 9 26 // ALTMAN?
Yesterday (September 14) — just two days after Dario Amodei, the chief executive officer of leading AI firm Anthropic, called for “slowing down” the pace of AI development so guardrails could be put in place that would “greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong” — Trump threw a tantrum:
“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!
In the same post, Trump even hinted that the government might pursue criminal or regulatory penalties against AI companies, such as Amodei’s Anthropic.
“The Trump Administration has stopped AI ‘people’ from doing bad, or potentially bad, ‘things,’ like Dario (Anthropic!), who is now pretending to be a ‘perfect little angel’ — and we will continue to do so!”
Then Trump interrupted a speech being given by Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, at a conference in Los Angeles to say — over a speaker — that worries about AI were “a hoax …. Robots are not going to be taking over the world. That’s not going to happen.”
Trump has called AI data centers “the oil of the next 50 years” and says they are delivering wealth and investment to communities in the U.S. In July he insisted that data centers are “Cash Cows,” creating taxes and jobs that “amount to LIQUID GOLD!”
Trump’s rejection of any regulation of AI or its data centers contrasts with the views of many voters. A March Gallup poll showed that nearly half of those surveyed “strongly oppose” the construction of local AI data centers, including almost 40 percent of Republicans.
Yet Trump remains adamant that nothing should be done. “We can put up guardrails, and we can do this and that, but I think you have a lot of negative forces that are bringing it up,” Trump told reporters Sunday while traveling in Ireland. “And they’re bringing up things that won’t happen.”
Why would Trump be so opposed to regulating AI — even in the face of growing public concern, even with midterm elections just around the corner?
It can’t be that he knows very much about AI.
And it can’t be that Trump loves AI because of what it can do. Yes, he’s used it to make fake photos and videos of himself, but that doesn’t explain his adamant refusal to regulate it.
It can’t be that he’s worried about China catching up to or surpassing the U.S. in AI. China has a small fraction of the data centers America has, and China isn’t poised to leapfrog our technological advantage. Besides, even China is considering imposing guardrails on its AI.
So what explains Trump’s absolute refusal to regulate AI? Could it possibly be that he and his family have personal financial stakes in it?
Indeed, Donald Jr. and Eric Trump have invested substantially in American Data Centers, a firm created to support AI cloud computing and AI infrastructure.
They made these investments soon after their father announced a $40 billion investment pledge in U.S.-based data centers from his business partner Hussain Sajwani, unveiled another $500 billion in planned investments in private-sector AI infrastructure, and signed an executive order rolling back Biden-era policies that took a more cautious approach to AI and directed “the development of an AI Action Plan to sustain and enhance America’s AI dominance.”
The Trump sons also hold advisory roles and ownership stakes tied to Dominari Holdings’s American Ventures fund, which targets AI infrastructure, data centers, and cryptocurrency. American Ventures has reportedly raised more than $1 billion across 21 investment vehicles backing companies tied to AI, crypto, drones, nuclear energy, and data centers.
Donald Jr.’s own investment firm, 1789 Capital, is backing emerging technology companies working in AI and defense. The firm has bought shares in some of the most coveted private companies before many went public, including SpaceX, Anduril, Cerebras, and Reflection AI, often by leveraging their political and business connections to secure a stake or help boost the companies’ sales.
The growth of Donald Jr.’s investment firm has been astonishing. Two years ago it managed a few hundred million dollars. It now oversees more than $3 billion. As of June 30, its main investment fund generated returns of roughly 200 percent, according to a person familiar with the firm’s performance. While still early in its investment cycle, those returns eclipse the average returns of about 21 percent from venture capital firms started in 2023, according to PitchBook, a provider of financial data.
Donald Jr. and Eric’s father seems to be turning his attention away from being president — “I’m getting a little bit tired of politics now,” he said a few days ago — toward things that excite him more, such as his ballroom and triumphant arch, as well as making even more money for his family off his presidency.
But as he focuses on making himself and his family wealthier, he’s leaving the rest of us more vulnerable to AI.
One of the first responsibilities of a new Congress, come January, will be to establish guardrails around AI — assuming that by then Trump can no longer control what Congress does, and that January isn’t too late.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
=-=-=
-=-=
gmail left hook 9 11 26
if Democrats and Republicans take money from billionaires who are promoting AI and Crypto, what hope do you have that once they gain power, they will turn around and hold these destructive, racist, anti-democratic forces accountable and promote regulation?
If you do believe they will actually promote the majority instead of their benefactors, then I have a Trump diploma to sell you for $50,000.
Wonderful.
This week, Anthropic employees are warning that this technology might end humanity. We also know that Anthropic is creating a real-life version of the movie *Minority Report,* where they will stop “pre-crime” and help law enforcement go after activists and anti-AI critics.
Wonderful.
Congress is now investigating a July incident involving OpenAI in which the AI model’s “swarm” of 700 autonomous agents coordinated a hack into Hugging Face’s production infrastructure. However, according to Mother Jones today, this is mostly performative, meant to placate bipartisan anger at reckless capitalists unleashing destructive technology. Most likely, Sam Altman and his cabal of sociopaths will walk away with a slap on the wrist.
Sirota joined me to discuss how fascism will continue to flourish unless Democrats finally embrace an ideology of transformation, instead of restoration, and aggressively combat the broligarchy and super PAC money that is corrupting our world.
...
-=-=-=
---
ref1 am prosp
The Revolving Door Project, aProspect*partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
The past few years have seen a widespread move away from free-market dogma, as policymakers search for new economic perspectives. The election of Joe Biden in 2020 proved to be a crossroads for economic orthodoxy. For the first time in more than a quarter-century, a Democratic administration did not entrust its economic policy exclusively to adherents of Robert Rubin’s philosophy, for whom the solution to any economic issue was usually “Be less of a Democrat.”
Instead, the Biden-Harris administration trusted progressives as a coalition partner, rather than an electoral faction that had to be dealt with, not worked with. The Biden administration attempted true industrial policy for the first time in over a generation, rekindled enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and didn’t shy away from stimulating the economy when it was foundering. And while Biden’s term has been a rousing success on most macroeconomic measures—the electoral loss turned in part on global inflation and the rollback of the temporary pandemic safety net—progressives’ increasing power within Democratic politics has caused some moderates to become enraged that they’re now expected to settle for the position of senior partner, and denied near-total control.
Enter the “abundance agenda,” an attempt to generate new messaging for a new political era in which neoliberalism has fallen rapidly out of favor. The term has been floating around for years, but has more recently become a rallying cry for a whole array of deregulatory causes. The abundance agenda has also offered shelter to effective altruists, who have been searching for a flag to rally around that isn’t associated with one of the largest frauds in world history. The Biden administration has started to usher in a post-neoliberalism, with more heterodox ideas competing for acceptance. Abundance is neoliberalism repackaged for a post-neoliberal world.
*Read more from the Revolving Door Project
What exactly abundance adherents believe varies, of course, but there are a number of broad precepts: building more housing, producing more energy, and fostering more technological innovation. None of these are objectionable goals; the differences with progressives arise, largely, in how to get there. Abundance starts from a “growth above all” mindset. The agenda’s advocates hate residential zoning laws—which, contrary to what they frequently imply, is something they have in common with us and most progressives—but also detest the National Environmental Policy Act, support fracking, oppose tenant protections, and are often deferential to the policy preferences of Big Tech.
While there are efforts to create abundance-oriented factions within both parties—in effect recreating the Republican and Democratic establishments that dominated politics throughout the 1990s and 2000s—the near-term focus is the Democratic Party. And, in their move to stake out partisan influence, abundance is explicitly seeking to weaken progressives. With that in mind, it’s worth understanding who exactly makes up the abundance movement.
The coalition includes many prominent centrist organizations, but also corporate interests and conservatives that MAGA pushed out of power within the Republican Party. Many components of this faction have financial ties to crypto, AI, Big Tech, and oil.
In October 2024, a number of organizations held the Abundance 2024 conference. The event was sponsored by Arnold Ventures, Open Philanthropy, Renaissance Philanthropy, and Stand Together.
- While at times heterodox, Arnold Ventures funds a sizable network of neoliberal think tanks, including $3 million to the libertarian Reason Foundation and at least $1 million to the pro–pension privatization Retirement Security Initiative, which has led to founder John Arnold (a former Enron executive) comparing himself to the Kochs. Arnold serves on the board of Meta. The Arnold Foundation has also spent hundreds of millions of dollars pushing for school privatization.
- Open Philanthropy was co-created by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz. It has close ties to AI firm Anthropic, which was founded by Daniela Amodei, the wife of Open Philanthropy co-founder Holden Karnofsky. Open Philanthropy is also closely associated with effective altruism, donating millions to Sam Bankman-Fried’s favorite philosopher Will MacAskill.
- Renaissance Philanthropy was founded by Tom Kalil with money from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It was started with an explicit focus on AI, and Kalil himself is on the board of Sherpa.ai. Schmidt is also on the board of multiple AI companies and has invested in crypto. He believes that, rather than try to mitigate the damage of climate change, policy should double down on AI in the hopes that it will come up with a solution. Renaissance is extremely close with Schmidt Futures, Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s own foundation. Many Renaissance staff come from Schmidt Futures, including Kalil and their Economic Mobility Fund program director, partnerships manager, chief of staff, operations manager, and head of strategy and partnerships.
- Stand Together is one of the primary institutions within the Koch network, and was created by Charles Koch. Like Arnold Ventures, Stand Together funds the Reason Foundation. It funds a wide range of conservative nonprofits, including the anti-LGBTQ Alliance Defending Freedom, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. Its current CEO, Brian Hooks, is concurrently the president of the Charles Koch Foundation and previously was the executive director of the libertarian Mercatus Center.
---
3 26 ANTHROPIC REFUSED US MASS SURVEILLANCE, USED IN VENEZ AND IRAN TARGET; SUE TRUMP ADMIN BC BLACKLIST SUPPLY CHAIN BS ~ HEGS
nyt dowd 5 26
SIS DANIELA
Amodei, who majored in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said that “studying the humanities is going to be more important than ever. A lot of these models are actually very good at STEM. But I think this idea that there are things that make us uniquely human — understanding ourselves, understanding history, understanding what makes us tick — I think that will always be really, really important.”
Other billionaires and execs — Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase, Ginni Rometty at IBM, Satya Nadella at Microsoft, Mike Novogratz at Fortress Investment Group and Jack Clark at Anthropic — have warned of the need for emotional intelligence and storytelling in a world dominated by A.I.
---
WIKI
Dario Amodei was born in San Francisco, California, in 1983.[1] His sister, Daniela, was born four years later.[1] His father, Riccardo Amodei, an Italian-American leather craftsman from Massa Marittima, Tuscany, died when Amodei was a young adult.[9][10] His mother, Elena Engel, a Jewish American born in Chicago, worked as a project manager for libraries.[1]
Dario grew up in San Francisco and graduated from Lowell High School.[11] He was a member of the USA Physics Olympiad team in 2000.[12] Amodei began college at Caltech, where he worked with Tom Tombrello as one of his Physics 11 students. He later transferred to Stanford University, where he received a bachelor of science degree in physics.[13] He also holds a PhD in biophysics from Princeton University, where he studied electrophysiology of neural circuits.[14] He was a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford University School of Medicine.[15]
Career
From November 2014 until October 2015, he worked at Baidu.[16] After that, he worked at Google.[17] In 2016, Amodei joined OpenAI.[18]
In 2021, Dario and his sister, Daniela, founded Anthropic along with other former senior members of OpenAI.[19][20] The Amodei siblings were among those who left OpenAI due to directional differences.[21]
AN 4 26
The Trump administration is no stranger to the courts. Since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, his actions have resulted in a reported 300 legal challenges, largely due to the issuance of executive orders later deemed "baseless." These repeat court appearances, says legal scholar Kimberly Wehle, are an intentional part of Trump’s mission to make “lawlessness seem normal.”
According to Wehle, a key part of a White House lawyer’s job is to advise the administration on the legality of its efforts and dissuade it from attempting to implement edicts that could be struck down as illegal. But in the case of Trump, the administration has “pumped out a tsunami of baseless, illegal, and even unconstitutional” orders, which have “forced judges to waste precious time stating the obvious — that there’s no justification for much of the legal garbage coming out of this administration.”
Wehle uses the recent example of the administration’s actions toward Anthropic. After the company refused Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s demands to drop safety protocols from its Claude AI that prevent the mass surveillance of Americans and autonomous killing, it was designated a “supply chain risk” and banned from use by federal contractors. A judge, however, ruled that this was illegal.
But what was most incredible, says Wehle, was that “a government lawyer showed up in federal court to defend these indefensible policies” in the first place. The lawyer even went so far as to admit there was no statute to support the government’s actions, and that its proclamation regarding Anthropic had “absolutely no legal effect at all.”
In a functional administration, this would never have made it to court.
“From the standpoint of legal ethics and the rules governing civil proceedings in federal court, legally baseless representations to a court of law constitute grossly sanctionable misconduct,” writes Wehle. “This should raise questions about how any lawyer could enter a federal courtroom and try to defend something so indefensible.”
According to its own principles, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel is supposed to vet orders from the White House to provide “clear, accurate, thoroughly researched, and soundly reasoned” advice. Wehle asserts that it is “tragically evident” that government lawyers are failing to do so.
Instead, it seems that the mission of Trump’s lawyers is merely to “cast a false patina of legality upon his lawlessness.”
---
2 26 ceo caves
hegs threat
2 24? 26 attacks anthropic,take via wartime prod act?
refuse surveill autonomous weapons
---
DUCK 2 26
2 days agoClaude, the AI model developed by Anthropic, was used by the US military during its operation to kidnap Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, the Wall Street Journal revealed on Saturday, a high-profile ...
- [
The Indian Express
How the US Military Secretly Used Anthropic's 'Claude' AI in the ...
1 day agoAnthropic's usage policies say the tool should not be used to support violence, help design weapons, or conduct surveillance. How Claude was used in the Venezuela operation According to the report, the US military accessed Claude through a partnership between Anthropic and Palantir Technologies, a data firm with long-standing defence contracts.
CNBCTV18
Anthropic Claude AI Used in US Military Operation to Capture Nicolas ...
2 days agoUS used Anthropic's Claude during the Venezuela raid, WSJ reports Anthropic's artificialintelligence model Claude was used in the U.S. military's operation to capture former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing people familiar
---
POLITICO
The AI lobby plants its flag in Washington - POLITICO
Jun 6, 2025The AI lobby plants its flag in Washington A new wave of AI companies is lobbying up in Washington, and already getting much of what it wants.
By Mohar Chatterjee 06/06/2025
Top artificial intelligence companies are rapidly expanding their lobbying footprint in Washington — and so far, Washington is turning out to be a very soft target.
Two privately held AI companies, OpenAI and Anthropic — which once positioned themselves as cautious, research-driven counterweights to aggressive Big Tech firms — are now adding Washington staff, ramping up their lobbying spending and chasing contracts from the estimated $75 billion federal IT budget, a significant portion of which now focuses on AI.
They have company. Scale AI, a specialist contractor with the Pentagon and other agencies, is also planning to expand its government relations and lobbying teams, a spokesperson told POLITICO. In late March, the AI-focused chipmaking giant Nvidia registered its first in-house lobbyists.
AI lobbyists are “very visible” and “very present on the hill,” said Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) in an interview at the Special Competitive Studies Project AI+ Expo this week. “They’re nurturing relationships with lots of senators and a handful of members [of the House] in Congress. It’s really important for their ambitions, their expectations of the future of AI, to have Congress involved, even if it’s only to stop us from doing anything.”
This lobbying push aims to capitalize on a wave of support from both the Trump administration and the Republican Congress, both of which have pumped up the AI industry as a linchpin of American competitiveness and a means for shrinking the federal workforce.
They don’t all present a unified front — Anthropic, in particular, has found itself
with conservatives, and on Thursday its CEO Dario Amodei broke with other companies by urging Congress to pass a national transparency standard for AI companies — but so far the AI lobby is broadly getting what it wants.
“The overarching ask is for no regulation or for light-touch regulation, and so far, they’ve gotten that,” said Doug Calidas, senior vice president of government affairs for the AI policy nonprofit Americans for Responsible Innovation.
In a sign of lawmakers’ deference to industry, the House passed a ten-year freeze on enforcing state and local AI regulation as part of its megabill that is currently working through the Senate.
Critics, however, worry that the AI conversation in Washington has become an overly tight loop between companies and their GOP supporters — muting important concerns about the growth of a powerful but hard-to-control technology.
“There’s been a huge pivot for [AI companies] as the money has gotten closer,” Gary Marcus, an AI and cognitive science expert, said of the leading AI firms. “The Trump administration is too chummy with the big tech companies, and basically ignoring what the American people want, which is protection from the many risks of AI.”
Anthropic declined to comment for this story, referring POLITICO to its March submission to the AI Action Plan that the White House is crafting after President Donald Trump repealed a sprawling AI executive order issued by the Biden administration.
OpenAI, too, declined to comment.
This week several AI firms, including OpenAI, co-sponsored the Special Competitive Studies Project’s AI+ Expo, an annual Washington trade show that has quickly emerged as a kind of bazaar for companies trying to sell services to the government. (Disclosure: POLITICO was a media partner of the conference.)
They’re jostling for influence against more established government contractors like Palantir, which has been steadily building up its lobbying presence in D.C. for years, while Meta, Google, Amazon and Microsoft — major tech platforms with AI as part of their pitch — already have dozens of lobbyists in their employ.
What the AI lobby wants is a classic Washington twofer: fewer regulations to limit its growth, and more government contracts.
The government budget for AI has been growing. Federal agencies across the board — from the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy to the IRS and the Department of Veterans Affairs — are looking to build AI capacity. The Trump administration’s staff cuts and automation push is expected to accelerate the demand for private firms to fill the gap with AI.
For AI, “growth” also demands energy and, on the policy front, AI companies have been a key driver of the recent push in Congress and the White House to open up new energy sources, streamline permitting for building new data centers and funnel private investment into the construction of these sites.
Late last year, OpenAI released an infrastructure blueprint for the U.S. urging the federal government to prepare for a massive spike in demand for computational infrastructure and energy supply. Among its recommendations: creating special AI zones to fast-track permits for energy and data centers, expanding the national power grid and boosting government support for private investment in major energy projects.
Those recommendations are now being very closely echoed by Trump administration figures. Last month, at the Bitcoin 2025 Conference in Las Vegas, David Sacks — Trump’s AI and crypto czar — laid out a sweeping vision that mirrored the AI industry’s lobbying goals.
Speaking to a crowd of 35,000, Sacks stressed the foundational role of energy for both AI and cryptocurrency, saying bluntly: “You need power.” He applauded President Donald Trump’s push to expand domestic oil and gas production, framing it as essential to keeping the U.S. ahead in the global AI and crypto race.
This is a huge turnaround from a year ago, when AI companies faced a very different landscape in Washington. The Biden administration, and many congressional Democrats, wanted to regulate the industry to guard against bias, job loss and existential risk.
No longer. Since Trump’s election, AI has become central to the conversation about global competition with China, with Silicon Valley venture capitalists like Sacks and Marc Andreessen now in positions of influence within the Trump orbit. Trump’s director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy is Michael Kratsios, former managing director at Scale AI. Trump himself has proudly announced a series of massive Gulf investment deals in AI.
Sacks, in his Las Vegas speech, pointed to those recent deal announcements as evidence of what he called a “total comprehensive shift” in Washington’s approach to emerging technologies.
But as the U.S. throws its weight behind AI as a strategic asset, critics warn that the enthusiasm is muffling one of the most important conversations about AI: its ability to wreak unforeseen harm on the populace, from fairness to existential risk concerns.
Among those concerns: bias embedded in algorithmic decisions that affect housing, policing, and hiring; surveillance that could threaten civil liberties; the erosion of copyright protections, as AI models hoover up data and labor protections as automation replaces human work.
Kevin De Liban, founder of TechTonic Justice, a nonprofit that focuses on the impact of AI on low income communities, worries that Washington has abandoned its concerns for AI’s impact on citizens.
“Big Tech gets fat government contracts, a testing ground for their technologies, and a liability-free regulatory environment,” he said, of Washington’s current AI policy environment. “Everyday people are left behind to deal with the fallout.”
There’s a much larger question, too, which dominated the early AI debate: whether cutting-edge AI systems can be controlled at all. These risks, long documented by researchers, are now taking a back seat in Washington as the conversation turns to economic advantage and global competition.
There’s also the very real concern that if an AI company does bring up the technology’s worst-case scenarios, it may find itself at odds with the White House itself. Anthropic CEO Amodei said in a May interview that labor force disruptions due to AI would be severe — which triggered a direct attack from, on his podcast, who said that line of thinking led to “woke AI.”
Still, both Anthropic and OpenAI are going full steam ahead. Anthropic hired nearly a dozen policy staffers in the last two months, while OpenAI similarly grew its policy office over the past year.
They’re also pushing to become more important federal contractors by getting critical FedRAMP authorizations — a federal program that certifies cloud services for use across government — which could unlock billions of dollars in contracts.
As tech companies grow increasingly cozy with the government, the political will to regulate them is fading — and in fact, Congress appears hostile to any efforts to regulate them at all.
In a public comment in March, OpenAI specifically asked the Trump administration for a voluntary federal framework that overrides state AI laws, seeking “private sector relief” from a patchwork of state AI bills.
Two months later, the House added language to its reconciliation bill that would have done exactly that — and more. The provision to impose a 10 year moratorium on state AI regulations passed the House but is expected to be knocked out by the Senate parliamentarian. (Breaking ranks again, Anthropic is lobbying against the moratorium.) Still, the provision has widespread support amongst Republicans and is likely to make a comeback.
---