Did you do all the harvesting and planting and

all that? He started a spraying business and he started a coal yard, which became an excavating business, which became a couple of car washes, which became a small modular storage business with boxcars.

And then in 1990, he really changed my life because I actually thought I was going to get into excavating and possibly into agriculture.

Um, and I was 14, I was in high school and I worked with my dad doing excavating.

So you do septic tanks, you know, uh, sand filters, that sort of stuff in the mid Midwest.

And then, uh, we did the AT&T line across with a ditch, which across Illinois and did a project for Illinois state, uh, the Pierre Marquette state park.

So I worked in excavating with my dad in high school on the side, and then he sold it in at 14.

on the river that's right down there she loves the 80s

What are the scenarios that you're-

I don't think you have to be a science fiction novelist or a filmmaker to imagine scenarios where it could wreak a lot of havoc.

For one thing, AI is increasingly controlling the systems that keep us alive.

It's gonna be controlling the electricity system, the payment system, the, uh, education system.

It's gonna be embedded in the military.

You could imagine a world where agents pursue a goal of their own, a goal that we once gave it, but we've now diverged from it in some way, and they pursue that continually in a way that works against human interest.

These are ways that these systems could fail simultaneously.

What do you make of, of that argument?

And so I think when people are, are looking at the world of AI, it's always like, what's the, what's the wrinkle here? [laughs] What's the g- what's the gimmick? What am I not getting? So it's like, why would Anthropic be funding a super PAC fighting to get the government to regulate Anthropic?

Chris, great to be with you.

My day job is running a group called America's Responsible Innovation.

We're the largest group in DC arguing for regulation of the technology, reasonable guardrails around it, and we got started because OpenAI and some other venture capitalists were gonna try to really buy the election.

And we were out raising money from all kinds of people, and to their great credit, and we are happy to take contributions from lots of people, and Anthropic offered to do that.

So I do think Anthropic honestly believes of the dangers inherent in this technology.

They believed in our mission, which is fundamentally we need a democratic approach, small D democratic approach to AI to make sure this works for all of us.

What do you say to people who think this is either sort of delusional and apocalyptic or, and this is related, some kind of weird reverse psychology marketing scheme, right? That if you talk about how dangerous it is, it, it tells everyone that you're powerful and they should invest in your company.

Brad, what's your response to that critique, this idea that we're just gonna have a patchwork of different state laws? Obviously, if you're OpenAI or Anthropic, it's very difficult to deal with fifty very different laws if you're trying to move quickly in building your, your new models.

I think I have several responses to that.

The first is the internet was much more monolithic than AI is.

As I mentioned, you know, AI is giving me my Spotify recommendations, the next movie to watch on Netflix.

Flock is using it in some ways to, to understand the surveillance.

So all the things Adam talks about are open to a massive federal bill.

You have something like the EU AI Act on steroids.

politicization.Brad, how do you shift public sentiment around AI? Do you think that's even possible?

And I'm wondering from your perspective, do you think that higher ed in general, because of course there are differences, is being sort of honest with itself about how disruptive this technology is? Are they mostly just sort of trying to graft AI into their existing university model, university systems, that kind of thing?

I think higher education has not been honest with itself for a very long time.

And AI has actually just kind of brought it to the forefront, but it didn't develop, it didn't create any new problems.

It just like heightened and made this more aware.

So I'll give you an example.

To me, higher education is actually a bundle of goods.

There's the human capital formation.

And I think a lot of people would wonder, well, what's so dangerous about preemption if the alternative is that kind of messy patchwork of 50-state regulation, or maybe that's just a false choice I'm presenting?

So talking first about the military, uh, and, and defense, just given your work at the Pentagon, what's your kind of level of fear about AI and the use of military readiness and offensive and defensive operations? Are you concerned about the application of AI in, in military affairs?

I am concerned.

Again, it has some great use cases in the military.

So imagine you're getting terabytes of, of intelligence, you know, imagery coming in from all the drones, all the signals intelligence from all the collection devices, you know, all the human intelligence reports.

You know, all this kind of intelligence coming in, no human can assimilate it all into a common operating picture.

AI can do that.

I think that's a great use case for it, and that was actually the original use case of Project Maven.

How do you work within that context where there is that level of fear, not just among the general public, but being expressed even by the titans of this industry? And how does that impact the balance you're trying to strike between leveraging the good uses of this technology while also protecting our, our interests and our security?

So what's your take on what happened there?

So I'm just speculating a bit about what happened there and kind of what I understand from talking to people and knowing the AI culture a bit.

And it is, you know, the people who make this, who are, you know, truly a few hundreds of people who are at the cutting edge of making these models.

You know, they're enormously talented at what they do, brilliant people, strong moral convictions many ways about how AI should be used.

Most of the people I know who are at the cutting edge, who are probably going to become unbelievably wealthy from this, they didn't do it for the money.

They did it for the mission.

And in some ways, that's Anthropic's great success, I think, as a company watching it from the outside.

And do you think this is a gap? I mean, is it something that we should have?

So can you just start by taking me through that path that you've had and how it brought you to the work that you're doing today?

When I was a young person I really wanted to be involved in politics.

I believed it was the most important profession one could pursue and so I was elected to Congress in my early thirties, um, and served two terms there before running unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate.

And so since then I've tried to do interesting work, always trying to find what to me was the most important challenge our country faced and to try to find a way to get into it.

I was really lucky that probably almost a decade ago now I became interested in artificial intelligence and started tracking it a bit.

I'd go to conferences, get invited to things.

And of course as it's, um, become more prominent over the last three or four years, um, I've been kind of at the front and center of a lot of the work.

Can you tell me a little bit about how you wear each of those hats and how your work with each of those organizations differs and maybe overlaps as well?

Absolutely.Do you think AI's a good analogy for this, Brad?

Um, perhaps.

I mean, I do think Charles is completely right, and something I talk a lot about in AI policy, that we don't have to accept a deterministic future.

We can control it, right? You can go backwards, you can put things back in the bottle.

Those things do happen, um, and I think, um, I often, uh, find myself in opposition to people from Silicon Valley or kind of a very facile view of technology that just says like, "Hey, it's going to happen, right? We just have to, to learn to live with it.

Perhaps mitigate some of the damage it might cause." No, we don't.

There are examples of technologies that we've chosen as a, well, global society not to pursue, think of cloning or human germline editing.

Brad, when you think about what you're trying to do with Americans for Responsible Innovation, are there other substances or other innovations that you take lessons from as having done it right?

Yeah.

... it's a great question.

You know, we do see companies like Duolingo and Shopify say that before you post a job, you have to assert that AI cannot do it.

As you mentioned, the unemployment rate for new college graduates is larger, higher than the national average.

The Washington Post recently said that it's the worst market for software engineers since 1979.

We hardly even had computers in wide dissemination.

So, I do think the jobs are going to go away.

Is that a possibility?