Welcome to the Rotary E-Club of Silicon Valley.

Thank you so much, Roshan and fellow Rotarians for the warm introduction and giving us the opportunity to speak with you today.

My name is Emily Benson.

I'm a project assistant with the Record Clearance Project and got started back with the project back in 2024 as a student.

And I'm very happy to be here as a staff member.

Thank you.

And again, I'm very thankful to have the opportunity to have your ears for a few minutes today.

Yes, and with that, we will get started.

If the judges do rule in favor of the government, what sort of precedent do you think that would set? As you mentioned, Anthropix really targeting consumers, but for companies that are trying to get dual use with the consumer market and government contracts, would this basically mean that government agencies like the Pentagon could determine how these companies build their software?

We have to take this anthropic U.S. government situation in a broader context.

And if you look back at the past 12 months, the U.S. government has taken highly unusual steps, many of which include pursuing and acquiring equity stakes in private sector companies.

This includes MP materials.

IBM, Intel, these each have different reasons or substantiations for why the government sought interference.

In the case of Intel, it was mostly a stabilization move.

For IBM, it was a shot in the arm that could give longer longevity to its quantum facilities.

as you alluded to we've seen anthropic get squeezed again after the commerce department recently forced the company to pull its new fable and mythos models offline because of a potential cyber security risk we keep seeing this back and forth between the company and the administration is this just another illustration to you of the government trying to actively control some of these products I mean, if the government can step in and use legal means to stop a product rollout, what does that mean for AI development?

These machines print circuits onto silicon at a scale that's almost impossible to picture, but Emily did give it a go.

The ASML optical system relies on Zeiss mirrors, which are polished to a smoothness of less than one atom's thickness.

So to put that into perspective, if mirrors were blown up to the size of something much larger, let's say Germany, the tallest imperfection would only be one millimeter high.

A Trumpf laser could easily hit a golf ball on the moon, so we are talking about extraordinarily advanced science in order to push the limits of physics to right up against what's actually possible in the universe.

So a handful of governments decide whether China gets to buy these machines, and that's exactly the fight right now, and Emily warns that if it happens, it's not just China that could get hurt.

Yeah, so if they can't sell to China, the most immediate impact will be Chinese retaliation against our economies.

China has tremendous control over the raw material or finished product inputs that go into our economies.

This could cause something that looks and feels like the COVID-19 supply chain crunches.