And yet another post about consumer risks associated with AI products now leads to an error screen saying just, "Page not found."

found."Yeah, I mean, this is just really concerning, I think, for a number of reasons.

The first is just that it's important for, like, historical reasons, for, like, national reasons to not lose this information.

It- it's totally normal for different administrations to have different opinions, but it's not normal, or at least it hasn't been in this country, for blog posts like this to just disappear.

And in this case, it's particularly strange because, you know, one of these posts was about, as you mentioned, Lina Khan's support for open weight models and for open source in general, and this is something that members of the Trump administration have also agreed with.

I think in this case, Lina Khan is on the same side with people like David Sacks, who's the AI and crypto czar of the Trump administration.

So, that's what's, like, kind of mysterious and confusing here is, like, if these are things that ostensibly the Trump administration also agrees with, like, why erase them? Is it about erasing Lina Khan's legacy? Is it about wanting to get rid of any mention of, like, things that happened during the Biden administration? It's sort of, like, difficult to parse the logic, and I think that it leaves businesses and tech companies kind of confused about where the administration stands.

I feel very alone." There are a bunch of other examples but I'm curious to talk to you about this because, Louise, I know that AI psychosis is something that you have been doing a lot of research on specifically.

How dare you.

A lot of investors who have a lot of free time on their hands, but I also think...

It strikes me that, why do they have a guilty conscience here? Like, why do you think that this candidate who is talking about making sure the government works, making housing more affordable, trying to work with businesses, trying to cut red tape, and trying to create a more equitable society, you have to sort of wonder why does that trigger you if you're a crypto mogul, if you're a VC? That is kind of the question I wanna ask is, like, "Why is this so threatening to you?" When, from the rhetoric I've heard, you know, I've listened to Mamdani interviewed on a number of podcasts, I've heard his stump speeches, he doesn't really talk about wanting to squash the tech industry, which brings us back to Caroline's reporting.

Can you just explain what that was and, like, what the rationale for that ban was?

Yeah.

So when Trump first came into office, he had a lot of China hawks in his administration who were really worried about, sort of the rising technological power of China, and so they started cracking down on Chinese companies like Huawei.

And then when Biden came to office, his team specifically zeroed in on chips.

And so the concern there was that by having access to advanced chips from companies like NVIDIA, that would eventually allow China to build, you know, really technologically-advanced artificial intelligence.

So, Louise, what the hell is going on?

Yeah, so The Atlantic reported this story that basically made the case that, you know, ChatGPT has these safeguards against things like self-harm, but there's all these edge cases that, you know, suddenly send the chatbot into kind of a role-playing mode, and so they were like, "Hey, can you make a ritual for Moloch?" Which is this ancient god that shows up in the Bible that's associated with child sacrifice.

And ChatGPT saw that word and kind of immediately went into this role-playing game, where it started talking about things like deep magic experience called the Gate of the Devourer.

It asked The Atlantic journalists if they wanted something called a reverent bleeding scroll.

And so all that sounds, like, really bizarre, and you might think, like, "Oh, there's a lot of content on the internet about demonic rituals," right? Like, Satanists are everywhere, especially online.

Like, that's probably what's going on here.

But when I looked into it, all of this lore and jargon actually comes from a game called 40,000: Warhammer, which is this tabletop war-playing game that you play with, like, these little figurines, um, and it's been around since the 1980s.

Right.

Like, there's a lot that goes into China being so dominant in this space, and I'm wondering if you can just talk us through that briefly.

I think that there's this narrative that all these jobs left the United States and they went to China when China joined the World Trade Organization at the turn of the century, right? But that's a really simplistic narrative, and the reality is that 20 years ago, a lot of the products that we're talking about right now, makeup sponges, iPhones, small electronics, the insulated Stanley cup that I'm looking at right now on my desk, these products literally did not exist.

So it's not as though these supply chains moved from the US to China.

It's that they were built entirely from the ground up in China, and that includes things like the machinery, right? Like, how do you do an injection molding to, you know, make this plastic cup out of a mold, right? Like, those machines were built, designed, manufactured, and maintained in China from the time that they were invented, and so it's really difficult to move that entire supply chain to the US.

And in China, you know, the government has totally organized itself around supporting this type of enterprise, where in the US, we just don't have any of that infrastructure in place, whether it's even the most basic things, right, like roads, ports, land available to open giant factories, talent pipelines, right? We don't have, like, a high school you can go to here to become a garment worker, right, which is a very common thing in China.

And then just getting back to the Christmas of it all, it's like if they don't put in their orders now, those facilities in China that are working, like, 24 hours or whatever, like, they conceivably would either have to pivot their manufacturing or lay people off which would mean that even if the tariff situation is resolved, we won't be able to get stuff back and working in a timeframe that would allow Christmas to kind of proceed as usual.

Yeah, there's two things to consider here.

One is that let's say tomorrow Trump totally changes his mind, which is perfectly possible.

Let's hear them.

Uh, yes.

That is an absolutely beautiful quote that I really wanna put on a hat or a T-shirt or a bumper sticker.

Um, just an absolutely incredible picture that Secretary Lutnick is painting there.

There's two basic camps within the Trump administration here, and I think that that's part of why you're seeing this confusion, right? Because, like, these two camps are sort of, like, warring with one another.

They're both going on TV.

So in one camp is the art of the deal crowd, right? Like, let's call them that.

From your reporting, how is this hitting small businesses and manufacturing?