← Bulwark Takes
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All right, I believe we are live. Hey everybody out there watching on YouTube and on Substack. I'm Andrew Egger, White House correspondent for the Bulwark, author of our morning Shots newsletter with Bill Kristol, our editor at large, who's here with me today. We are here for the third and hopefully not final week of our Tuesday morning live show. Coming off of our morning Shots newsletter just went out a little bit ago. This is Morning Chaser, your Tuesday morning chaser. Thanks to you all for coming and tuning in with us and to everybody who's watching later. Bill, how are you doing this morning?
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B
Just fine. And you?
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A
Oh, you know, I'm doing great. What a time to be alive. There's so much going on in the news right now. I have been trying to wedge some content on what seems to me like a very important story about AI and who gets to own it and what the future of it is into the newsletter for several days now. But it keeps being superseded by more immediately pressing concerns. So we're going to do both today. We're going to talk about the more immediately pressing concerns and we'll do a little bit about AI as well. But let's start with.
- [02:02]
B
Let me just interrupt. It's good that Andrew isn't taking it personally every time Sam and I tell him, you know, yeah, that thing could be put off another day, Andrew. It's not really quite as important as the war that's going on. And Andrew, you take it. You take it. You take it well, you take it well. We'll get it in, I think, 2027, 2027. There'll be a good, good lead. Warning shots item on AI DoD anthropic. It's actually a very interesting topic. We will get to it after we do the war first, right?
- [02:29]
A
Yes, that's right. Because as you may or may not have heard or seen by now, we are seemingly sort of at war. We're quasi at war. No war has been declared. But that seems to be increasingly a sort of frippery, a formality these days, at least the way presidents from all over tend to practice it. And especially this one, it has been a little strange to watch the president and the defense secretary not bother to avoid the word war. I mean, they keep talking about us being at war, where usually under these circumstances, presidents have a little bit more they sort of talk around it. They talk about these limited actions that we're taking in these different theaters around the world. But, but let's talk about that, Bill, because you wrote the top for our morning newsletter today. We are, I don't know how many days now actually removed from the strikes. You know, they happened over the weekend and it's now Tuesday morning. And yet even though we have gotten quite a bit more communication now from the White House in the form of the president calling up many random reporters at odd hours to sort of give his stream of consciousness thoughts about the quote, unquote, war, we've had, you know, Marco Rubio out there talking, we've had Mike Johnson out there talking, J.D. vance out there talking about these actions. And yet it does not seem as though we are that much closer to understanding really why we did this or what our objectives are and were in doing it than we than we did over the weekend. So you wrote about some of this this morning. Can you just kind of talk us through the state of play in terms of what the administration is saying about all of this right now?
- [04:01]
B
Yeah. And on the war issue, it was amazing when Senator Mark Wayne Mullen said yesterday on cnn, well, it's not a war. And really, I mean, Pete Hegseth had said that morning that this is a war that President Trump's going to finish. And yes, I don't think the families of the service members who've died fighting this war tragically would appreciate being told, well, it's not really a war. Other presidents have stretched obviously, their ability to use executive power by saying it's not quite a war that requires congressional authorization. To be fair, we haven't done anything this big since 2003. I mean, whatever. And the fight against ISIS and ISIL and different versions of the terror groups in and around Iraq and Syria were genuinely a continuation of what was authorized, I think it's fair to say, in the original AUMF that authorized the war in terror back in at the end of 2001. Obama's intervention in Libya is probably the test case of him pushing the boundaries. But it wasn't nearly at this scale, nothing like this scale. And it was done in conjunction with NATO allies. I still think better to have gone to Congress then. So this is genuinely shocking that he, I mean, I just think we shouldn't. Everyone's been saying correctly, there's a long history of executive overreach and it's been gradual and it's been building up for, for decades. But this is different in the sense that this is really big, it's massive, you know, and it's ongoing. It's not a one off thing like the strike in, in, in, in June where we sort of finished up what Israel was doing to the nuclear program. So a, it's really a war. It's a big war. It's pretty, it for me is totally astonishing and, and unacceptable that they didn't go to Congress. We'll see what Congress does this week in terms of the War Powers Resolution that they need to, I think exert their authority. Even if they defend the war, they should say, okay, well let's, let's could have not qu. Quite retroactively authorize it, but let's signal to the world that we're behind it. As it is, you've got the President conducting this war with unfavorable public opinion polls, no congressional authorization or even expression of support. And I think allies and others can look at it and think, well, what exactly is going on here? And then as you say, the President has given many different explanations, some of which he's walked back. The freedom explanation, helping the Iranian people rise up, which is actually would be a pretty decent explanation for doing what we've done. But that is one that Congress could have, should have authorized if we were going to do it for that reason. Rubio's tried the Imminent Threat Authorization. We'll get back to that in a minute. Maybe that's doesn't stand up very well. I don't think there have been a bunch of other, you know, we have to stop Iran from having nuclear weapons and exporting terror, but they've been trying to do both for 20 years and they've been trying to do both for the whole first year of the Trump administration. And, and we didn't, you know, we didn't think it required this, this kind of action. Sometimes it does require some military action. So I think the reason the Trump administration seems incoherent about its goals is that it is incoherent about its goals. And I don't really know why. Honestly, I really don't know why the President is doing. I mean, I think he's doing it for various reasons. Maybe we should get to the Israel point, which you wrote about in the second item in Morning Shots a little more. I have a thought or two on that too. But. But I do think historians will be. Maybe Venezuela went to his head. Maybe he doesn't like Iran, the Iran leadership. I totally agree with that. He doesn't like what they've done over the last 20 or 47 years. I totally agree with that. Khamenei tried to kill him, as he put it, and he's gotten him back first. Maybe it's kind of personal revenge. I mean, it's obviously some combination of all these things. But I think the final point I make just right now is I think the Venezuela quote, success, but it was at least a success in the limited sense of Maduro being snatched and us doing it neatly and cleanly though close run thing on the helicopter there. But anyway, that really went to his head, I think. I just think he is high in his own supply in this respect and thinks he can do anything. The US military can do anything. There's no cost to be paid. People will kowtow to us anymore, which some will do in the short term if they're scared of us. And there's no thinking through of the broader consequences of what we're doing. I think.
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A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, the most striking thing to me, just listening to them talk about it over the last couple of days, especially Pete Hegseth yesterday speaking to reporters, is just the real incongruity between the stated aims and sort of the rationale that they're giving. Because the aims are like pretty traditionally hawkish, at least some of them. The way they've been expressed. Iran can never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon like full stop Iran, even the degree to which it was stockpiling sort of conventional weaponry. Marco Russia Rubio said yesterday short range missiles and drones that was threatening to tip them over to a point where they could sort of attack with impunity in the Middle east and sort of overwhelm missile defenses, our missile defenses there or Israel's missile defenses there. And so those aims sort of expressed that way kind of make sense from like a hawkish sort of kind of thought process expressed by a guy like Marco Rubio. You get Pete Hegseth up there and he is obviously very concerned with sort of the, the more isolationist MAGA critique of sort of the last 20 years of our foreign policy. Right. The idea that you create these power vacuums, you set the table for yourself to have to fight years and years and years of war. And he has said in no uncertain terms, that's not what this is going to be. We don't want endless war, we don't want nation building, we don't want to spread democracy, we don't want to have woke wars, is kind of the way he has bizarrely put it. But there's, but the incongruity between that stated end and those stated assurances is remarkable. I mean, the thing that they are saying is we are going to refuse to allow this country to have to reach a certain military threshold forever. But don't think it's going to be like a lengthy conflict or anything like that. We're going to be in and out. I mean, it's just. Am I missing something there or is it actually quite, quite this incoherent?
- [09:59]
B
No, that's well said. I mean, you know, I was, I was a supporter of the Iraq war and a very strong advocate of the fact that if we were going to do it, we needed to send in ground troops. And that obviously is very much not a great outcome. And obviously that leads to casualties and so forth. And so that's a very tough thing to advocate and a tough thing to carry out. As we all found out and George W. Bush found out, we weren't fool, we weren't crazy. Just to get to your point, right. We thought if you're going to go for regime change, if you're going to try to construct something much better, you can't just bomb them for a day or a week. We had bombed people. If Clinton had bombed Saddam Hussein for four days, I think it was at the end of 1998, and maybe done some damage to the nuclear. And so yeah, there's, I think it's really well said, the way you put that. I mean, there's a big incongruity between the ambition of our aims and I would say the scale of what we're doing, which is in a way somewhat consistent with that. But then the incredible wish to stop short, not incredible, the understandable, I suppose, but irresponsible wish to just reassure everyone that nothing at stake here, we just demolish them and we have no responsibility, we wash our hands of what happened. I mean, even just from a human point of view, really, you're going to go pulverize the nation And I'm not against pulverizing some of the regime elements and destroying a lot of the weapons, and then you have no responsibility for what comes next. I mean, that's not a very sound position, I think.
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A
Yeah, yeah. And it really does kind of drive home just how remarkable it is that not only is there no real broad base of popular support for this right now, I mean, small, small minorities of the public, at least prior to the action, said they wanted to see something like this. It was like 21%, I believe I saw of in one poll. Obviously, that is likely to tick up because of the nature of these things. When Trump does a thing, maga, at least in large part, tends to line up behind him. So I assume the polling will increase. But there's nothing resembling sort of like a broad base of popular support for action over there, nor are they really trying to generate one. Right. I mean, they're not saying, let's buckle in for a really long haul here and everybody just needs to be patient because the ends will be, you know, satisfactory with. It'll be, it'll be worth sort of the cost paid in blood and treasure. But, but instead, even from the very jump there, they are in sort of damage control, reassurement mode. Right. Like, don't you worry, this isn't going to be like the other ones. This isn't going to be long. This isn't going to be costly, this isn't going to be painful. And I guess we'll see. I mean, like, that's that. But, but, but it just, it again, I just keep coming back to the incongruity between those reassurances and the deliverables that they are saying they're going to be able to deliver. So we'll find out about that. But one, one other thing on all of this that we haven't talked about is the one piece of new information that we did get yesterday about why specifically this happened now, and that was this remarkable reporting that we got first out of the New York Times and later confirmed both by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and House Speaker Mike Johnson, basically saying that a big part of the calculus for these strikes, for the Trump administration was that Israel was determined to go forward with its strikes now, regardless of whether or not we joined them. And according again to these leaders that I just mentioned, that was a part of our assessment. That's what made it sort of a defensive action in the term terminology of Mike Johnson. Or as Marco Rubio put it, that was what we judged we needed to do to address an imminent threat because Israel was going to strike and we assessed Iran was going to strike back against us and against Israel. And, and so the sort of again in this, in this strange logic train, the defensive action they are alleging was to join Israel. Obviously the logic of that is sort of tortuous. Maybe it holds up, maybe it doesn't. I'm not an expert in these things, but I think that the bigger sort of the reason why this explanation made a lot of people prick up their ears is just the underlying state of play that that reveals about sort of who's calling the shots here. I mean like between, between America and Israel. Like it was kind of a startling at least suggestion of sort of a lack of agency on the part of, you know, the United States of America in terms of when to get involved and when not to get involved with this conflict. I don't know exactly how to parse all that. Bill, what was your take on this stuff coming out yesterday?
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B
I think it's really worth noting. Look, I think it can who knows what the true truth is about exactly what Israel would have done if we had said no, we're not going to help it. I mean the buck passing side of it, which you mentioned in morning shots shouldn't be ignored. Right? I mean it's a nice excuse. Everyone, you know, a lot of Republicans, a lot of Americans are pro Israel. A lot of people are very sympathetic. Israel has a much more existential threat from Iran, has had and does have than we than the US Does. And a lot of people are sympathetic to the idea that we should help Israel. And Trump in fact went in to help Israel in June. Right. He did the last finished up, so to speak, the nuclear bombing. It's unclear why we wouldn't have done that kind of thing again even if Israel had gone to war A B in June, the war between Israel and Iran went I think for 11 days until we came in. Very few American assets were hit by Iran. They're not idiots. Do they really want to fight? They were having, they did hit Israel. They tried to, they launched massive missile attacks and so forth. We helped Israel defend itself against those. But it wasn't as if Iran said, great, Israel's attacked us. Let's just attack America too because that we, we can handle both Israel and America. That's in a way that's what they're saying, right? That's liter what Rubio is saying. I don't buy that as a true analysis of the Iranian regime. They hate us. Maybe they would try to kill Americans in terror attacks or by lobbing some drones into bases. I don't minimize that. Obviously, if Israel had attacked, we would have taken many defensive precautions. I assume we would have told the Iranians who we were talking to last week in negotiations, you touch us, you're really going to get it. But you know, for now, we're going to let Israel do what it feels it has to do. I mean, there were millions of things, millions of in between positions we could have taken rather than saying, oh, Israel's going to attack, we can't stop them. And you pointed out in warning shots we did in June at the end, after our sort of concluding nuclear attack on the nuclear facility, Trump told Israel privately and publicly, we're not with you if you do anything more, don't do anything more. Right. There was some all caps tweet. Remember that?
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A
Yeah. Turn the planes around, don't drop the bombs. I mean it was really on truth
- [16:11]
B
social right out in public suddenly. Now Rubio's account, well, we're kind of helpless because Israel was going to go ahead. Now, either it shows that Bibi had Trump wrapped around his little finger or sort of conned him, I suppose, or Rubio is looking for an excuse and blaming Israel in a sense, or making Israel take responsibility for this whole war. But again, it's ridiculous. Whatever. I mean, we would have been involved if Israel had gone to war in the same way we were in Jew. We might have done things. We might certainly would have had to take defensive precautions. The idea that this massive attack which we spent two, three months sending huge chunk of our fleet and many bombers and so forth over to the Middle east to participate in, was triggered by simply by the need to defend ourselves because Israel was attacking is both false and I think dangerous for an American. For Rubio to say that the effect of it is either to make, I don't know, us look weak in the world's eyes or like a tool of Israel that helps anti Israel types here in the US I think both on the right and left, don't you think? And say, well look at this is, you know, we're now being dragged into a war that as you said, is not very, very popular by Israel. Rubio basically said that and it's. I don't think it's true in, in the sense that we have a lot of agency. Trump did not have many Amer. Every American president has said no to Israel in the last. For all of that we're such close allies in the last 30 or 40 years, often on very controversial at very Controversial moments, telling Israel we wouldn't support further actions by them in Lebanon or elsewhere, often not supporting. You know, it's not as if every administration hasn't had a pull and push and pull with Israel, and Trump has in his first year. So it's really irresponsible. That part I find really distasteful, maybe, because I'm pretty pro Israel, and I just feel like this is going to increase anti Israel's sentiment and really kind of anti Semitism, probably in the US in the sense that's a Jewish lobby maneuvering, you know. Now, Trump himself may have been very responsive to parts of that, you know, some of his biggest donors. Miriam Adelson, I don't know. I mean, who knows what calculations Trump personally is making? But it's not an excuse, as you put it. He has agency. The US Government has agency. The US Government has many times not done what Israel wanted and just saying, well, Israel wanted to do this. So we just had to go along, as Rubio said, not go along. We had to launch a massive attack on our own in conjunction with them. That's really wrong and irresponsible, I think.
- [18:35]
A
Yeah. And I think the point that you make that's really important, that a lot of the analysis of this out there right now is missing is that Rubio might not have been being particularly forthright.
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B
Right.
- [18:43]
A
I mean, like, there are a lot of extraneous reasons why it might have been useful for him, you know, for this or that sort of narrow reason of making the case, for instance, that there was an imminent threat that we had to address. And therefore, you know, this is constitutional under various, you know, wartime authorities, that sort of thing. All this is kind of in the back of Rubio's mind, but I did want to talk a little bit about sort of the political repercussions of the administration so publicly making this case. Because there is a fault line, and you kind of gestured at it here. There's a fault line that runs right through the MAGA base in terms of a lot of this stuff right now, some of which is blatantly anti Semitic, but a lot of which is. Is. Doesn't quite go that far, but is very skeptical of sort of extremely close military ties between the United States and Israel that wants. Wants to see less of us doing all of that and so on. And, and I mean, these people were not happy yesterday. They were not happy about the war at all, first of all. But then seeing these sorts of comments from, from Rubio and from Johnson, I mean, there are a Lot of people out there who are like my worst fears about, you know, the, the, this administration kowtowing to Israel are confirmed from within the MAGA base. I mean, like, I at least was a little surprised to see the White House not need, feeling the need to massage that side of the base. Maybe it's just because I'm too online and I see them a lot and I like, I think of them as actually maybe a larger contingent of, of the broad MAGA constellation than they really are. I mean, but that was my reaction is like, isn't this kind of just giving a lot of grist to sort of the Marjorie Taylor Greene's the anti Israel folks of the party?
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B
So I think it was maybe this was Rubio, though, very focused, as you sort of said, on taking care of the congressional problem. I think he was on the Hill when he said this, wasn't he? That he was dealing with. Why didn't we get, oh, it was immediate, it was urgent, it was imminence, which has always been a sort of a excuse for not going to Congress first. Not just excuse. It would be a reason not to go to Congress first if it genuinely were an imminent threat. You can't, you can't, you know, broadcast to the world. Exactly. So that was the problem he was dealing with. But he maybe didn't think through what other problems it was causing either politically for Trump and for the MAGA base and for Republicans or just for the country to what does the world think if, if the Secretary of State of the United States says we had no choice because this much, much, much smaller country, whom we have constrained many times and who we have as recently as June, you know, stop from doing something and in any case can't make us do anything, are saying, oh, we had no choice. They were, they were going in. And it wasn't just they were going in, but Iran was then going to attack US Assets as if we don't have the ability to defend US Assets once Iran starts to attack them. So the idea that again, I think Rubio wasn't thinking about both the geostrategic implications. The White House has not actually said, now that I think about it, as you mentioned it, what Rubio said. Right. I mean, the White House has not gone down the Israel path the White House is into is more just Khamenei's horrible. And you know, and, and, and it's, we can't let them develop nuclear weapons. So there may be an interesting, you know, maybe what Rubio said was not exactly a White House line It was his own attempt to deal with the congressional problem. But either way, it now is out there and it's having the effect it's having.
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A
Yeah. And it kind of gets into what, what actually counts as an official White House line. Right. I mean, I know that some of the, like, I think I saw the, the rapid response. 47, you know, one of the, one of the, like White House's Twitter web teams reposted Rubio's remarks. And so, like, that is in some sense an endorsement from, you know, the main building of, of the line. But also it's, it's, it might just be some random, you know, comm staffer who's like, oh, the Secretary of State said this point. It's a little opaque on this point.
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B
Andrew. This is why in normal White Houses, the President of the United States gives a carefully written 15 minute, 20 minute speech when we're going to launch a major military action each day and lays it out. Now, it's not always perfect, it's not always coherent. And people can always say, that's not a good argument. That, that one contradicts this one. Fine. And then each day, and I was in a White House that was at war, the White House's press secretary is coordinating with the State Department and Defense Department spokespeople. And obviously at the top level, the President's coordinating with the SecDef and the Secretary of State and so forth, his national security advisor. And they are being very careful about their message. Right. And I mean, that's not just, you know, George H.W. bush was probably better than most administrations at this, with Cheney and Baker and Scowcroft and those guys. But that's true of every administration. Obama, even Trump won. Actually, you know, you read accounts of Pompeo being on the phone with Kelly and so forth when there were, you know, moments of really intense action. What has the sense here? It's, you know, Hexess prancing around the Pentagon, beating his chest. Rubio is desperately trying to keep the Hill sort of under control. There is no national, I guess Rubio is technically the national security advisor. There is basically no national security advisor. Which I would just say for those who, you know, from an inside government point of view, that's a very important job when you're actually fighting a war. I mean, someone needs to call the meeting and coordinate these guys. The Vice President's got his own little political agenda, keeping his head down because he wants to be sort of on the isolationist side that you think of the MAGA world. So he doesn't really want to be too much involved in this war. And he wants to leak out that, well, if we're going to do it, we have to do it big, but also get it done fast and, you know, kind of getting his own spit out there. So this is where you pay a price for not having a serious administration, honestly.
- [24:09]
A
Yeah, yeah. And if you think that power vacuum is bad in terms of messaging the war from the, in the immediate term in the White House, just think about the one that's now developing in Iran in the wake of all of this. So, so, yeah, it's, there's, there's a lot of chaos. Not a lot of it seems to be adding up to anything good. We will obviously continue to follow this story very carefully in morning shots and in 50 other Bulwark products. I mean, this is, it's crazy, the stuff that's going on. What a time to be alive. We can turn away from that now. I did want to talk a little bit as well. Again, Like I said, it feels weird to talk about this in the midst of this actual war breaking out and maybe starting to metastasize, hopefully not too badly across the Middle East. But I have been working and writing about something else related to the Pentagon. Sort of a policy thing that, that you never know in the long term could in fact end up being just as important, which is this fight that has been going on between Pete Hegseth and the AI company Anthropic over the last couple of weeks came to a head late last week, resulting in the Pentagon, which had previously been really integrated with Anthropic. Anthropic had been the only AI company licensed for its AI to be used in classified settings. So, for instance, even as late as this weekend, the attacks that we carried out in Iran and then as our commands around the world coordinated our responses or planned for Iran's responses against us, they were using anthropic AI. Anthropic is integrated into these systems, but it's not going to be for long. And the reason for that is because on Friday, Pete Hegseth pulled the plug. He said not only are we canceling our contracts with Anthropic and we're going to sign, you know, we're going to backfill those. We're going to sign similar contracts with a couple of other AI labs. OpenAI, which runs ChatGPT, and Xai, which is Elon Musk's Grok. That'll be good in classified settings, I think. But not only are they, are they switching to those other AI software partners to contract with. But they are also forbidding Anthropic from doing any work with any government contractor, period in perpetuity, until, until Hegseth decides to take his foot off of their neck, which is a real, you know, existential threat to the company as at least as far as Pete Hegseth has characterized this. If he got his way, Anthropic would no longer be able to partner with many of the companies that own a lot of its stock, Google and Amazon. They would no longer be able to buy video chips that power its technology from Nvidia. They would no longer be able to sell their software to any number of companies that have contracts with the dod. So it's a real, it's a real threat. And the reason for this is because Anthropic and Pete Hegseth had a disagreement about what the DoD should be allowed to use their software for. Up until now, under the terms of an agreement that was first signed under the Biden administration, but which the, the, the Defense Department under Pete Hegseth re ratified last year, the Defense Department had very broad latitude to use Anthropics AI for, for classified military purposes, even lethal purposes. But there were a couple of red lines, one of which is Anthropic said you can't use our models to conduct mass, mass surveillance domestically. You cannot do broad American citizen surveillance with our models. And the other red line was we don't think that our models are currently reliable enough to be used to power lethal autonomous weapons systems. So like, you know, self targeting, self actualizing killer robots and drones out there, the models are not reliable enough to do that yet. So we do not think the Defense Department should be able to use our model for that. Hegseth basically said, we disagree with these, we don't think you should be able to tell us what to do. Hegseth says, we don't want to do either of those things yet, but, but sort of on principle. Hegseth is basically saying you can't do that. You can't tell us not to do those things. Anthropic said, well, we're going to anyway. So that was kind of what led to the nuclear blowout here. Obviously this is kind of continued to reverberate. It's going to take a long time. Anthropic is suing and, and you know, some of these other companies are, are striking these new deals with, with the Defense Department. But also it's not very popular the idea that, that I would be used to surveil Americans at en masse and pilot killer robots. So these other AI companies are having to sort of pretend to the public that that's not really what they're doing. They also really have respect for civil liberties and, and, and a healthy fear of, of the robot apocalypse. So there are amazing things happening in the Defense Department right now. I have just been rambling a lot about the stuff that I find interesting in the world and report on Bill. I don't know. Do you have a take on this, on this DOD anthropic blow up? I mean, there's so many different weird angles about the future that this implicates.
- [28:57]
B
No, that was really an excellent, I think, account of what's happened. You wrote about it Friday. Before the war began. Before the war began. And you have another piece coming. Maybe we'll see tomorrow or Thursday, depending on how much the war crowds everything out. But no, that was really an excellent.
- [29:12]
A
To get pushed again.
- [29:13]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm doing my best to, you know, just soften the blow here. That was a very good summary. The one thing you said at the end of the piece Friday I totally agree with is, you know, this should not be a matter of a private negotiation between Pete Hegseth and the CEO of Anthropic. I mean, this is. Congress can act here. Congress can and should lay down markers as they do in a million other ways. Remember, every three years or when it gets reauthorized, it's a massive debate in Congress over section 702. I don't even honestly remember what 702 is a section of. It's some act, obviously, some congressional, some law which has to do with national NSA surveillance and the Rand Paul. But also the left don't like the degree to which they don't surveil us, but they surveil. I guess if we're talking to a foreigner, they can get. Not the phone, not what we say on the phone, but what to a suspicious foreigner. But. But the fact that the call happened anyway, It's. I mean, metadata. I mean, it's very complicated. It's always debated. No one, everyone thinks, you know what Congress. A good debate. It's a good thing to debate. There are real differences in how you prioritize privacy and national security. And this is the kind of thing the United States Congress resolves. The President has a veto authority, obviously. And I think at times in the previous administrations threatened to veto things that weren't friendly enough to national security. That's. Where's Congress? I mean, this is where you pay such a Price for the absence of Congress. Because even if it doesn't get resolved perfectly, at least there's a sense of a democratic process that's dealing with this. And now we're, as you say, at the very end of what you just said before, it's very unclear what's happening. It's unclear if AI if the other companies really are going to do what Anthropic wouldn't do or not. They're really not going to do it, but they're sort of saying they're going to do it. It's unclear what the legal situation is. Hegseth really doesn't have the right, one wouldn't think, because of one disagreement over these particular things to ban Anthropic from dealing with anyone and any other unrelated defense thing. And as you say in the actual real time, right now Anthropic is in the US Defense Department systems and the others aren't. Right. And I don't know that that's changing in the next week or the next month or the next three months. How quickly do these things get can get. They get changed over if they in fact do get changed over.
- [31:13]
A
So supposedly they have six months to make it happen, according to.
- [31:16]
B
Yeah, so that's great. So the whole war is going to be fought with this allegedly unreliable, I mean, Texas determination is that Anthropic is an unsuitable partner to have in our defense supply chain. And we're literally fighting the biggest war we fought in 20 years with anthropic contributions on AI. So I think you did an excellent job on the summary. You should keep following it. It is really important. And my only sort of footnote, I guess, more broadly would be I was talking to a very intelligent Democratic strategist last week. It sort of ran about other things, actually about races in 2026. I can't remember how it came up even. Maybe we were chatting, maybe he'd read your piece or something. And he said, you know what? I think the whole AI issue, that's even so much on the job question, which is what a lot of people have talked about. Well, how many white collar jobs will it take? And so forth. But on the privacy question, Grok sexualizing women and I suppose men also, they could. And girls and boys. That whole issue is going to be huge is what he said. He thought it could be one of the biggest issues of American politics over the next few years. He thought it should be because it is a genuinely big technological development. It takes us a while to handle these big technological developments. And there are big Fights about them. We make some stupid decisions as we go forward, but no one thought you could just have the automobile and not have, you know, rules of the road and build highways that are suitable for automobiles and then limit the speed on the highways and then have. Limit the danger of automobiles with seat belts. I mean. Right. No one. And God knows, AI is a bigger thing, I think, than automobiles. So the idea that we're just passively watching all this happen gets back to the point about Congress. I mean, it's. We need. And don't you think. I do think that in each political party, maybe you should say a word about each if you want. Or certainly on the Republican side, this can be a very big kind of lurking issue for 2028. No.
- [33:03]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have really more and more been coming around on the idea that not only are these technologies not a flash in the pan as some people have kind of thought they were going to plateau off and not create a lot of economic activity, but that in fact they are going to continue to sort of reveal themselves to be more and more powerful than we even really anticipated, which just multiplies the potential for disruption, multiplies the upside and the downside. Right. And increasingly spotlights how perilous it is that there really is no energy, hardly any policy work being done at the congressional level to get our laws up to speed in one way or another about this. Because, I mean, this is sort of at the. The bedrock of the Pentagon's position is like, well, look, we should be able to use these models for what they call all lawful purposes. And what a lot of these advocates and civil liberties types people are saying. And in fact, the position that Anthropic is kind of tacitly endorsing is none of these privacy laws that we currently have. First of all, the state of them is not great anyway. We've known this for 20 years that sort of like the state of the restraints on these digital companies, the amount of information that they can vacuum up is so far beyond what anybody would actually sort of deem permissible if they sat down and tried to develop a line for what they think is reasonable. And it's so far outstrips what we could do before the digital revolution, before all of our lives moved online. And when you add AI into that, and you add, not only is all of this data being vacuumed up all the time and put into these different commercial databases and government databases and things, but now you have a basically sort of omnipresent, omniscient database synthesizing machine that can at will sort of pull all of those different things out of all of those different repositories and put them all together to assemble like a remarkably thorough and like consistent picture of like a person's digital footprint. And that in theory that's just at the government's fingertips. Now like that's the kind of thing where you really start to realize, wow, on the surveillance side of things, we have no framework for like we never anticipated that this would be the case when we were writing the laws that are now on the books. We have not written any new laws since then. And, and, and as a result these things are getting hashed out in this environment where really the only, the only thing stopping the government from, from being able to sort of do this at will is the scruples of this or that AI company. And, and, and, and as we have seen seen those scruples don't necessarily go very far when as in this case, one AI company like Anthropic is willing to say well look, please don't, just don't do this one thing. And the government is going to say screw you, we're going to destroy your business and it won't even matter because we're going to get rid of your models and we're going to move over to this more pliant AI company over here that is willing to let us, let us do these things. So, so it really is, I mean like it's the sort of thing that cries out for real policy thought and real policy work at a moment when Congress is completely paralyzed and it's not a great thing. I don't know what to say about it exactly. Sorry, go ahead.
- [36:20]
B
Bill said AI is spending a huge amount of money now on congressional races to try to support people who are really in favor of not regulating them much again. And I don't know, maybe that'll, you know, that's oil companies spend a lot of money trying to fight environmental regulations and so forth. Right. I mean, so it's not, there's nothing wrong with that. It's a free country and all, and interest groups will be, will do what they do. But yeah, one, one thing that limits the powers on US interest groups is just more public discussion.
- [36:50]
A
Right.
- [36:50]
B
The auto companies were very powerful and then Ralph Nader came along and a lot of other groups got formed and others against drunk driving and suddenly the auto companies wasn't quite as one sided. One can imagine that dynamic happening in a normal and healthy political system in the U.S. it's just the System seems so broken. I guess the final point I make is just this is so new. I mean, these blue ribbon commissions are often pointless and foolish or kind of just don't really do serious work, but some of them do. And again, you could have, in a different world, an executive commission appointed by the President or appointed by the president, with some selections from congressional leadership of big shot former CEOs, former judges, former everyone, right? Civil society types, religious leaders, to say, okay, what should be the outlines of a kind of regulatory or what at least are the questions that we should be asking? It wouldn't be a foolish thing to do. We've done that in other areas in the past and sometimes it's been helpful. But again, sort of in the era of Trump, it just sounds silly to even suggest such a thing.
- [37:53]
A
Yeah, yeah. And the White House has had sort of a policy approach to these questions, right? I mean, their broad stance on AI all along has been don't get in the way. Just like any sort of, like, sort of like overly persnickety regulation that we did right now would only be sort of like shackles on these companies that are developing these models that are going to be so transformative that would hold us back in the AI race against China. These have been their positions. And so it's very strange to see Hegseth and the Defense Department still pushing this extremely maximalist vision of what AI, the technology should be used for. No restraints on the way we, the Defense Department are going to use them, keep on pushing that forward because we need to win the AI race against China while at the same time, you know, having these, these viewpoints about the technology, but now taking this insanely hostile stance toward one of the leading companies in the industry. And so that is like creating this bizarre fissure right now, even inside sort of the tech, right, where, where they're like, wait a minute, I thought you guys were pro AI and now you're taking like perhaps the most promising AI company we have that we should be so lucky to have, you know, a bunch of clauds, a bunch of anthropics in America and you're trying to nuke them from orbit. Like, how is that sort of like pro AI in this broad sense? Obviously this is a really developing story. We will hold on onto it. There are 50 different angles that we didn't even talk about about this. But, but it is, I mean, it's the biggest clash so far between the government and the AI industry. It is spotlighting just how sort of flimsy the legal structures that are that in theory should put a curb on all of this are and it really does just start to look like a race to the bottom in terms of whether there are going to be any real curbs on the most frightening uses of this technology, which we haven't even talked about. Like some people think will actually also just exterminate humanity and destroy the world. I don't necessarily think that, but that's out there too in terms of hooking more and more of our decision making up to artificial intelligence. I should have said long ago that they tell you, you know, not everybody tunes in at the beginning. Remind them who you are, remind them why you're here. I'm Andrew Egger. This is Bill Kristol. We write Morning Shots for the Bulwark on Tuesdays. We're going live to talk through what we've been writing about, what we're going to be writing about. Thanks to everybody who's out there watching and following along. So far, I think we're going to call this one quits. But I should say one more thing before we stop and that is that Sarah and JBL and Tim will be doing a live taping of the Next Level this afternoon at 2:00pm so you know, pretty much these days you can just go through your whole life consuming live and on demand bulwark content. You can watch us at 10am you can go take a long relaxed 3 martini lunch, come back at 2 for the next Level. You know, there are worse ways to spend your time on the Internet. We appreciate you guys all out there for watching. We hope you'll head over to the Bulwark and get the Morning Shots newsletter as well as our many other excellent newsletter offerings. And I guess we'll see you here next Tuesday. Thanks Bill for coming along and we'll see you all next time.
- [41:07]
B
Thanks, Andrew.