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- [00:00]
A
Emergency podcast, Iran plus Anthropic at some point, but we got to start with World War three. Joining us today, Emmy Probasco, cset, Henry Farrell, Mike Horowitz as well as Brian Clark. I think we got to start with Mike. I mean, this is our first like big, meaty American precise mass like campaign, right?
- [00:30]
B
I don't know whether I'd call it a precise mass campaign. I think it's notable that this is the first. The United States used a system called the Lucas, which is America's first precise mass system. You know, less than $100,000 can go a couple thousand kilometers. Like you can definitely shoot it down, but you have to try and you know, ironically, obviously reverse engineered from the, from Iran's Shaheed 136. So like effectively using Iran's own technology against them. Now Iran itself like copied some West German tech from the 80s to design the Shaheed. So, you know, whatever, I guess like what goes around comes around or like something like that. But the. It's been interesting to see in the, like from just from a military technology perspective in the context of the Iran operation, the mix of in some ways what we would think about as American legacy strike, you know, like Tomahawk missiles, like that kind of thing, along with some of these early indications of emerging capabilities like the Lucas as well as frankly, Claude being in the mix. And like, who would have thought after the events of Friday that like Claude would enter the chat so early?
- [01:38]
A
I think we should start at the strategic level.
- [01:41]
B
Sorry. Yeah, we could do that if you want. You asked me about precise mass and so I. Yeah, right.
- [01:45]
A
It was my fault. So I was, I was talking with. So, so there's, there's this like, you know, pave bombing to win. The whole story of the 20. A lot of the story of the 20th century is like bombing people doesn't quite always get you what you want. But the difference between bombing in 2026 and bombing in like 1943 or for most of the 20th century for that matter, is you couldn't just kill all the people who ran the country. So I was going back to ask ChatGPT like what their or Claude code actually what the comparisons were of like killing leaders but not invading the country. And it was throwing me Jugurtha of Numidia, like the Byzantines, overthrowing like boyars and stuff. I mean this is not a, especially when you don't like have someone do the coup for you in inside the country and then like is there to take over it. I mean this is a Relatively rare thing in human history to like pull off an assassination from, you know, a few hundred or a few thousand miles away. So I don't know, like, like, like where are we on air power now? I mean, we're, we're, we're four days into it, like obviously tbd. But curious for everyone's, everyone's takes on the theory of victory here.
- [03:09]
C
I think you gotta, like you just mentioned, you gotta have somebody to pick up the pieces and run with them afterwards. Because if any good autocrat is going to eliminate any potential competition in the 21st century, it's not like the British when we revolted and we had a bunch of people that could take charge and they didn't bother to try to assassinate them in advance. I think right now we've got this air power can be very effective at eliminating the leadership potentially. But then you've got to have the civil society that can pick up the pieces or you've got to be willing to put that in place with people on the ground. It just seems like that that's still going to be the missing element.
- [03:43]
B
Yeah, I mean, Pape, I mean, if you think back to like the OG paper or something, the argument was slightly more nuanced. I mean it was that coercive bombing, when you, when you more precisely hit targets can be, you're, you can be capable of generating concessions from the target. The issue is that punishment bombing just like, like, let's go like hit like random stuff in the country. Like generally it usually generates a rally around the flag effect and the targets and that it was hard to get really big concessions out of, out of just bombing. What seems to be different today is the scale and velocity of what you can do and what you can do accurately. There are reports that Israel launched more than 500 attacks on the first day. And frankly, given the number of weapons that the United States has, there's no way the US did that many. But you know, this really illustrates the, this really illustrates sort of a changing world. And, but although if you wanted to make an argument that it's not changing, the Israelis obviously, yet again had exquisite intelligence which they seem to have on every actor in the region not named Hamas and like thus had the ability to know, all right, like all these guys are meeting here, these guys are meeting here, giving them the ability to execute these, these leadership decapitation strikes on the first day.
- [05:07]
C
The other thing is, you know, air power is, can do this kind of thing if you don't have any air defenses to go up against. Right. You See, in Ukraine, the air power is not really cutting the mustard there. And the reason is because there's air defenses that are preventing somebody from being able to operate unimpeded in the airspace. And Iran's air defenses are largely neutralized. So you can fly around and launch GBUs at people, which is a lot of what Israel's doing is using basically JDAMs on targets because they don't have to operate from stand off range. He could do that at volume and really execute a pretty effective coercive campaign and take out a lot of the infrastructure that's very difficult to take out with precision strike standoff weapons.
- [05:47]
A
Emmy, do you want to any strategic level stuff before we go in?
- [05:52]
D
No, only partly because it's. I mean, this is all. You had a lot of questions. I think I have more questions than I have answers. So I appreciate Mike and Brian jumping in and attempting to answer.
- [06:02]
A
Well, you can throw like, I don't need to be the only one asking questions. Also, like, you guys can like, shoot.
- [06:07]
E
Shoot back.
- [06:08]
A
Shocking for.
- [06:10]
B
I mean, it's unbelievable. Like, we've never seen a con. We've never seen the United States attempt a military operation of this scale with goals that were. Were this, in some ways incoherent. Is that the right way to say that word?
- [06:24]
E
The.
- [06:25]
B
The. In that the. You know, sometimes it gets like regime changey. Sometimes it's about like eliminating the threat, like, whatever that means necessarily. And the. But you know, in some ways what the Trump administration has done is like break the. Ironically, I like break the Pottery Barn rule from, you know, the, The Colin Powell era. If you break it, you buy it. That is just not how the Trump administration sees the world. And so they are willing to do things that no American administration has ever been willing to do in the past because they don't feel responsibility for governance over places that they bomb.
- [07:05]
E
So is this a good idea? No, I think that makes sense. But I guess the question is, is that a good idea in the long run? I mean, Mike, you know better than I. You're a real national security person. I am not. But there are umpteen different arguments, articles, books, talking about how doing this kind of thing doesn't necessarily end up in a good place over the longer run. So do you think that this is. Which is possibly going to have benefits? Do you think that this is going to be a disaster along the lines not of Iraq, but of something similar, where we do see continuing problems for years, perhaps for longer than that? What's the long term strategy as opposed to the just go in there and reduce everything with air power.
- [07:55]
B
I'm not sure the Trump administration has a strategy beyond 2028. And so in some way, I mean, I mean, I'll say this, Henry, it'd be a real bad look for our political science business if the Trump administration can like do Venezuela do this and then Cuba is next. Cuba's obviously next and there's no backlash and they're like no negative secondary effects. If you, I mean just in that like everything we would expect theoretically would suggest that, you know, instability is likely to occur in these places. You have power vacuums. You have. Which increases your risk of terrorism, which increases, you know, like risks of, of like, like militia, like groups in these places lashing out and that like this would be very dangerous. The is possible, frankly, that we don't actually see that in the short term and we end up seeing that in the long run. But the, but the effects in some ways, like look disconnected enough from the initial operation that we don't that, that maybe like the Trump administration doesn't care as much or something. But like, yeah, like, look, you're, you're 100% right. I just think they're not, that is, they are unconcerned with like instability per se, you know, like increased risk of like a terrorist attack or something like that. The, or at least, at least based on my read.
- [09:17]
A
But what's the. Sorry, Emmy.
- [09:22]
D
No, I mean, should we also give airtime to the argument for why now? Because I think that's the thing that's pushing against concur with everything you're saying. We've sort of opened Pandora's box now, so what happens next? But I think it's worth talking about why there's another hand here that is at least worth discussing.
- [09:40]
C
Yeah, well, yeah, I mean the argument would be Iran's on its back foot. This is an opportunity to take it out as a military threat. If you're Israel, this is a terrific opportunity to eliminate the potential for Iran being able to threaten you with missiles or even a nuclear program down the road. And you may not care that much if it turns into a, a mess. You know, maybe not a failed state, but not a well governed state. But if you're a cutter or you're the uae, you may not appreciate that because now you've got to deal with this neighbor across the way that's got, you know, all kinds of instability and is probably interfering with shipping. And if you're cutter, you depend on LNG exports for a massive portion of proportion of your economy, you can't have the straight of Hormuz closed off periodically like the Red Sea is, or else you're going to actually start losing, you know, some of your economic livelihood. So I think, you know, for the Gulf states, this is not great. And I'm sort of surprised that they didn't push back more on the effort to, to mount this operation. But they're going to be the ones that inherited, probably not Israel.
- [10:39]
D
Yeah. And I mean, and not to say that there aren't, like, I don't really understand where this goes either, to Henry's core question of, like, what. What's our goal here? But, you know, then I don't think we want to gloss over that. You know, Iran didn't necessarily have a great government to begin with, so that.
- [10:56]
A
Well, well, my question, if you, if you want to do the regime change, don't you do this while the protesters are in the streets? And like, not when you have the 30, 000 of the most eager people dead. I mean, it's like a, it's timing's a little tricky.
- [11:13]
B
I mean, sure, but it takes time to like, line up a military operation, like, get all your assets in place to be able to do, I mean, you know, like in given and curious what Emmy thinks about this, like, in particular. Brian thinks this in particular. Like, at any given moment, if you want to, like, launch a couple Tomahawks or maybe like, maybe you'd say, like, spend a special forces unit, like, sure, like, you could do that. But if you want a sustained campaign, then you've got to array the forces. I mean, this is also why, like, I'm not that worried about a, a U.S. ground invasion of Iran because, like, the forces just aren't there right now to do that. I mean, it would take months to frankly align the, like, ground forces. If you wanted to, if you wanted, if, if you wanted to invade. Sorry, one other thing there, there's an element of this. If, if Iran goes down and then Cuba goes down and you think back to the like, end of the Cold War period and kind of the rogue states that we used to, that we used to talk about that in some ways, like the Trump administration kind of like in an end of Godfather, one way is like going around trying to like, knock off, like, eat like, like everybody on the checklist for like a reset. And then I guess, like, what happens if we get back to North Korea
- [12:23]
C
taking care of the family business?
- [12:25]
E
Well, what does it do to nuclear proliferation?
- [12:28]
B
So I guess that everybody's gonna get nuclear Weapons now? Are you kidding?
- [12:32]
E
Yeah.
- [12:33]
B
Like the majority of the South Korean public already wanted nuclear weapons. Why would they stop now?
- [12:39]
C
Again, you could think all this stuff's
- [12:40]
B
a good idea, like, whatever. Like it just, it, like you could be totally fine with it, but it's not. I mean, yeah, of course.
- [12:48]
C
I mean, well, like the old school way of doing this back in the, in the bad 80s or 70s would have been having the intelligence services start to establish a center, you know, another power center that would be able to take over when this thing goes down. Um, you know, the CIA did this routinely in this, in South America and Central America. It seems like in this case we use the intelligence services to find out where all the head guys are going to be and then be able to take them out at once. But we didn't do anything to establish the alternative that was going to rise up and take its place. So that seems like we've not really thought that through because it doesn't seem like there's any discussion about who's going to be potentially taking over that we would prefer to the current regime.
- [13:33]
A
Well, Trump had a line. He said like, oh yeah, I had some, some ideas of guys in mind and like, oops, we just killed them. So now we're on like, dude number 50, which maybe we don't even have a case file on. I mean, when we're, when we're that down in like the minor leagues here,
- [13:50]
C
the deputy Minister of agriculture.
- [13:53]
B
Well, is there.
- [13:54]
A
Okay, let's, let's do a little. I want to come back to something that Mike said earlier about like, the theory of like, if this works, if this ends up working out, like, what did we not understand about the world?
- [14:08]
B
I don't think it's that we didn't understand something about the world. I think this is all a question of like, how you process risk and make like assessments of risk. Like the argument against going after Iran, for example, has always been that essentially Iran has chemical weapons, they have lots of these long range drones, they have lots of different kinds of missiles. They have like a bunch of USVs. They could, they could shut down the Strait of Hormuz. And so you have the risk of a big impact on like setting aside any like, moral or ethical. Like, should you fight the people? Like whatever. The, they have a, like should you fight the government? The. You have like a like parameter risk of escalation or that their air defenses function better, like, or that they can unleash really substantial terrorist attacks in Europe, you know, shut down the straight for weeks. Like that kind of thing. And, and in some ways the, it would, it would, it, it might suggest that those risks essentially were like assessed at too high a probability. Or I mean, it could mean that those risks were accurately assessed and we just like got the like, play. We got like the dice roll of reality where like, we didn't see those impacts. But it's also possible because like, history is long and like winds around that we end up seeing some of these impacts, just not immediately or maybe they'll happen tomorrow, I don't know.
- [15:34]
E
Yeah, well, yeah, there is that old Bismarck thing about God loves fools, drunks and the United States of America.
- [15:43]
B
I use that quote in my US Foreign policy class like last week.
- [15:46]
A
Amazing. The terrorism one I think we should dwell on for a little bit. I mean, we've had like multiple assassination attempts that have failed by the Iranians, but they were kind of using the B team. And you know, you've had like, or they've, they were trying to like contract it out and they ended up contracting out to some FBI agents who are now all busy like finding immigrants and whatnot. I mean, that's a real risk. I'm not super excited to see how that one plays out. I had a operational question. Oh, let's come back to like, was
- [16:26]
B
it about, was it about how screwed we are in the Indo Pacific?
- [16:31]
C
We'll get there.
- [16:31]
A
We'll get there, I promise. Like, the idea that you can kill off this many people and Iran still running around firing off all these missiles and doing stuff, is this, should this be surprising impressive? Like, what does that, what does that tell us?
- [16:44]
C
They've been preparing for this kind of thing for decades. They've, you know, they've got the infrastructure to support distributed missile launches. They've still got a couple hundred missile launch ballistic missile launchers available and untold number of shahed shahid drones that they can deploy. So they've been preparing for this and you know, largely have distributed their command and control, especially the irgc, which survives and is trained to operate in a more distributed way where they don't really need contact with the headquarters to be able to execute.
- [17:14]
A
I think that's the tricky thing, right, is like you have the Iraqi army give up when the, when like, like when Trump like sends a text message to all of them saying surrender or be killed. Like they're not literally all going to be killed.
- [17:29]
C
Right.
- [17:30]
A
Which is different than like if the tanks are rolling in from Kuwait. So it's just, I don't know, I'm worried.
- [17:40]
C
You should be worried yeah, it doesn't, there doesn't seem to be an easy way for this to end cleanly. You know, it just seems like it's inevitable that thereby is going to, it's going to be protracted. And the only question is protracted in what way does it result in continued closure of the Strait of Hormuz and economic impacts and, or does it result in continued ballistic missile attacks that eventually start taking out things that we care about?
- [18:04]
A
Other operational stuff. You want to go to China, Taiwan?
- [18:08]
C
Mike?
- [18:09]
B
No, I just like it. I mean I thought it was, I thought it was, I thought it was striking. I've been curious what others think that the like day one of the conflict and you are already have articles showing up in like the Journal and like the Times and the Post. It's like the US might run out of weapons soon and the, I mean, you know, like, obviously the, you know, far be it for me to not take this moment to describe again how bad it is when somebody fires a, you know, like $50,000 shot at you and you fire a million dollar thing back to destroy it and how thus we should be firing the $50,000 shots. But the, the, that that is not sustainable and Iran is, you know, if like presuming Brian is correct in his assessment of Iran's ability to continue launching or they could even like reconstitute some of that launch capacity over like a month long, a month long period, then I mean you're gonna, you're really drawing down stockpiles because the U.S. isn't just protecting. The U.S. is not just protecting the U.S. navy or U.S. military bases. The U.S. is also playing a role, protecting all the Gulf countries and you know, like recall how, like how upset they got like they have been in the past when like they have faced like risk in this context. And so the US like that's where there's I think a lot of pressure on the U.S. and that means that if this keeps going, the U.S. will have to pull in theory would need to pull some stockpiles out of the Pacific and like send them over to the Middle east to be able to continue intercepting Iran Iranian attacks at the rate that they're being intercepted. And I mean like, that's a, like, I don't know, that's like, that's like kind of risky.
- [19:53]
C
Yeah, it's that Air Defense Interceptor inventory. That's the big problem is we're burning through those at a pretty high rate because even if you're smart and you don't use them to shoot down the shaheds, you use your guns or you use something else to take down the Shaheed. You're still, you're still using a lot of them to take out ballistic missiles. And then the Shaheeds are used on all the soft targets that are undefended because you can't protect everything at the same level. So these Gulf countries are now having to come up with a way to defend against shaheds, which they didn't have to before. You know, they got to defend their shopping malls and airports against long range, cheap drones.
- [20:29]
D
Not to mention like all the naval assets that we shift over there that could have been doing other things.
- [20:34]
C
Right, right.
- [20:35]
B
100%. Great point.
- [20:39]
A
All right, well, Mike, you gave us our transition earlier. The story came out that Claude, or Sorry, anything else on around. I feel like we only did it 20 minutes. This is like, I'm,
- [20:51]
B
we could like, talk about how wild it is, like forever, but you, you've also like, collected a set of people who are like, interested in AI stuff. And so.
- [20:57]
A
Okay, that's, that, that is true.
- [20:59]
B
Well, I, I, it's so like, it's like, whatever, dude. Like, whatever. I'll like, like, I'll, I'll like sit here and talk about like, what it means for the defense of Guam or Kadena or something as long as you want. But like, the, the is like, look, you, you like, what are we. I mean, I also, I mean, sorry, one, one more thing that I'll say that you could like, use or not use, frankly, is like the, I do. There's an element of this in seeing American air defenses have to operate at scale against Iran, where I wonder what information we are now communicating over to China about how our air defenses operate and where the like, soft spots might be conceptually that, that could then maybe, I mean, we know, I mean, look, they like, the Chinese pay super close attention to everything we do and like, this will be no exception. And obviously the world has had a very close look at offensive U.S. capabilities, you know, throughout the war on terrorism period. And so they're certainly well versed in those, which is one reason why they've been nervous about them because they're pretty, we don't have enough of them. They're pretty good. But like, now they're getting a really good look at US Air defense having to operate at scale.
- [22:10]
C
Yeah, but, yeah, there's a, the flip side of that too is US Air defenses, especially for the sea based stuff has worked. I mean, the ground based stuff has worked too. So I think it's, I Mean, it's a little bit. I don't know, Emmy's perspective on this was. But it was surprising to me as a retired Navy guy that this stuff actually works when the time comes to get. You get shot at and you pull the trigger. And it actually works that it defends like you thought it was going to do.
- [22:33]
B
Our $2 million interceptors should work against the Shaheed.
- [22:38]
C
They worked against ballistic missiles, too. I mean, that's what's interesting is that, you know, this stuff, it works now. It's. It's expensive and it's overkill for a lot of these threats. And so what this has done is given these guys a lot of sets and reps to evaluate. Well, what is the right defensive system to use against the Shaheed? And they're not using SM2s against Shaheds anymore. They're using guns, they're using other drones, they're using jammers. Yeah. So they're using other stuff against the Shaheeds now. So they. But that's it. So it sort of goes both ways. You've got both. You've given a bunch of telemetry to China that they could employ in their own tactics development, but we also got a bunch of feedback that allows us to refine our approach that otherwise we would have been doing this against China and probably not doing it nearly as well.
- [23:23]
D
So I think Brian's got a great point there. I'd also add in the operational experience in the Red Sea where. Where we've learned a lot, and the number of times that I heard about what was happening on the ships out there and thinking, oh my God, you know, you don't do those maneuvers unless you think you're about to die. And has taught folks a lot. I think it's sort of the reps and sets where the reps and sets have begun, and so we see them extending now. But all of this is fantastic data for China.
- [23:51]
C
Yeah. But it also, you know, it's combat experience. Right. So you got Chinese military with, you know, now zero combat experience with the most recent purge going up against, you know, this is more experience for the US Forces. Obviously not against a pure competitor, but it's better than nothing.
- [24:08]
A
I was. Did note General Kane just saying joint a thousand times, but I mean, it's. It's relevant. Right. Like this is. We really got a lot of. A lot of players in this at the moment.
- [24:25]
C
Well, it's his job. Right. He's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He's got a. It's branding. Right. It's it's because he's not actually in charge of anything. So you're in charge of the staff, you know, in reality. So if you're the chairman, you gotta highlight the joint nature of the operation
- [24:38]
A
so you can call out the logistics. Don't forget about those. And then the family members. I mean. Yeah, like, this is.
- [24:45]
B
This is good.
- [24:45]
A
He's. He's giving everyone their kudos. All right, Mike gave us the transition earlier. Who do you think. Do you think it was anthropic or the Department of War? Who put the story out that Claude was being used in this?
- [25:04]
D
Sorry, Claude was being used in what?
- [25:06]
A
In. In the Iran operation. Operation Epic Fury.
- [25:13]
D
I don't think it takes much to figure out that CENTCOM is using Maven smart system.
- [25:18]
B
Yeah, right.
- [25:20]
D
Okay.
- [25:21]
B
Like they tell us every single time they can.
- [25:24]
C
Right.
- [25:28]
D
So I would tell you Maven Smart Systems did all the combatant commands. CLAUDE is integrated into Maven smart system. That is not to say that everything that Maven does is Claude. There's lots of things that Maven does that some of which has absolutely nothing to do with AI and purely just moving data around. But centcom's probably the furthest ahead. They're the most experienced war fighting cocom. They are the most experienced with maven smart system. General Kurilla, you know, he's sort of the OG here who was at the 18th Airborne, really did incredible work there. And goes to Centcom and I think, you know, to the reps and sets conversation we had earlier. I think they've been working very hard to get as smart as they possibly can and use it in the most responsible way. So I don't know what exactly they're doing. I'm very happy not to know exactly what they're doing, but they are the most experienced code comm in this sort of the use of MSS and therefore presumably integration with claude.
- [26:26]
A
Fair enough.
- [26:27]
B
Yeah, yeah. Like, I think this is. I don't know who. It doesn't necessarily need to be that somebody like, leaked it on purpose. This could easily just be like somebody asked somebody at centcom and they like, happened to say it. Like, frankly, that that is often more likely from. From my viewpoint than a like, deliberate stratagem to like, get the information. To get the information out there and like, just like plus one on everything.
- [26:49]
C
Emmy said it also Maven smart system. I mean, not to throw shade on Maven smart system, God forbid, but it's a little clunky to use. You know, it's not, you know, it's it's like your typical web thing where you've got a lot of menus you gotta go to and you gotta pull multiple things down and create a workflow. And so having of AI tool to help you do that is almost essential, I think, to be able to have it run at an operationally relevant tempo. So I think that's a, there's an element of that too that these, these planning tools because there's just so many parts out there that you can pull together into a kill chain that if you want to do that at any sort of scale and tempo, you need something to help you do it.
- [27:32]
D
I mean, I would. Sorry. Just to push it even further, Brian. Like it wasn't exactly like our weapon systems on our ships were a joy to work with or easy to manipulate or even understand. And so this is a step change improvement.
- [27:49]
C
That's true.
- [27:50]
E
Yeah.
- [27:50]
B
It's all.
- [27:50]
D
Yeah.
- [27:50]
B
Like what's the baseline? Like what are, what do we compare?
- [27:56]
D
So I think, I think actually one of the things that's, that's super interesting about MSS is that it's got lots of bells and whistles. There's a, there's so much you can do. It's just, you know, it's workflow software with a bunch of data streams that you can manipulate, which is awesome and is super intimidating. And you can't just like sit down and expect to be able to manipulate this thing like you're doing Gmail. It just takes a lot of work. But. So AI does help, but in my mind, the AI helps less with sort of user manipulation in the sense of like user interface than it does in. Yeah, in just. There's so much data. There's so much data available, it's extraordinarily difficult to make sense of it. I don't even know that necessarily the Claude's making sense of all the data all the time because the use cases there are questionable sometimes, but is really good at writing the daily report to the commander. There's some really boring things that happen every day in an operation and AI can be helpful in supporting people who are going to do that anyway and then allowing you just sort of helping the person, not necessarily replacing the person.
- [29:03]
C
So I think it helps you build that workflow too.
- [29:05]
E
Yeah, yeah, I'd like to jump in on that, Amy, because here's my sense of somebody who has spent zero time in any sort of part of the armed forces whatsoever. But my fundamental working assumption with all of this is AI is fundamentally, in its current form, a bureaucratic technology that Is it allows bureaucracies, and if there's one bureaucracy that is the biggest bureaucracy of all, it is the DoD, it allows bureaucracies to do things which are more efficient than traditional means of paper pushing, summarizing information, translating between different observed languages, different branches use all of these really mundane, but nonetheless quite crucially important tasks. And so I wonder when we look at this big fight between anthropic and hes, how much of this is really missing the point. So I think there are real issues here, which is, on the one hand, you can see ways in which these technologies can be used to automate certain kinds of aspects of operations, which are highly problematic. On the other hand, you can also see ways in which they can be used. And this is clearly part of the story. They can be used for domestic surveillance. If you have a bunch of disparate data about individuals. They might have different social media services, they might also have dating services. You can pull stuff together in ways that make sense, but that this is not actually about whether or not we're going to see terminator happening in 5 or 10 years time. This is about much more mundane, much more ordinary, albeit crucial and sometimes pretty scary uses that the technology could be used for. So I would love to get you guys sense on that, because that's my sense from outside.
- [30:49]
D
Did we just lose Henry? Okay, I'm in violent agreement with you, Henry.
- [30:55]
E
I.
- [30:56]
D
Everything you've said is just right. There's so much of this that's mundane. I'll give you one of my favorite examples of where I've seen an unclassified demonstration of something that could be used on the classified side, which is foreign disclosure. So there's a super boring task that has to happen where we have all this classified intelligence and you might want to share it with a partner. You may not want to give them the full story. So you might want to tell them, hey, we have aircraft in a particular area, but we might not want to tell them how many. And so you can put together an LLM, an agentic workflow if you want, that takes the original intelligence, then kind of runs it through all the different parameters from the different guidance documents that these guys get, and then come out with a sanitized version of the intelligence. Super boring, totally a bureaucratic task. And this isn't to say that necessarily, it always gets it 100% right and you should never look at it, but the task of doing it in the first place can be so much more efficient. And, and yeah, if we could, if we could really help People understand that nobody really wants a Terminator or the, you know, this war bot meme that's going around on the Internet is even
- [32:02]
B
I don't want a Terminator.
- [32:04]
D
None of us. I keep trying to tell people, you know, military officers fundamentally like control, you know, just to, to seed so much control is not really in their DNA or their training or their bureaucracy. But anyways, this is all violent agreement with you, Henry. Does that help you at all?
- [32:26]
E
Super helpful.
- [32:27]
B
I would, I would add, I agree with everything Amy said. I would, I would add one distinction which is I would distinguish between AI and LLMs in that the I. And this is part of where I think the like challenge has been frankly in the Warbots conversation as much as, as much as anything since the Pentagon has deployed autonomous weapon Systems for like 40 some odd years essentially. And like, and, and, and if you use the Pentagon's definition of autonomous weapon systems, that's true. If you use phrases like anthropics, like whatever, fully autonomous weapon system, like big people should. Nobody should ever use that phrase. But whether like fully autonomous weapon systems or like whatever phrases like the NGO community concerns. And frankly they've probably been using autonomous weapon systems for many more years because they're like wrapping in a lot more. Wrapping in a lot of like precision guided weapons and sort of things like that. And like this has created a lot of challenges in the conversation, I think because like Anthropic is certainly correct that like the last thing you would do is take like Claude trained on the slop of the Internet and like slap it in a weapon system and like try to like, like, like hope that it would like hit the correct target. Like Anthropic is right, that's not ready for prime time, but you could use you. So which is why you would use instead like a super bespoke algorithm trained on a very like very bespoke data set that probably wasn't LLM based and, but would still be an autonomous weapon system or even like an AI driven weapon system. But the, like the things you would worry about, the risks, some of the control issues that like Emmy is that, that Emmy smartly mentioned are very different in that context. But like that nuance has just gotten lost here.
- [34:14]
D
I think there's also.
- [34:15]
A
Oh, sorry.
- [34:17]
D
Yeah, I mean I can keep going on this forever. But the other thing to mention is that does anyone know of a perfect weapon system? I certainly do not. There are no perfect weapon systems. They are all.
- [34:29]
B
Emmy is a perfect weapon system. Brian is a perfect.
- [34:31]
D
No, no, I am. But they're all flawed. And, and so we learn to operate with flawed weapon systems and we learn when to deploy them and how to deploy them. And so I don't think that while. Listen, I really appreciate that we're having this conversation. I'm glad that people are interested in this topic. I think it deserves a lot of, you know, deep thought. But I do not think as we enter into the conversation, people recognize how many fail safes the military builds in to its process and how serious, you know, these are still human beings that go at night and want to sleep with a clear conscience if they can. And so we put in, there's the technology. Can you get the technology right? Can we get it to the highest level of reliability and precision? That's one part of it. Then there's all the training on the people. So you don't get to operate these systems without going through a lot of training and then having usually someone higher up the food chain say like yay, verily, you are allowed to push that button or do that operation. And then on top of it you've got, as Henry pointed out, this phenomenal bureaucracy that we have really affected over time that is building in all sorts of checkpoints. Like you may turn it on only at this time, you may point it in only this direction, you may, you know, the rules of engagement, the battle app, the battle orders. There's just all these different bureaucratic things. So we, we put in lots and lots of process procedure to try and boil down the risk of imperfect systems. And that's not to say that we should just go running forth with, with any of these tools, but just that we have to build up all of the fun doctor and operations training around it.
- [36:09]
C
So it might also be important to draw the distinction between the autonomous weapons and the AI enabled command and control and planning function. Because I think those end up being very different in terms of like what the capabilities are, what kind of guardrails you can put in and then to what degree we're willing to turn that over to the AI, either LLM or an AI enabled system. Because I'll tell you, in our war gaming we find that teams are willing at some point to just press the I believe button, that what the AI is telling them the course of action should be is fine because it just gets too complex. You're doing your maven smart system, you know, kill chain development and you're running out of time and you're like, okay, what do you think I should do? Okay, that's good, we'll execute that Kill chain. So the autonomous weapon can have all kinds of guardrails on it. But if we've built a plan that is derived from some model and we're sort of just expecting that it's going to work and it's not going to kill a bunch of innocent civilians, then we're not going to. That basically obviates any effort that we had to try to make the autonomous weapon safer, because our planning process is not safe.
- [37:17]
E
Okay, can I maybe push a slightly different version of the Dario Amadei story? Because. Okay, here's my sense of things, and I've got to say I do not buy into the Dario Amadei vision of we are going to be in a world where we have a nation of geniuses in a AI lab pouring out stuff five or ten years from now. But I think there are some real concerns that I think his ideas to some extent get at. And here my sense, and my guess is Mike is the same. I have complete faith in a lot of the military ethos that the United States has created. The same day that Hagsass did this, he also said that he was going to take away the opportunity for military personne to do advanced degrees at a bunch of universities, claiming that there was this incredible hostility that professors had towards the military. And my experience, I guess Mike's is the same, is that if you want to have really thoughtful, interesting people in your classes, by and large, people who are from the officer corps, they have a standard deviation, more care, more principle, more ideas about these things than most people do.
- [38:32]
B
They're awesome in the classroom, they're wonderful
- [38:34]
E
in the classroom, they're wonderful. And I think that's a pretty universal, universal agreement that all of us have. That said, if we're in a military where HEG says is also saying that more or less, we don't want to worry about stupid rules of engagement, that makes me nervous. And if we're in a world where, as Amy says, these technologies are fundamentally imperfect, there is a ton of slop associated with them. You worry about the ways in which differences at the top in how you do things might intersect with these systems in very unfortunate ways. And you, you especially worry about this when you look at the possibility for domestic information and the various. A lot of this seems to be about access to domestic information. There's a lot that the US Military can do under the law to get around to 1, 2, 3, 3, 3, gathering together information from commercial databases. And I would be frankly nervous about some of the ways in which this might look two Three, five, six years down the time if this was not pushed back against.
- [39:38]
B
I worry, I mean, I agree with you Macro. I think I, I've been very vocal that I thought that the Pentagon's been adopting AI too slowly for a long time rather than, rather than too quickly. Because I think the like risks have essentially always been that the US Military would rest on its laurels and has been too slow about integrating emerging capabilities. And in part it's because of like all of the policy and procedure and process, like, most of which has nothing to do with AI at all. And so I think the risk for the US is general living going too slowly rather than too quickly. And frankly, even in the hegseth era, though I'm a little less comfortable making this argument at present that even in the hegseth era that all of that like policy and procedure and whatever like still exists in ways that make it fundamentally difficult. For the reason that like Emmy suggested before, which is like, incentives are actually aligned to have systems that work because systems that aren't reliable, like by definition don't work. And operators, commanders and operators aren't going to want to use them because they want to use things that they trust. Like, if they can't trust these systems. I mean, which is why like the like both Emmy and I have done research on automation bias in one way or another. The this like phenomenon of over trusting, over trusting AI. And you know, it's like Brian's point about the like thing that you worry about like people just like hitting the I believe button. But like the if you, if you trust algorithms more than you should, given their accuracy, like, you solve that with things like training and standard operating procedures. And like, it's frankly good that in these war games that like people are like, get confused and then press the I believe button because then that tells you how to that like on the one hand, like, sure, you'd rather they not do that. But on the other hand, like here I'll tell you something to make you feel better. Even the I've got a draft paper that I'm working on with a woman named Lauren Kahn and a woman named Laura Resnick Samitin that compares a sample of West Point cadets to a sample of us like the US general public, essentially, like similar like age and education level where the West Point cadets are substantially less susceptible to automation bias than the general public. And we it I think that the mechanism is essentially this. The mechanism is essentially the training that the military is giving people, like not just in AI but in like war fighting and Decision making in general, which to like Brian and Emmy's point actually can make people more cautious at times.
- [42:19]
D
So if I can, I can't leave the automation bias point to go. I agree. I actually did a study with also Lauren Kahn where we looked at. You can compare the way the army uses the Patriot battle Patriot missile battery to the way the Navy uses the Aegis weapon system generally. These are very similar. But what I found, what you find interesting, and this goes to your point, Henry, that if we're going to accept imperfect weapons, which frankly, we have no other choice, then you need the bureaucracy to sort of address it. So in terms of bureaucracy with the Patriot, the guidance that is, first of all, who they staff a Patriot missile battery with is a slightly more junior person. They have slightly less training. And in the training documents, at least when you go back to the original ones that are unclassified, it says basically like, just turn the system on and don't touch anything because this system is smarter than you. And you can read that in the guidance documents. If you go to the Navy, what it says is, this is your responsibility and if you screw this up, it is entirely your fault. I was trained under that.
- [43:26]
B
This is so true.
- [43:29]
D
Very seriously now, that said, both sides have committed terrible mistakes. The Vincennes incident and the Navy instance, they didn't trust the system. The system was actually correct and they said, I don't trust the system. And then they accidentally hit the wrong thing. And in the Patriot fratricide, they sort of stayed hands off because they said, we know what we're doing. So there's no perfect answer here is sort of a sad story. But there are bureaucratic choices that can be made. And so if we are eroding the bureaucracy, if we are eroding test and evaluation or all the different things that have to come after you buy the weapon system, that's problematic. And so I think, and I frankly think that our operators don't love. I mean, to Brian's point, like, if you drop MSS on an operator's desk, they're going to be like, okay, like this is complicated. But if you give them the proper training and you get them certified, they'll become more facile, they'll be better at their job. I don't want to miss Henry's intel point, which is not my area of expertise. I've learned enough to be very humble about how intelligence works. But I do think there is a worthwhile conversation to be had in the country about what do we expect, what is now our expectation in terms of the data that's available. And while we are concerned about how it might be used domestically, and certainly I'm in that camp, you know, same data is being bought by China, guys, and it's not like it's not available. And so this is more than just a problem of how do we choose to govern the way we use data by our government, but how do we choose to allow our data to be shared and how vulnerable are we now in a way that we really weren't vulnerable before? I mean, the data was there, but you couldn't really use it until you had these new tools.
- [45:18]
A
Sorry, Brian, you're Zizzy.
- [45:21]
C
Oh, no, I was just going to say you got companies like Vannevar Labs and others who are commercializing this, harvesting of commercial data on our enemies and then giving it to the US government. So the US Government has benefited from this availability of open source intelligence and data and we've been using AI tools to harvest it. So it's a legitimate question to say how, how much of that is going to be like US information that's leaked over into somebody else's network and now we're harvesting it for the purpose of our own military intelligence gathering. So similar to fisa.
- [45:52]
B
Right?
- [45:52]
C
It's the same challenge with FISA that I'm going to spy on somebody else, but if they're talking to somebody back in the U.S. i'm now essentially spying on somebody in the U.S. but so it's something that we have to ponder. And I think back to Emmy's point, the only way to really kind of keep it in check is to avoid giving so much data to third parties that are going to be able to then provide it to somebody else.
- [46:14]
A
Can we come back to the fight on Friday? And that happened over the weekend.
- [46:19]
B
That's actually what I was going to do.
- [46:20]
A
Okay, well, Mike, I think maybe we should set the supply chain risk bit aside because it is really, really hard to steal, man. That one. But, but you know, on the, on the government, autonomous, like what they're claiming on their side, like what, what, what, what, what do you see as the strongest piece of that argument? Or, or how do you want to do the transition? I'll do it.
- [46:48]
B
Yeah, well, no, no, sure. We're like, well, let me, let me tell you my view of this, I guess. And then I'd be curious what like other folks think, because I think like Brian and Emmy and Henry all bring like different perspectives to the table here in that the, like, to me, and I've said this Several times in the last week. This is a dispute about policy, a little bit about like policy, but about personalities and politics. And frankly like if you want to be even stronger, it's a dispute about like personality and politics masquerading as a dispute about policy. And I think the like OpenAI deal in some ways is the clearest, is the clearest evidence for, for that. But even more evidence for that is the fact that like one, Anthropic was the first company in the door to do doing classified work to every use by Anthropic. Every use that everything depending on asked Anthropic to do. Anthropic was happy to do. And three, there were no upcoming asks by the government of Anthropic that Anthropic like didn't want to, didn't want to do unless publicly, at least publicly. And so like this essentially was a like theoretical fight about future potential use cases and like who gets to decide. And it seems like the government is thinking about the like AI tools the same way they think about like missiles they buy from Lockheed. Like Lockheed, you know, like Lockheed. Lockheed doesn't get to tell us we get to use ELRASM against like this country but not that country. Whereas Anthropic is thinking about this more like a service where for each use of Anthropic's technology you would need Anthropic people to help like build it out out. And so this then creates a bunch of like a bunch of challenges. But like to me this is really like a breakdown in trust between Anthropic and the government where the government doesn't trust that Anthropic will be there in important national security arenas and Anthropic doesn't trust that the government's going to be responsible perhaps for some of the reasons that like we've been that, that we have been talking about. But this was not like a fundamental disagreement over like a use case that was on the table. Able but at least that's my perspective but like curious what others think.
- [48:58]
C
Yeah, I agree, I agree with Mike. I think this definitely, it seemed like the, they were definitely not arguing over the thing that was actually being discussed. It seems like they nobody was saying that the government was going to pursue use cases that Anthropic was saying they didn't want to do. It seemed like it was much more about you're changing our terms of service. We don't like the open ended nature of those new terms which are essentially no terms of service. And we want this ability to continue to put A brake on any future use case that we don't agree with. I guess my question for Emmy and Mike is do we think are they. When the government is using CLAUDE on the classified. On classified networks, it's not having to go back to Claude's or to anthropic server farm somewhere, so it's not acting as a service or is it. Are they using CLAUDE under a service model, do you think? Or are they using CLAUDE under some kind of. Of like OTA product model?
- [49:54]
D
That's a good question. I don't actually know the answer to how they're. They're using it. My understand, my pro. Sorry. My presumption is that this is, this is somehow hitting NGA's compute and that's where it's sitting.
- [50:09]
C
Yeah, but it seems like they must have some. Like, to Mike's point, there's still anthropic people are still involved in the use of CLAUDE on a day to day basis or else this would just be like an lrasm where, you know, you, you, you gave them a version of Claude and now it's out of your hands. The government might use it for whatever.
- [50:26]
D
I actually don't know. I mean this is.
- [50:28]
C
Yeah.
- [50:28]
D
I mean just to back up a little. First of all, like we've been trying a really long time to make strong bonds back to the commercial tech sector. They are so important to our operations. That's where the R and D money is. We have been.
- [50:41]
B
This is like a rough week. A rough week for like goals that Emmy and I have had for a while.
- [50:45]
D
Yeah, right. And so just like on that level of, you know, government working with commercial tech, this was a pretty sad week. And I still, you know, hope springs eternal. I would like us to get back to it because I think this, I don't know how this affects, you know, I'd love to have a conversation with folks in the Valley and elsewhere who are maybe doing commercial tech, but they're thinking about defense and now they're wondering like we're going to have. We just, I think maybe took a step back and that's really unfortunate in terms of the. Oh gosh, the terms of service. I mean as Mike and I think we're talking about this that you know, put. If you put autonomous. An autonomous weapons in a contract, like please define autonomous weapon.
- [51:31]
A
Right.
- [51:31]
D
I'll wait. It's so hard. So I can understand why there's, there's friction there at the same time. Again, like, like there is, you know, there are laws around autonomous weapon, but the law is just, you know, did you notify the government that you changed the policy? That's, that's the law. So there, I think there could be space to, to do something meaningful there.
- [51:54]
B
Yeah.
- [51:54]
A
Mike, how do you feel about your, your directive getting a new moment in the slot?
- [51:58]
B
I mean, I think the. I, I think that like, look, Pentagon direct. I remember like a very distinct moment when we were so the, the office that, for those that, that don't know, for like listeners that don't know. Now, the, the office that I was privileged to run in the Pentagon rewrote the Pentagon's policy on autonomy and weapon systems in 2023. We were accused at the time of two things. One by the NGO community of providing a pathway for the development of autonomous weapon systems, and the second by some as overregulating autonomous weapon systems, which in some ways like, made us feel like maybe we like got the bounce.
- [52:35]
A
Like.
- [52:35]
B
Okay, at that point, I will say that the, I think the part of the issue is like Defense Department directives are not meant to see the sunlight. I mean they're, they are the rules surrounding them and the specifics are, are like very much written in a super insidery way for that like, largest bureaucracy in the world kind of audience. And so when, and the Pentagon has never been good about publicly explaining what directives generally mean. Like, we got, we were allowed to do like one or two media things when the revision to the directive came out. And then it was like back to the normal posture of like, the less said the better and not because anybody was like specifically opposed to it in this case. That's just, it's just like, that's how the system generally operates. Like, that wasn't, wasn't like a, like anybody was like trying to like stifle information or something. But it means that the, it shouldn't take a, you know, like, like a PhD in autonomy and weapon systems to understand like what American policy looks like. But just like reading the directive and trying to interpret it yourself is like not, is like sadly not that informative or it's informative, but like, you could be informed the wrong way. Which says to me that like, frankly, either we need a new policy or we need a. Some like real robust, like public documentation on like what the policy actually means. I think either one of, I think frankly, I think either one of those would be reassuring if people understood what it actually said. But like, so, yeah, it's like, it's weird to see like your handiwork out in public like that. And like, and like everybody Saying things that aren't true about it, like everybody.
- [54:17]
E
So I wonder how much of this is just a fundamental culture clash between anthropic and dod. So I really think the best piece I've read about anthropic and is Gideon Lewis Krauss piece in the New Yorker a few weeks back. Which really gives you the sense of what it is to be in an organization where Claude actually seems to have a personality, where people are interacting with Claude every day and where they see their job as in some sense being loosely analogous to bringing up a new intelligence. And that may seem, that may seem extremely wrong headed, but it feels a little bit like Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. So if you take an 11 year old kid, you bring them away and you teach them to kill people and you teach them to manipulate and whatever, and this is not necessarily something that most parents are necessarily going to go along with super happily. So I do wonder. I also think that this is wrong headed. Equally, I do hope that Amudei is right along the lines that Amy suggested when he said maybe this will provoke people to start actually thinking about some of the questions of rights, some of the questions of information exchange and what the problems are that we have created society that we live in.
- [55:33]
D
Yeah, Ender's Game is a fabulous leadership book and I believe it's on the Navy's required reading list for leadership. So strongly agree with that part.
- [55:43]
A
Well, maybe we should spend a little bit of time on the kind of like political economy piece of maybe not actually doing, but threatening to put Anthropic at the same level as a Huawei. Henry, do you want to, you want to start with that, what we're taking case hearing there?
- [56:03]
E
So I think that this was a remarkably stupid thing for the Department of Defense to do. And it was also really interesting for me to see Dean Ball, who is the person who's more responsible than anybody else for drafting the current US General approach to AI coming out and pretty directly denouncing the administration and saying that this is evidence of how America is going to hell in a handbasket and how it is that we actually need to build.
- [56:32]
B
He's really strong. He got like real aggressive. He got real aggressive on it.
- [56:36]
E
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's a really interesting document to read. And more or less he ends up saying, well, and here I'm paraphrasing, we've got to see more civic activity happening around this stuff because the guiding impetus to a better society is not going to come from the government that we have. But I think that this really is an important thing from the point of view of governance, because my sense is, and this is, as I say, I am not standard A. I'm not a standard national security person. When people are talking about different weapons systems, I have no more idea than the next person who reads the newspapers. But I do think that if you think about this in terms of economic security and economic coercion, this is the first time that I know of in which the United States has really gone all the way to suggest that the tools it uses for coercing other countries and businesses in other countries and designating business in other countries is going to be applied to a US Business. And as far as we can tell, simply for refusing to sign up to changed contract terms. So I really think that this, again, it could be like what Mike was saying about Iran earlier. It could be that the repercussions of this take some time to really begin to unfurl. But I think it's going to have two consequences. First of all, it's going to mean that a lot of businesses in Silicon Valley, once they talk to their legal teams, once they start thinking through what the odds are, what the potential risks they run might be, are going to be much less willing to get in bed with the US Defense establishment. The risk to reward ratio, which used to look pretty great on a lot of fronts, is now perhaps tuned more substantially towards a risk than towards reward. And the other thing that I think is that this is going to, perhaps, if the DOD wins this fight, it's going to result in a lot of allies and third countries looking at US Tech companies in much the same way that we look at Chinese tech companies. I remember James Palmer had this fantastic phrase where he said it's kind of like One of those 1950s science fiction movies where a tech company appears to be independent until suddenly the Body Snatcher comes in, and suddenly Adams does all sorts of things that suggest that it is acting at the behest of the Chinese state. I think that a lot of the same fears are going to begin to bubble up around US tech companies if they don't succeed in pushing back and creating a clear zone for autonomy. And so in a certain sense, it is returning back to some of the fears and worries that happened in the tech sector around the Snowden revelations, when it became clear that there had been a lot more backdoor stuff that had been happening in terms of active cooperation or grudging assent than anybody had known. But this could be substantially worse. And so on the One hand you have the US effectively trying to push AI development, push the integration of AI into the Department of Defense. On the other hand, you have the US wanting the rest of the world to, to use American AI. And it seems to me that by emphasizing the first, the US and pushing it to a pretty ridiculous degree, the US has really hurt itself on the second.
- [59:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, I agree with all of that. And if you were a company thinking about doing tech work with the Pentagon right now and there's some non zero chance that if, if you do like a little work with the Pentagon and then like decide not to, that you might get slapped with a supply chain risk designation that like makes you. That like, like, like puts you in the same class as Huawei. Like what does that do to your incentive structure? I mean that like and, and that, and this is from a workforce to I think a point, you know, points that both Henry and I think Emmy have made at various points in this conversation that was like maybe not the most comfortable at working with the Pentagon to begin with with and has like gotten there over the last several years. And, and I think the way that it's. The way that it was clear and, and Jordan, you've heard me say this before. The way it was clear the utility of their tech in the context of Ukraine's defense against the Russian invasion was actually really good for the tech sector then wanting to work with the Pentagon because they saw that like hey, our tools can be used for good to like help defend a country like against being invaded like the, but like that, hey, like the, the shine's really fallen off on that one at this point. And like, and it, it really creates some. I think that there's some real, there's some real tension here since I think there's not, there's not a great argument for why the Pentagon wouldn't just let Anthropic wouldn't just cancel the contract and, and like find another vendor and that like given that Both Xai and OpenAI now have deals with the Pentagon to do work in classified. It, it certainly contradicts the need for like a DPA does like a Defense Production act designation. But like also, I mean it, it, it implies that the supply chain issues are like not necessarily like exactly the way the department is talking about them potentially. I mean who knows whatever. Like, like lawyers will get involved now and like there'll be filings and then you know, they'll send say things.
- [61:55]
C
But Mike, are you saying it's inconsistent to say your stuff is a supply chain Risk. But if you don't let us use it, we're going to use the DPA to force you to give it to us. We want it so bad, we want the supply chain risk so bad that we're going to use the DPA to force you to give it to us.
- [62:09]
D
But I mean, I'm sorry.
- [62:11]
B
No, no, no.
- [62:12]
D
I mean, I guess there's more of a question than a statement, but I'm, I'm not sure, like how long is this going to take because. Or how long will it take to affect what we're seeing right now? Because there are so many companies that are in the defense tech space now in a way that is not just in the United States. Right. There's enthusiasm now around the European market. There's lots of activity and there are companies I think perhaps, and you guys know better than I do, but that the companies that are in it for defense, the sort of, the new startups that are really excited to be in the defense space will try and stay in the defense space. And it's these companies that are sort of in the middle, middle where they're like, oh, we've got some pretty strong commercial applications. We think we can make a lot commercially. We've got engineers who might be more excited about the commercial applications and those are the ones that we might start to lose. But even then, I think Anthropic is still pretty enthusiastic about the national security mission. They just have a problem with this. A couple of individual points. So I don't know that I know exactly how this is to be going to rejigger the relationship, but I don't think it'll be straightforward.
- [63:19]
A
Well, I don't know. I don't know if we can say a couple individual points when you have the President tweeting out that you guys are a terrible company. I don't know, but I mean, yeah, right.
- [63:30]
B
Like it does.
- [63:31]
C
Right.
- [63:31]
B
Like, like Emmy can be right about the structural incentives, like still like being there etc. And like it is true that I think Anthropic would like to work with the national security community. And look, these companies are really competitive with each other and Anthropic is like our tools are the best. Like of course the military should be using, using them. The, it's. But yeah, the like vibes are not good right now.
- [63:52]
C
So Emmy, do you think the, like a, like a Anthropic. Do they use their relationship with DoD as sort of a sign of how good their stuff is and then they go to their commercial customers to say our Stuff is so good that DOD is using it preferentially. Does it lend some cachet to them?
- [64:08]
E
No, because I'm trying.
- [64:10]
A
I would imagine it runs the other way if anything, but these are just. Look, this is, this is not like a cute like machine tools company that like makes some stuff for Ford and oh, maybe we'll get a $10 million contract with like some, you know, weird corner of the, like the Air Force industrial base. They have so much money to be made. I mean, they are growing at 10x a year. And I can assure you that like the percentage of that, you know, of that like exponential, which is like random, you know, government contract is like not a relevant number to the future of the company and the future of the valuation. So I would, you know, my assumption is that this was like more of like a little bit of patriotism, a little bit of Dario, I want to, you know, shape the future of the world and a little bit of like, oh, maybe if we do a good job at this, they won't screw us on like X, Y and Z other regulatory thing. Curious if you buy that Mic.
- [65:08]
D
I don't know that I can comment on that, but I will. It's something else that Brian said. Like a lot of the companies that are interested in working with the Department of Defense, when I've heard, when I've spoken with them, part of the interest is that the problems are really hard. And so if you can prove yourself. It's not that if I can prove myself in the defense world, then I can sell, you know, people want to buy my stuff. I don't think that's true. But if I can improve my tools, if I can improve what I learn on the world's hardest problems, then I can translate the ability to do really exquisite things into other potential avenues. That I think is a more compelling argument.
- [65:46]
C
So they might be willing to put up with the potential exposure, you know, that the, the, the possibility of running afoul of the department in some.
- [65:54]
D
Well, I also, I mean, rules that they're trying to do from, you know, I, I've. I have never met the CEO of Anthropic, so I don't know him. But everything we've heard from him and that we've heard from other individuals in the institution is that they're pretty pro national security. Like, I don't. There is no. Each of these, each of these companies has different cultures and ways of talking and sort of. They have self selection where, you know, people select into them. And I think it's significant that when all this started to happen. There was that there was a tech sector sort of website that popped up with signatures from OpenAI and from, from Google. But inside of Anthropic it was actually pretty quiet. So I think lots of people tried to compare this to the maven Google movement and that didn't have, that didn't really hold. I know we wanted to do that, but in this instance I don't think it held. So I think there might have been genuine interest and a genuine concern. I'm willing to accept that as one of the potential reasons that this is happening.
- [67:00]
E
So I think that's right. But I also think that the place it comes from is a fundamental notion that we are in a battle between democracy and authoritarianism and we've got to do everything we can to make sure that democracy wins. So on the one hand, Joseph, we see the Trump administration pulling back from some of the hawkishness with respect to China. I think that that is something which clearly has caused a lot of unhappiness and some public statements, if I remember correctly from Amudei, about how it is that we shouldn't be selling chips, all of that kind of stuff. I also think that the actions of the current admin in Minneapolis and other places as well do give rise. If you read Amodei's most recent piece. So there's clearly some implicit commentary that you've got to make sure that democracy in the existing democracies does not go bad either. So I think that all of that stuff is absolutely right. So I think that there's a very clear, there's an enthusiasm or has been an enthusiasm in anthropic to embrace national security in a way that was not true of many other AI companies. I think that if we look, look at OpenAI, I think it's a much more commercial self interest type story, but it's a particular understanding of national security, which is an understanding of national security which is somewhat out of favor with the Trump administration. So I do wonder, and the final thing, I mean getting back to what Mike said at the beginning is my feeling is that this is indeed it's a pissing competition. A lot of this is about not simply egos, but who should be in charge of the world. I think that there is a clear from a lot of people in the AI community that they are the people who are effectively figuring out what the future state of the world is. The decisions that they make are decisions that are going to have consequences for decades. And when this runs up against other people who think that they're in charge. I think it's very, very hard sometimes to try and figure out a way through. So for better or for worse, my suspicion is that this is a souring which is going to be very difficult to un sir.
- [69:16]
D
And, and just sorry. Like the people who suffer are the people who are right now trying to do operations as ordered by the President. Those are the people who are not having the tools that they need. And so that you know, I, I, I respect that everybody who's you know, has their own opinion and we can have disagreements but like let's just not forget who gets affected most.
- [69:37]
B
The Look, I think the winner in the Anthropic v. Pentagon feud is China. If the, the, if the US national security establishment ends up being deprived of the talent and technology of like one of the like world's great firms and like cutting edge firms like at the moment. But, and not to make this like political in the, in the, in this context but the, the I think you know, we haven't talked at all about the views of the White House on this and Anthropic, uniquely among the major tech companies right now, has been willing to like throw down a little bit with the White House, you know, particularly with regard to AI export controls. Now I think that all of the AI companies actually like broadly share Anthropic's view, which is different than Nvidia's view. Nvidia's like China, huge market customers. Like that's great, we can sell more like more chips. More chips. Whereas I think the AI companies are like why are you selling all of these great chips to our competitors? Like that doesn't actually help us like thanks guys and have like a different view of this. But Anthropic has been the most vocal about it and like David Sachs, you know, who runs AI policy for the White House has you know, you know it sounds like mused about Anthropic as sort of like the woke doomers of the, of the like current crop of AI companies. Now I think that's not like entirely fair but like the, the point here is not like whether somebody's like right or wrong about that, just that the part of the context in which this, all of this happened is a world in which Anthropic was arguably on the outs in some ways with the White House already and, and maybe arguably being saved by how good their technology is. But would be like one interpretation of that story. But there's, there's, there's other stuff at play here than just the Pentagon.
- [71:21]
A
Anyone want to talk about Congress. I mean, I mean these seem like things, things that deserve legislation, not just directives. Question mark I don't know.
- [71:35]
B
It depends on like what you think. The, the I'll tell you my opinion which is like, it depends on like what you. So like Emmy did a really good job earlier of laying out like all of the different kinds of regulations you have on the use of like it depends on the thing you're worried about on like the use of force, say in general. And in theory there is like a whole system backed by federal law and by like treaties that the US is like still is still part of that like govern how force is used and that are designed to ensure like for example that there's always human responsibility for the use of force. And the, and so in, in some ways, even in a world where the Pentagon say like didn't have a policy on autonomous weapon systems, in theory, the outcomes that you see should not actually be like very different because the, the testing and evaluation system should be functioning. The standards for whether you would approve something in the field would be the standards same. The like all your AI specific policies in the Pentagon are really doing is telling you how to comply with what are broader requirements that exist for everything, whether it's like a bow and arrow or a machine gun, like, or an autonomous weapon system or like an AI decision support tool or something like that. So the it. I don't know, Congress could decide it wants to like legislate over that. Like it.
- [72:51]
A
Yeah, I mean it feels more like the war power stuff of like if we're, if we're sitting here in 2020 and we're talking about all lawful uses, when that includes you know, double tapping on some fishers question, you know, drug runners, question mark. And like no inspector general, anything is ever going to look into that. Then that, that seems to me to be like the most straightforward place and I guess the domestic surveillance stuff of like how much we want to superpower US government. Government. You know, I don't think it's just LinkedIn querying LinkedIn posts that we're going to be worried about in the coming years. Sorry, Emma or Emmy or Brian.
- [73:34]
D
Yeah, Brian.
- [73:35]
A
No.
- [73:38]
E
Okay. Maybe one way to think about this. You know, as Emmy said earlier and as Mike has said more recently, a lot of the standard things that we think about with regard to AI and national security are really boring. Specific things about specific systems and how to use them and what kinds of rules and so on. And that is not the debate that Congress is at the moment set up for. I was really taken by this piece that Jasmine sun wrote a couple of weeks ago in her newsletter where she talks about going around to a bunch of different members of Congress. And there is clearly some discussion happening between some conservative people in Congress and the woke AI people who Sachs is denouncing. So there is a lot of shared concern, shared fear about the social consequences of AI. And she had one staffer who she quoted as more or less saying, well, you know, the reason why we're not together with these guys is it's really hard for us to work together with people who are in polycules in San Francisco. And you can understand that from a social perspective. But it was also clear that there were a bunch of people who were more or less champing at the bit thinking, here is the opportunity to create a real populist movement against AI. And so I do wonder. I think we're going to see a big debate on AI in Congress. I think it's going to be a weird debate. I think it's going to see a lot of strange bedfellows together. And I do not think that it is going to be the technocratic debate that either the Pentagon or some people in Silicon Valley might be expect.
- [75:21]
D
Well said.
- [75:22]
A
Any other concluding thoughts?
- [75:24]
D
We didn't talk China. Isn't this called China talk?
- [75:30]
B
I mean, I mentioned China a couple times. You did, that's right.
- [75:33]
A
I, Yeah, I like the, like, the.
- [75:34]
B
No, look, I. This is all good for. Look all like, who's laughing at us right now? The Chinese. Who benefits from all of this? Like, both, arguably the Iran conflict, like, and the Israeli. The Chinese, like, this is great for them.
- [75:49]
A
You don't think this is 4D chess. We're taking the axis of evil down? You said it yourself, Mike. Come on.
- [75:54]
B
Sure, that's right.
- [75:55]
E
Yeah.
- [75:55]
B
I mean, I guess, like, we're gonna. We're gonna take down the old axis of evil and then. And then we're gonna pivot to Asia. That's when the pivot to Asia occurs.
- [76:04]
C
I will say some of the Iran hawks, you know, that I deal with over at Hudson are saying that this is a way to poke back at China because it takes away away their access to oil via the railway that they were building with the Iranians. And this also takes away some of their, whatever, access to the Gulf and that kind of thing. But I think in the end, this is much more beneficial for China than for the US it seems like there's not really going to be a lot of upside for us, especially as this thing Protracts.
- [76:36]
A
I love how some administration official gave a quote to some outlet saying, oh, yeah, we're just in our hide and bide for phase, like two weeks ago.
- [76:47]
B
Okay.
- [76:48]
C
We just think on very short term, we're done. We're. We're done with the hide and buy. We had a slow.
- [76:53]
A
We had a slow week. We just picked our anthropic fight. The, the tech crackdown parallel that I see a few folks making of, like, she getting upset at a uppity Jack ma for not going along with the program in the way he hoped, having too high a. A profile and then blowing up and financial and leaving him to, like, hide under a rock for the next five years and, like, hang out in the plaza in Manhattan where I ran into him on the street and like, 2023 is apt, but also not apartment because, like, anthropic, if they really do the supply chain thing, Anthropic is going to sue and they're going to win. And the, the sort of, the actual, like, the like, from a rhetorical perspective, doing really jarring. But there is a difference in, like, the powers that, you know, Pete Hegseth or David Sachs or even Donald Trump has, as opposed to someone like xi, when they try to do a tech sector crackdown. So, yeah, it's clearly like, pretty terrible atmospherics, which we talked about for the past 80 minutes or so. But I do think it's. It's a difference in degree agree between just like, oh, like, let's pick a fight with, you know, this guy because he's a shit lib, as opposed to like, oh, we're gonna throw him away and, you know, run his company out of business, which I don't necessarily think is the, the glide path that the President could take us on, even if that's really what they decided to do.
- [78:27]
D
And yeah, I, So I'm. I was actually making a slightly different point, which is like, while we're having this argument, like, China continues to work. You know, it's hard at work. And, and we just finished. There was a piece that Sam Bresnik, Cole McFall and I just finished that looked at all the different experimentation that they're doing, not just with large language models, but all sorts of different applications of AI. And it's pretty comprehensive. They really didn't miss anything. And they're talking about it pretty openly. So it's just, it's frustrating a little to see all of this happening and think that we are. We're kind of in a competition here and we're having what seems like an argument that got out of hand as opposed to making real progress.
- [79:11]
A
All right, let's call it there. Thanks so much everyone for being a part of ChinaTalk.
- [79:20]
B
Thanks for. Thanks for having me.
- [79:22]
C
Thank you.
- [79:23]
B
Delighted to do this. As always, it was really nice to
- [79:26]
D
talk to all of you. I'm sure we'll continue this conversation as well. This episode is brought to you by Nespresso Introducing Vertuo up, the latest in a long line of innovation from Nespresso. It's innovation you can touch, sense and taste in every single cup. With a three second start, easy open lever and dedicated brew over ice button, it's even easier to enjoy your coffee your way. Sip for yourself. Shop Vertuo up in exclusively@nespresso.com it's tax season.
- [79:58]
A
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