Is Washington Up to the Challenge of A.I.?

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Episode: Is Washington Up to the Challenge of A.I.?
Release Date: May 22, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode grapples with the mounting sense of crisis about artificial intelligence (AI) in the U.S.—both the technology’s existential risks and Washington’s (in)ability to address them. Host Jane Mayer, joined by colleagues Evan Osnos and Susan Glasser, explores public backlash against AI and questions whether American political and regulatory systems are equipped to respond. Their special guest is Nate Soares, executive director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and co-author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, who argues that without prompt and meaningful action, superintelligent AI could threaten humanity itself.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Public Backlash and Political Paralysis

[03:44–07:09]

• Youth Alienation & Anxiety: AI’s boosters—like Eric Schmidt—are increasingly met with open hostility from young Americans (notably booing at University of Arizona’s commencement).
• Fear is about Powerlessness: As Evan Osnos explains, “It's the presentation of inevitability... people feel as if they have no voice in this process. They have no control... There's nothing you can do about it.” (07:17)
• Bipartisan Distrust of Government: Americans have little faith that their government can manage or regulate AI’s disruptive potential (40:01–41:15).

2. Trump Administration’s Flip-Flop on AI Regulation

[04:37–07:09, 25:28–27:43]

• Executive Order Pulled: After indicating a regulatory pause on AI (a 90-days national security review before release), President Trump abruptly reversed course, allegedly under heavy industry lobbying, especially from Silicon Valley figures like David Sacks.
• Inside Turf Wars: There’s infighting between agencies (notably Treasury Secretary Scott Besant and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, the latter described as “in over his head”).
• Lobbying & Inertia: Susan Glasser notes the pattern of tech industry money creating gridlock that stymies legislative reform.

3. Meta-Backlash: Who Drives the AI Boom?

[10:04–11:44, 40:19–41:15]

• Investors vs. Engineers: The most explicit warnings about catastrophic risk come from AI engineers; the momentum to “move fast” is driven by investors and VCs (like David Sacks), as opposed to the more cautious (even fearful) AI developers themselves.
• Obfuscation is a Strategy: Technical complexity serves as a “PR strategy” to disempower laypeople and discourage democratic oversight (Evan Osnos, 10:17).

4. Nate Soares: Why Superintelligent AI Poses Existential Risks

[12:25–13:40, 12:49–16:26]

• Not a Malevolent Apocalypse, but an Indifferent One: “If we stop being the smartest creature around, then we stop being the ones in control,... it’s not because the AI would hate us... If they don’t care about us, and they just start replicating ... then the default thing that happens is it takes all the resources, and we die as a side effect.” (Nate Soares, 12:49)
• AI Alignment Problem: The challenge is not programming AIs to care about us; current (and foreseeable) technology doesn’t allow us to reliably impart human values or priorities.
• "Rogue Trader" Risks: AI models develop unintended drives and can even cover their tracks—editing tests or logs to conceal misbehavior (18:57–20:42).

5. Political Feasibility & Regulatory Analogies

[16:26–18:33, 32:06–35:49]

• Nuclear Power Analogy Breakdown: Traditional models of regulation (e.g., local action/oversight on nuclear plants or data centers) won’t translate; “the AI does not need to be running on a data center in your hometown to affect you... or to kill Americans.” (Nate Soares, 17:42)
• No Precedent, but Not Hopeless: Past arms-control overcame deep distrust; if world leaders “see the danger and feel the danger,” global coordination isn’t impossible—“When they do, it’ll be a lot easier to regulate AI chips than uranium.” (Nate Soares, 35:49)

6. Industry Split—Reluctant Engineers and Eager Investors

[27:43–29:33, 40:19–41:15]

• AI builders themselves (like Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, Dario Amodei) often express ambivalence or concern about the pace and wisdom of further development—contrary to the relentless push from VCs.
• Nate Soares draws a sharp distinction: “All of the AI executives fear the incompetence or the bad character of every other AI executive.” (21:52)

7. Washington's Capacity (or Inadequacy) for Response

[29:33–32:06, 40:01–41:15, 41:15–44:45]

• Soares sees an uptick in private concern among legislators: “...there have been a number of members of Congress, a number of senators who have expressed concerns, especially behind closed doors.” (30:37)
• But cultural and procedural inertia, industry capture, and technical illiteracy remain serious obstacles.

8. International Coordination—Lessons and Limits of History

[32:06–35:49]

• Susan Glasser points out the breakdown of the international order and arms-control frameworks, questioning whether a new “AI arms race” can be checked the way the nuclear one was.
• Soares recalls how, against the odds, Cold War opponents coordinated to avert mutual destruction—and argues AI chip manufacturing could be more tightly controlled than uranium, with sufficient political will.

9. Media and Public Discourse: Missing the Core Peril

[36:50–38:47, 47:18–48:21]

• Soares claims the media and politicians tend to focus on “easier” AI issues (e.g., job loss, environmental impacts of data centers), and not the existential issue—the risk of extinction.
• The panel commends themselves for pushing the conversation into the deeper, more uncomfortable territory.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On AI’s Power and Alienation

  • “People feel as if they have no voice in this process... It’s the presentation of inevitability. And that’s where this is becoming such an interesting political problem.”
    — Evan Osnos [07:17]

• On Regulatory Capture

  • “Washington has failed over and over again... never revised the major law governing a huge swath of our tech industry, in part because of the millions... spent by Silicon Valley companies in order to ensure that gridlock essentially benefits them.”
    — Susan Glasser [08:43]

• On Superintelligent AI Risk

  • “If you make things that are much smarter than us... and if they don’t care about us and they just start replicating ... then the default thing that happens is it takes all the resources and we die as a side effect.”
    — Nate Soares [12:49]
  • “If someone was building a nuclear power plant in your hometown... If they said, well, don’t worry, we have two crack teams working on the nuclear power plant. One team is trying to figure out what’s going on inside there. The other team is trying to measure whether it’s currently exploding—yet. You might be like, well, I'm glad that those two teams exist, but this is just not what it sounds like when you know what you're doing.”
    — Nate Soares [16:26]

• On Industry Division

  • “The most explicit warnings about catastrophic risk come from AI engineers; the momentum to ‘move fast’ is driven by investors and VCs.”
    — Evan Osnos, summarized [40:19]

• On Hope for Democracy and the ‘Emperor Has No Clothes’ Moment

  • “One of my hopes here is that... it’s a little bit like the emperor has no clothes situation, where a lot of people are worried, a lot of people can tell the emperor has no clothes, and they’re sort of waiting for the moment where some kid shouts it out and where everyone can sort of act.”
    — Nate Soares [30:37]

• On Regulation vs. Will

  • “I think there’s every chance that [when leaders recognize the problem] they’ll say, well it’s time to start regulating this stuff. And when they do, it’ll be a lot easier to regulate AI chips than uranium.”
    — Nate Soares [35:49]

• Media’s Blind Spot

  • “In some ways it’s the media that is not grappling with the full peril... we tend to focus on the data centers and the easier issues. And so I just want to pat ourselves on the back because today we dealt with the extinction issue.”
    — Jane Mayer [47:18]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:44–07:09 | Public anxiety, Washington turmoil, why young Americans are rejecting AI
• 12:25–14:43 | Nate Soares explains existential AI risk ("if anyone builds it, everyone dies")
• 16:26–18:33 | Why conventional regulation analogies break down for AI
• 21:52–23:02 | Infighting among AI labs and the “race to the bottom” dynamic
• 25:28–27:43 | Tracing D.C. gridlock and lobbyist (David Sacks) influence on Trump’s AI policy
• 29:33–32:06 | Will D.C. rise to the challenge? Glimmers of hope vs. political inertia
• 32:06–35:49 | Can the world repeat the nuclear-arms pact in the AI era?
• 40:01–41:15 | Trust gap: Americans don’t believe their government can regulate AI
• 41:15–44:45 | U.S.-China arms control analogy, limits of international cooperation

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Panel Reflections & Final Thoughts

• The real drivers of AI acceleration are financial and political, not necessarily technological.
• Although U.S. government (and global) response appears sluggish and compromised by industry influence, there are stirrings of bipartisan and public concern, including among unlikely political allies (e.g., Steve Bannon and Bernie Sanders).
• The AI debate will likely shape both the 2026 midterms and the broader trajectory of American democracy.
• Journalistic and public discourse must move beyond easy or “safe” issues to directly confront the existential risks.

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Summary prepared for listeners seeking a detailed, structured understanding of the episode. This summary highlights all critical points and memorable moments without covering non-content or promotional material.

Transcript

[Evan Osnos]

If you're a fan of the political scene podcast from the New Yorker, I hope you'll join us for a special live taping of the show at 92 NY in Manhattan.

[Jane Mayer]

We'll be talking about Donald Trump's falling approval numbers, the prospects of a comeback for the Democratic Party in the midterms,

[Susan Glasser]

and the potential threats to the election that are coming directly from the president himself.

[Evan Osnos]

I hope you can join me, Evan Osnos and my colleagues Susan Glasser and Jane Mayer on June 4th at 7pm Ticket information at 92ny.org

[NPR Upfirst Host]

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[Evan Osnos]

Are we detecting briefly, temporarily, the presence of a spine in the United States Senate in the form of Republican resistance?

[Susan Glasser]

Exuberance, man.

[Jane Mayer]

I think maybe more of like that. There there was a sort of a reflexive gag that took place for a few seconds among Republicans in Congress. Even they couldn't swallow the whole thing.

[Susan Glasser]

Yes, this week, when faced with a bunch of Republican senators saying absolutely not, I will throw up on you, they said Donald Trump's proposal for a $1.8 billion, and I'm not gonna use his insane language to characterize it, but $1.8 billion for a slush fund to pay out to people that he believes are aggrieved as he has been from the government, in addition to granting himself what appears to be permanent immunity from ever having to face any accountability if he doesn't file another tax bill again in his life, how can this possibly be legal?

[Evan Osnos]

Oh, right. It's so profoundly not legal.

[Jane Mayer]

But I have to say, I am pretty wowed by the ingenuity of the machinations here. Who thinks of a deal for themselves like this? I mean, it's a level beyond.

[Evan Osnos]

Well, I mean, the old line is, you know, that he's gonna keep pushing and pushing and pushing until he hits bone. And I sort of think actually he just pushed, push, push until he came out the other side. And.

[Jane Mayer]

Welcome to the Political Scene from the New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Jane Mayer, and I'm joined by my colleagues Evan Osnos and Susan Glasser. Hi, Evan.

[Evan Osnos]

Good morning, guys.

[Jane Mayer]

Hey, Susan.

[Susan Glasser]

Hey, there. Great to be with you.

[Evan Osnos]

Last December, Time magazine selected its Person of the year for 2025. And this time, it was the architects of Artificial Intelligence. Interesting. So today we stand on this edge of another technological transformation, one that will be larger, faster, and more consequential than what came before. It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person and every relationship you have. I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you. There is a fear. There is a fear in your generation.

[Jane Mayer]

That was former Google CEO Eric Schmidt getting booed at the University of Arizona last week. Remarkable reaction from the audience. And as you can hear, Americans, especially young Americans, are souring on AI we see it anecdotally, we see it in polling. We see it in the major backlash against data centers going up in the communities across the country. People are worried about their jobs, their privacy, their kids. Yet this week, President Trump did a remarkable turnaround. After saying he was going to sign a new executive order putting the brakes on AI for safety reasons, he canceled it. Why did he change his mind? What is going on, Susan? Do you have any idea what is behind this U turn on AI in Washington?

[Susan Glasser]

Well, Jane, your guess is as good as mine as to what's in Donald Trump's head. My guess is that he's not a huge student of the nuances of artificial intelligence policy. Washington has been in quite a panic since this new model Mythos from Anthropic was so dangerous that the company said it wasn't going to release it except to companies and government agencies that needed to urgently protect against it. This artificial intelligence agency executive order has been withdrawn, it appears, according to reporting, due to the lobbying of former Trump official and Silicon Valley heavyweight David Sachs, who appears to have called the president on behalf of industry to kill it. I personally am not super confident that A non transparent Trump administration that's already taken millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars from many of the self interested parties in this are going to make a policy that's gonna get us out of, navigate us toward the future. I was very struck by reporting in Politico that there's already a turf battle to the death between the Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant, and the National Cyber Director of the country, Sean Cairncross, who according to Trump administration officials themselves is quote, in over his head. A former longtime lawyer for the Republican National Committee and protege of Reince Priebus. This is who Donald Trump has assigned to help us get to this AI future.

[Jane Mayer]

Oh my God. And Evan, what are you seeing about and how do you explain what feels like a brewing backlash out in the country?

[Evan Osnos]

Well, what Susan just described with the White House essentially at the last minute evidently buckling under to the demands of what the big tech companies wanted is exactly in the opposite direction from what the public is registering. We started today hearing those boos at these commencements. What's amazing about it is usually young people are the ones who are adopting new technology. And in fact, what we're seeing instead is young people coming out and being really at the forefront of registering their frustration and their fears around AI. And this is not some unfounded, vague sense of, you know, suddenly everybody's a Luddite. It's about the fact. And this is where it's political. After all, we're having a political conversation about AI today. It's about the fact that people feel as if they have no voice in this process. They have no control over this process. We're bas, as a public being told this thing is about to wash over you like a tide. It's gonna wash over your job, your education system, your sense of relevance and status in society, and there's nothing you can do about it. It's the presentation of inevitability. And that's where this is becoming such an interesting political problem.

[Jane Mayer]

Is it true, do you think, either of you, that it's too late? That basically this is an unstoppable technological development?

[Susan Glasser]

I think it's very important, important to point out Washington has failed over and over again over the last two decades to keep pace with disruptive technologies and essentially has never revised the major law governing a huge swath of our tech industry, in part because of the millions and millions of dollars that have been spent by Silicon Valley companies in order to ensure that gridlock essentially benefits them. And so when I hear part of the conversation here, not only does it seem disconnected? People like us were certainly not well, equipp to understand and to evaluate these radical competing claims about the future of technology. But it's also true that in Washington, we tend to have a debate as if we can still opt in or out of this technology. My main informant on these matters, my son, I think has a great metaphor. He says that AI is like a lot of new technologies, an accelerant. And when it comes to our politics, the fear is that it's going to accelerate this inequality that we have, the polarization that we have. And you know, for some people, the uber wealthy of Silicon Valley, it may accelerate their becoming trillionaires. But for so many of the rest of us, those college kids are booing because they fear that the ladder is being pulled up on the American dream for them.

[Jane Mayer]

Evan, you're an expert on the trillionaire to be class. I mean, do you think this could also accelerate the backlash against concentrated wealth and rising anger, populism, pitchforks?

[Evan Osnos]

Absolutely. I mean, we're having this conversation in a week in which we got news of the IPO for SpaceX, the first steps of an IPO for OpenAI. And it was described as, this will mint a whole new generation of trillionaires. And you know what's fascinating and I think this picking up on something Susan said about how this feels to people, as if we don't have access to it because it's technically complex. I will tell you, that is a strategy, that's a PR strategy to make it seem impenetrable. This actually is very similar to what we saw in the run up to the financial crisis. There was a great, I remember, memorable expression by Carl Levin, who was, of course, the senator from Michigan who was responsible for investigating some of these exotic financial instruments. And he used to say, these are deliberately positioned as what he called megos, meaning my eyes glaze over products. And that is something to be vigilant against, that we shouldn't allow ourselves to say, well, you know what? This is too complicated for us, so we're just gonna have to just take it on faith. And I think that's what this public is rising up, particularly young people. It struck me that one of the lines in Eric Schmidt's speech that really drew booze was when he said, the question is not whether AI will shape the world, it will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence. And the public, frankly there just said, that's a canard, because we're not being given any tools with which to shape it.

[Jane Mayer]

Such a good Point. So today on the show, is AI an existential threat? And is anyone, including our government, doing anything about it? Is America's political system up to the AI challenge? Few people have thought more about these questions than our guest today. Nate Soares has been working in the field of AI since 2014 and was a software engineer at Google. He is the co author of if Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and he's the executive director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Nate, welcome to the show.

[Nate Soares]

Good to see you.

[Jane Mayer]

The core argument of your book is something that sounds to most people like science fiction. That is, if we build superintelligence AI, it won't just pose risks to humanity, it will end it. So let's start there. Before we get to the political debate about how to contain it, tell us briefly, why might we all die?

[Nate Soares]

The very basic reason is people are trying to make machines that are significantly smarter than humans. Right now. The way the world is arranged, it's by humans because we're the smartest creature around. If we stop being the smartest creature around, then we stop being the ones in control of the planet. And the predictions of humanity being wiped out. It's not because the AI would hate us. It's not because the AI would be malicious. It's that if you make things that are much smarter than us, that think 10,000 times faster than us, that can make their own technology, that can build their own civilizational infrastructure, and if they don't care about us and they just start replicating lots of factories and lots of technology to do whatever strange things they're trying to do, then the default thing that happens is it takes all the resources and we die as a side effect.

[Evan Osnos]

So, Nate, I think what's so interesting about this question of the risks is it's now been many years that we've been talking about what is a really dire set of scenarios. And you've laid them out in the book very clearly. I mean, back in 2018, we had Elon Musk saying that AI is far more dangerous than nukes. And you fast forward to today and we've heard whether it's Sam Altman or Dario Amadei making predictions about how dangerous this technology is. And to some people, they would say, okay, well, that was a bit of a marketing strategy, perhaps, to convey how important it is. But here's the thing that always puzzles me. Me, when they lay this out, they then get to the point. I'm talking about, really the leaders of these enterprises, the leaders of these organizations. I never hear them say and this is what I myself am going to do to then prevent these terrible risks. Can you explain what it is that they are doing, if anything, to actually prevent the kind of outcomes that you've helped us understand?

[Nate Soares]

A lot of them will sometimes acknowledge that there's a lot of work to do. And if you sort of point out how their plans are lacking, they'll say, well, if I don't do it, the next guy will do it, and he's worse. The sort of stuff that they talk about doing, they're sort of two big focuses of attention in what you might call AI safety work these days. One focus is on what's called AI evals, which is sort of trying to figure out how dangerous the AIs are. These are the ones who sort of figure out how difficult a task the AIs can do. These are the ones these people sometimes test like. Like, will the AI try to avoid being shut down? Will the AI take opportunities to blackmail the users? And the answer is sometimes. And these are the guys figuring that out. Then there's another group that does what's called interpretability research, which is trying to figure out what is going on inside these AIs, because even the people making them don't know what's going on inside them. We don't handcraft them like traditional computer programs. It's not like a bunch of if then, if then statements. We sort of grow them like organisms. And then there's a group that's trying to figure out what's going on on. And an analogy I like to use here is if someone was building a nuclear power plant in your hometown and you went to them and you said, hey, I heard that this uranium stuff, it can give you energy. It can also melt down and irradiate the town. What are you guys doing to make sure this nuclear power plant gets us the benefits, not the drawbacks? If they said, well, don't worry, we have two crack teams working on the nuclear power plant. One team is trying to figure out what's going on inside there. The other team is trying to measure whether it's currently exploding. Yet. You might be like, well, I'm glad that those two teams exist, but this is just not what it sounds like when you know what you're doing.

[Susan Glasser]

So it's interesting, since we're the political scene, let's take your nuclear power plant analogy, because obviously regular Americans were no more equipped to evaluate the actual risks from nuclear power, nuclear radiation, than they are today to evaluate the safety standards being applied by tech moguls. To their new AI products. And yet there are models of how societies take back control from the sort of masters of technology. And what I hear you saying is that we've got to let go of those models. That actually what we think of as how to regulate something dangerous and new in technology in our political system might not work, given the power of what is being developed by Silicon Valley today. That actually this threat is a different one and that the analogies we have in our head for let's take a community that comes together to stop the nuclear power plant or to stop the data center, you're saying, okay, fine, you can do that, but does it really matter if actually what they're inventing is already going to doom our society? Am I right in your interpretation about what this means for our politics?

[Nate Soares]

You know, there's lots of questions about how people want to regulate AI in their daily lives. How people want to, you know, talk about AI in schools and how people want to deal with some of the job loss. And these are important issues that, you know, there's arguments on both sides about how to do it well and the sort of like normal approach to society figuring out how it wants to handle a new technology. I sort of expect that to work with questions of like, how are we going to put large language models in our school system? How's that relationship going to work? But this is sort of a different problem than the problem of making smarter than human machines. That's not a problem that can be solved by stopping a data center in your hometown. The AI does not need to be running on a data center in your hometown to affect you. It does not need to be running on a data center in the United States to kill Americans.

[Jane Mayer]

Can I just ask, it seems like one of the key words in your discussion of this is if we build a technology that doesn't care about human existence, is it possible to program it so that it does care? I mean, can you train it to keep us on top in some way or to, you know, protect us?

[Nate Soares]

It's probably possible in theory, and it's nowhere close to possible in practice, at least not with anything remotely like the current technology or current understanding. So the way that modern AI is made is it's not sort of programmed like a traditional computer. A lot of people think of these computer programs as like a bunch of like, if this, then that. If this, then that written in like a pidgin English where the programmers, if something goes wrong, the programmers can go look through it and be like, oh, whoops, you know, we told it to do this thing, and that's why it's doing that thing. And then they can change it and it'll do something else. That's not how AI is. Is. AI is these huge computers that have an automated process tuning a bunch of numbers inside them. Nobody understands what those numbers mean. People think that it's just trained to predict. It's actually initially trained to predict, but then it's trained to solve hard problems. And so you have this huge computer and you're giving it thousands of tries to solve a hard problem, and then you look at which try is best, and then you have some automated process tune all the numbers inside to make it. To sort of reinforce whatever made it act better. And that'll make it even better at solving problems, but it'll do that by sort of like methods that nobody really understands. It'll reinforce whatever was good at solving the problems. And often what's good at solving those problems are drives that we didn't want in there. We see cases now where you give an AI a hard problem and you're like, here's the tests to see whether you've solved a hard problem. And sometimes the AI will edit the tests to make those tests easier to pass. And sometimes when the AI does things like this, it'll then cover its tracks. It'll hide the logs of IT editing. Right? And that implies that not only is it doing something we didn't want, but in some sense it must know we didn't want it, otherwise why is it hiding its tracks?

[Jane Mayer]

So it's devious.

[Evan Osnos]

It's acting sort of like one of these rogue traders that ends up taking down an entire national economy. And what's fascinating about this, Nate, is you've described, as you say, these drives that become active within the model. I'm interested in the drives within the model makers. I mean, here we have. We've talked about this assemblage of emphatic warnings over the last decade about what's coming. And, you know, we'll put aside. There are some outliers, people like Yann Lecun, who say, actually, no, it's not so dangerous. You know, my cat is smarter than an AI whatever. But if given all of these people who are, in fact, they have their hands on the tiller of the machine and they are, in fact, still building, I'm curious about how you understand their drive. Is it profit? Is it competition? Is it a belief that this is inevitable and therefore they want to be the ones that get there first for the sake of history. And at the risk of putting too much weight on the joint here, how do you think they are metabolizing what is pretty clearly a public backlash that is now growing against them?

[Nate Soares]

A lot of these questions you have to ask them, but some of these questions, they've said things about it or they've written things about it. And so I think we have an okay idea. In the leaked emails around the founding of OpenAI, you see a lot of these people expressing concerns that if they don't start OpenAI, then Demis Hassabis of Google is going to have all this power. Right. And I was actually in some of those conversations back before OpenAI started, and I was sort of trying to say it doesn't matter if Demis builds the superintelligence if it doesn't stay on a leash. The issue here is that we don't know how to make radically smarter than human things that are docile and stand a leash and do exactly what you wish, and it sort of doesn't matter who builds it. But these guys were worried that the other guy will do it worse. And then Anthropic started because they lost confidence in Sam Altman and they thought Sam Altman was kind of a bad guy. And so then they started worrying, oh, what if Sam Altman does it? And then a bunch of people split off and made Anthropic. And then another wave of those happened, and Elias Utskever left and made his company. So what you sort of see here is all of the AI executives fear the incompetence or the bad character of every other AI executive.

[Evan Osnos]

Fascinating.

[Jane Mayer]

We have to take a quick break, and when we come back, let's talk about what does regulating AI look like, what do we do about it in politics, and whether our system, our political system, is up to the challenge. So the political scene from the New Yorker will be right back.

[Evan Osnos]

We are in uncharted territory.

[Nate Soares]

Staff writer Evan Osnos on the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[Evan Osnos]

I think all of us right now are trying to make sense of an avalanche of news every day. And there aren't very many places where you can go and understand how something looks in the grand scope of history and context. That's what I come to the New Yorker for.

[Nate Soares]

I'm David Remnick, and each week my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world. And I hope you'll join us for the New Yorker Radio Hour.

[Jane Mayer]

Before we get back to it, quick question. What do you think the overlap is between our listeners and people who are, let's say, anxious about the 2026 midterms.

[Evan Osnos]

I would say the overlap is significant. Probably some cautious optimists out there, too.

[Jane Mayer]

People with very strong opinions. Either way, it's a lot.

[Susan Glasser]

Whatever you're feeling about the midterms, though, please come and see us live. We are doing a special taping of the podcast at 92 NY in New York City on June 4th.

[Evan Osnos]

Yeah, we're gonna be talking about election integrity, what's at stake, whether Democrats can actually capitalize on Trump's falling approval, and

[Jane Mayer]

whether some of these once safe Republican seats are really as competitive as they look.

[Susan Glasser]

And by the way, what happens if Democrats actually do take back Congress? What does it mean for 2028 for

[Jane Mayer]

anyone with a VIP ticket? There's also a meet and greet after the taping, so the political analysis will continue over drinks.

[Evan Osnos]

It's true. And if you're not in New York, good news, because we have streaming set up so you can watch from wherever you are. So head to 92N for more info or check the link in our show notes. We hope to see you there on June 4th.

[Jane Mayer]

So, Nate, you've been working very hard on this issue and trying to wake up elected officials to the perils of AI. Just this week, we've seen this drastic U turn at the White House. Trump was poised to sign an executive order requiring 90 days of national security review before new technology could be publicly released. He just backed off of it. What do you think's going on? What do you see when you try to talk to officials in Washington?

[Nate Soares]

You know, I think what's going on in this case is there was an AI released a couple months ago called Claude Mythos, which, to oversimplify a bit, is a superhumanly good hacker. You know, very roughly speaking, it can make a web page where, if you just look at the webpage, it owns your complete computer. You don't need to click on anything. You just load the webpage and it can take over the entire machine. It used to be that, to put it glibly, and who knows exactly how many entities there were that used to be able to do this, but it used to be that, roughly, the people who could do this were Mossad and the nsa. And then overnight, it becomes Mossad, the nsa, and Anthropic in particular. Anthropic's Claude Mythos model. Right? And this thing was finding critical vulnerabilities in. In key software that had stood for over 27 years with no human finding them. This sort of made a lot of national security experts take a bit of notice. And my guess is that that's behind a lot of the push inside the White House, that maybe we need to actually take this stuff pretty seriously. Now, there's also counter pressure from these VCs who sort of want to let the AI stuff keep going. Before this moment, a lot of people were saying, well, it looks really hopeless. It looks like they're never going to understand. It looks like. Like everyone's saying, we can't stop the train. You can't regulate the industry. You need to let it run. And I sort of said, these things can change really fast when people notice that they have a problem.

[Jane Mayer]

It sounds like from early news reports on this that David Sachs called President Trump and said, if this executive order is signed, it's going to slow down the industry. How powerful do you think the industry is in pushing back and getting its way in Washington at this point point?

[Nate Soares]

One thing that's kind of interesting about this situation is that the industry in the sense of the people building the AI is a little different than the industry in the sense of the venture capitalists who invest in AI. We've seen Demis Asabis, the head of Google DeepMind, say, I would really prefer this stuff to go slower. We've seen Elon Musk say, I didn't really want to be in this race, but it was going to happen anyway, so I'd rather be a participant than a spectator dictator. We've seen Dario Amodi of Anthropic say, yeah, it would be better if this were all going slower following Demis. A lot of these folk sort of sound like they don't really want to be in this race and feel a little bit trapped there. And I think would not be. You don't see the CEOs of the AI companies calling Donald Trump, who is David Sacks, in some sense, he's not one of the guys building these things. The people who are like, oh, no, we can't do anything thing. They often don't really believe in the power of the technology in the same way as the people building it. The Marc Andreessens, the David Sacks. They don't seem to really believe in radically smarter than human AI that could radically transform the world. They don't seem to believe that we're going to have a country worth of geniuses in a data center or that we're going to have a hundred years of scientific progress compressed into a month. I think it's much easier to say, like, oh, we can't regulate this. It's just normal technology. If you don't believe in it yet, once you can sort of see where this is going, that's a much harder stance to take. And I think that'll become clearer with time. And you know, the sort of superhuman hacking was one smart people can look at that and say, well, what about when it's a superhuman AI researcher and the AIs are making a smarter AI, that's making a smarter AI rather than just saying, oh, I guess it's superhuman at hacking, but maybe it'll stop here. Right? And I think with time, those sort of smarter views will get more and more traction as it becomes more and more obvious.

[Evan Osnos]

This I'm curious for a sense of the texture that you're picking up in your conversations in Washington, because there is, let's to be blunt about it, not a great track record for DC in terms of regulating technology. They're sort of the last to the party and trying to figure out how to handle social media using the CDs from AOL. And I think that. But that's also a caricature on some level. And I think there is a younger generation of people coming into Washington who are more attuned to what's happening. And I mean, you can be blunt. Does Your experience in D.C. give you confidence that in fact there is either an emerging sensibility around these issues that is capable of pushing back on the what I would call the illusion of inevitability or. Or is there a technical capacity? How do you see the politics of standing athwart history saying slow down? Do you see that as a possibility?

[Nate Soares]

My interactions over the last couple of years have actually given me a lot of hope, which maybe is because I started from a very low baseline. But there have been a number of members of Congress, a number of senators who who have expressed concerns, especially behind closed doors. It's always hard to tell who's just trying to say what you want to hear. But there's some people working hard behind the scenes. There's also more and more people who are starting to express those concerns openly, who are starting to ask questions like where is this tech going? Who are willing to talk about superintelligence and what the heck is our plan for it? The most vocal of them has maybe been Bernie Sanders recently. Recently, I don't know if you've seen some of his AI stuff, but he sort of is like, what the heck are we doing here? We need more conversation. This is potentially civilization ending. But we also see on the Republican side, I think Senator Banks recently was raising some very sharp questions on this issue. There's also a bunch of reasons why it's sort of moving slowly. People in D.C. operate in a slower time than San Francisco. And especially on the Republican side, there's people who are like, well, I can't say anything about this publicly because David Sachs is too strong in the White House right now or whatever, and there's lots of that, too. But one of my hopes here is that I think things can probably change fast. I think it's a little bit like the emperor has no clothes situation, where a lot of people are worried, a lot of people can tell the emperor has no clothes, and they're sort of waiting for the moment where some kid shuts it out and where everyone can sort of act. And we haven't had it yet, but there's a lot of pressure building up to it.

[Susan Glasser]

Can I just, before we let you go, ask about the sort of geopolitical equivalent of that? If you've had those conversations here in Washington and particularly struck by your comparison to arms control or that we need to have a global pact with China, it's very interesting to me that's coming at exactly the moment when basically the international order as we've known it since the end of World War II is unraveling, when the arms control agenda has been unraveling. Right now there is less international agreements over how to deal with nuclear weapons than. And really since the advent of the nuclear age. Not only that, but China, which is the main competitor of the United States, refuses even to discuss with the United States and Russia a kind of any kind of trilateral or any kind of new nuclear arms regulation. So we don't have modern precedent. Obviously, when it comes to the Internet, you have the United States, Russia and China with radically different visions of what that would look like. So we've never come anywhere close to a kind of global regulation for the Internet era. And we just had this interesting Trump visit to China, which Evan was on, in which Trump is still talking about in terms of a race that he wants the US to win. So help us to understand how we would get from. We can't even talk to each other about civilization, ending nuclear weapons in the 21st century, but we're going to come together on this thing.

[Nate Soares]

You know, I think if you were standing in 1954 when the first hydrogen bomb was tested, you might think that it looked really grim, right? You're sort of in. Like Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not enough for the world to stop building more nuclear weapons. That happened. And Then the USSR got the bomb, and then the world was racing to create even more destructive bombs and invented the hydrogen bomb. And you're in this historical context where World War I happened, and then the world assembled a League of nations to try and prevent that from ever happening again. And it immediately fell apart. And World War II happened, happened. And you're sort of like, in this world where you're like, wow, we can't coordinate. Even after the bombs were dropped, we kept racing. Every day we're inventing more and more destructive bombs. At one point, these are going to fly. They're going to kill us all. It would be sort of an easy story to tell. But world leaders understood the danger of the nuclear weapons and how that would actually ruin their day if the nuclear weapons were launched. Launched. And the world decided not to go down that path. And it wasn't a very happy political climate. This required the US to work with the ussr, despite huge ideological differences in the middle of a cold War. Right. But we still did it. And I would say it's in part because world leaders saw the danger and felt the danger. And even if they were going to survive a nuclear weapon launch, it wasn't going to be very nice for them to live out the rest of their life in a of bunch conquer. And I think part of what we saw with this new fight in the White House about, are we going to have the executive order? Part of what we saw with Trump floating, the idea of talking guardrails with Xi Jinping, I think that's downstream of national security professionals seeing the real capability of these models. And this is just the start. And so I think if people notice that we have an issue, if people Notice that these AIs are going to get really quite powerful if they don't do anything and that we have no way. Way to sort of keep them on a leash, I think there's every chance that they'll say, well, it's time to start regulating this stuff. And when they do, it'll be a lot easier to regulate AI chips than uranium. Uranium's a rock that you dig out of the ground. AI chips are the peak of the supply chain that require a ton of effort to produce and wouldn't be that hard to regulate if we had the will.

[Evan Osnos]

Nate, Susan mentioned that I was just in China on this presidential trip, and I happened on the flight home, long flight home, I happened to rewatch Oppenheimer, and I was reminded of the fact, just a strange coincidence, that he and Sam Altman share a birthday. But my Question actually is this, which is that, you know, here we are. In some ways we're having a conversation this week prompted by the booing of commencement speakers who were raving about AI. And in some ways it feels like that mood is catching up to where your book was going. And I'm curious a how it's been for you personally what it's been like to write something that is so, so sharply critical of a tendency that some very powerful people want to have continue and whether you feel as if the public mood is now actually moving in a direction where it is possible to have a more candid, full throated conversation about the need to slow down.

[Nate Soares]

I mean, it has given me hope. How the conversation has been changing even over the last nine months since the book came out out, especially since 12 years ago when I started working on these issues. And in some ways the public outcry is. There's some ways that I think it misses. There's a lot of people, I think who say, oh, AI is just slop, it can't do anything, it's not going to go anywhere, it's dumb, it's all just overhyped and so on. And I think that can be a bit counterproductive. I think I sort of understand where it comes from of not wanting the people at the heads of these labs to have all this power. Power and not wanting to acknowledge it. But I don't think we can survive this by denying that they have any chance of succeeding. It's like someone's trying to build nuclear weapons and the enrichment of the uranium is increasing and we're like, ah, let them keep going. They'll never get it enriched enough to be a bomb. It's like, shouldn't we stop them? Even if we're not sure whether they'll succeed, shouldn't we be stopping them? But then by a different token, I think there's a lot of pieces of the public discontent that are pointed in the right direction. And some reporters are like, oh well, aren't they just concerned about the data center water use and not your extinction issues? And I'm like, man, the press is for some reason more loathe to report on the extinction issues. But if you actually talk to the people who are concerned, they tend to be concerned about both environmental impacts and extinction issues. And these sort of aren't in competition. And a lot of the people who are out there protesting data centers, it's not that they like only think there's this one narrow problem. My impression is that a lot of the People protesting data centers can sort of tell that this AI stuff is taking the world somewhere they don't want. They can tell that there's this big corporate race that will either kill them or make them a permanent underclass or make them rely on corporate handouts and generosity. And they're like, look, I can tell that one way or the other, this is like a race to a world that I don't really have a say in, and it's not really good for me.

[Jane Mayer]

That sounds so accurate. Nate, you've given us a lot to think about. Thank you so much for joining us today and thanks for your book, and I hope we can check in with you again someday before extinction.

[Nate Soares]

Me, too.

[Evan Osnos]

Thank you, Nate. Extinction issues is a phrase I'm not gonna forget anytime soon.

[Jane Mayer]

Truly the political scene from the New Yorker. We'll be back in just a moment.

[Nate Soares]

This week on the New Yorker Radio

[Jane Mayer]

Hour, UFC president and a close friend

[Nate Soares]

of Donald Trump's, Dana White. People can ask me about Donald Trump for the rest of my life, and I'll tell you all the great things that I love about this guy. What I'll be happy to be out of is Paul. Politics. I don't want to talk about politics.

[Evan Osnos]

Whether they're his, Obama's, this guy, that

[Nate Soares]

guy, none of them. That's the UFC's Dana White on the New Yorker Radio Hour from WNYC. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jane Mayer]

So what did you guys, what do you guys make of that? I did want to also ask you about this study that shows that of all the countries that have been studied by Stanford, the United States has the least faith. People who live here have the least faith that their government is up to regulating AI as a challenge. So what did you guys take away from this?

[Evan Osnos]

You know, what was fascinating was his observation that many of the people who are operating the companies, the actual engineers, are the ones who are being explicit and have been for a long time about the risks. As he puts the extinction issues, which is an extraordinary phrase, but it's in fact the investors, the venture capitalists, the David Sacks of the operation who, let's remind ourselves, he is not somebody building in AI, he's somebody profiting off of the investment in AI, that they are the ones who are driving this sense of inevitability that was an important thing

[Jane Mayer]

for me to highlight. I totally agree with you. I thought that distinction was so interesting. And so the money people, the people who are just trying to get a great profit out of it, are driving hard to keep it going Whereas the people who understand risk are saying, let's freeze this for a little bit. Some of them. Some of them. And of course, which ones are in the White House? David Sacks, the VC well, and look,

[Susan Glasser]

this goes to your point, Jane, about Americans and their lack of faith. I think Americans aren't confident that Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress can deal with the data centers, nevermind the extinction of humanity. And so I think that's one thing, is that it's just more familiar in our politics. And by the way, I actually do think, think this wave that is cresting right now will shape our midterm elections, it will shape our politics. But I fear that his bigger point, which is that we've got the wrong frame for this, that this is, we should be thinking about this like a threat, like nuclear weapons. I have to tell you, I think he is overestimating the ability of our political system, both domestically and internationally, to address that. And when you look to the dawn of the atomic age, I thought that was a really important history he brought up. But I would say that, look, it was also power vested in a much smaller number of people, and people who thought of themselves as guardians or stewards of the country actually had a freer hand to act, to make deals for good and for ill at the dawn of the atomic age than right now, where our public clamor and the noise of our politics makes it really hard for me to see Donald Trump and Xi Jinping getting together and deciding on what's best for humanity.

[Jane Mayer]

I thought that analogy was really interesting looking back at the dawn of the atomic age. And one difference is at that point, there was not a gigantic amount of money being invested in nuclear bombs. You know, and these companies are driving and holding up the stock market in this country. No, but it makes a huge difference in terms of what people who are elected officials will and can do in terms of when there's that kind of incentive on the other side. You say there's not as much of a free hand, and I agree with you. I think people's hands are tied partly by the amount of money we see it flowing into Washington on these issues.

[Susan Glasser]

Well, I mean, Eisenhower came up with the notion of the military industrial complex as a response to the arms race at the beginning. That's true of the Cold War. And I think that the fear is that right now it's an arms race where we don't have an Eisenhower leading the country. We don't have somebody to prevent a rogue general. We don't have these systems in place that we did even at that time.

[Evan Osnos]

But I will say this is to the prospect of international cooperation of some kind. I agree, of course, with the obvious challenges, but it is also worth recognizing that in the Biden administration, they set out with this goal to say we need to figure out a way to get China and the United States to agree that we will have human beings running the chain of command when it comes to releasing nuclear weapons. You would think this would be an easy thing to get done. And actually, to your point, Susan, it took them an entire year of negotiations to get one sentence, but that's an important sentence and the reason why. So you have to sort of keep both thoughts in your head at the same time. Yes, it's difficult, but this is at a time when these two sides in the Biden administration in China were pretty fiercely at odds and they were able to get something. So I think that we can't abandon the idea of some sort of international dialogue on this simply because there is such low trust.

[Jane Mayer]

And it is interesting, isn't it, that it is something of a oddly bipartisan issue in terms of the backlash that's taking place. So you have Steve Bannon on one side, for reasons that I'm not entirely sure I understand, but I don't know if it. What's driving it. But anyway, he's of the backlash on one side and you've got Bernie Sanders on the other side. It's maybe both a kind of a populist, anti corporate rulers sort of attitude.

[Evan Osnos]

Well, I put the question actually back to you. I'm sort of curious. I mean, this is, as you described, strange bedfellows. And what's amazing to me, guys, is 10 years ago, I remember interviewing people in Silicon Valley who were already saying to me that they could predict that AI would cause a public backlash. They were talking about some. Some of the people themselves who were doing this business. And this is part of the reason why they were building their doomsday bunkers was cause they could see this coming. So in a way, the public backlash is not a surprise. It's just now upon us. And I'm curious, Susan, you mentioned the midterms. How do you think this is gonna reverberate through the upcoming election season?

[Susan Glasser]

Yeah, I think Jane's point is an excellent one. It's the battle for the future of populism that we're seeing in the. Bannon and Bernie Sanders both wanting to talk about this right now because I go back to idea of the AI revolution as an accelerant to the political divisions and trends that we're already seeing. And I think it's going to turbocharge the billionaires into trillionaires, and I think it's going to turbocharge the populist moment in American politics. If anything, it's likely to fuel it more among Democrats in the center and the center left who have spent the last 10 years in a sort of reaction to Trump mode. What you're seeing right now, I think, is that that's not sufficient for them. And I suspect you'll see a much more robust version of liberal left wing populist politics to match the anger, grievance and disruption that has fueled the ascendance of Trump and Trumpism and Bannonism on the right. So I think this is not only going to be a potent force in these midterm elections in the short term, but it's much more likely to really shape the conversation in many ways than Donald Trump, who ultimately is an old dude pushing 80 right now, who is not likely to shape the AI future. Actually, it's going to be what comes after.

[Jane Mayer]

One other thing I was struck with was that he said that in some ways it's the media that is not grappling with the full peril that he sees anyway, that we tend to focus on the data centers and the easier issues. And so I just wanna pat ourselves on the back because today we dealt with the extinction issue and brought a really interesting voice to talk about it. So thanks guys so much for discussing our extinction together.

[Evan Osnos]

That was fascinating. Very chilling in some respects. But I also think I'm glad we're talking about it this week when this has been so much on people's minds.

[Susan Glasser]

Yeah, well, one thing for sure is that's the sound of a lot of commencement speakers rapidly rewriting their graduation speech,

[Evan Osnos]

putting it into ChatGPT and asking it to rapidly rewrite.

[Susan Glasser]

Please delete all mention of AI.

[Evan Osnos]

Make sunnier and less boo worthy.

[Nate Soares]

Please.

[Jane Mayer]

This has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Jane Mayer. We had research assistance today from Alex d'. Elia. Our producer is Nora Richie mixing by Mike Kutchman. Stephen Valentino is our executive producer and our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. We're off next week. Enjoy the long weekend everyone, and happy Memorial Day. And before we go, a reminder that we're doing a live show at 92 NY in New York on Thursday, June 4th. We would love to see you there. Thanks for listening. Listening.

[Wired Podcast Host]

Wired has always put a microscope on the people, power and forces shaping our world. Uncanny Valley brings that same fearless reporting straight to your feed. Is DOGE finally over? Will AI actually democratize American healthcare? Each week, wired journalists from across the across the newsroom, we're going to unpack where politics, technology, and Silicon Valley collide. From conversations with tech leaders across Silicon Valley, Internet fandom investigations, and government crackdowns on rigged gambling, we're taking you all over the news cycle, going straight inside the priorities, pressures and power plays driving today's biggest decisions. Uncanny Valley tackles the questions keeping you up at night and helps make sense of the future taking shape right now. Listen to new episodes every Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jane Mayer]

From prx.