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- [00:00]
Rory Stewart
Thanks for listening to the Rest Is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show Tickets, go to therestispolitics.com that's therestispolitics.com hi Rory here.
- [00:14]
Matt Clifford
With so much happening in the world of AI this week, both AI powered attacks on Iran with Anthropic's fight with
- [00:21]
Podcast Host
the Pentagon, I've been very lucky to be able to sit down with Matt Clifford again in our exclusive AI miniseries where we will be talking about defense, security, geopolitics and even some practical tips on how AI can improve your business. So please sign up at therestispolitics.com to join our member series and listen to the discussion between me and Matt and all the other content that we produce.
- [00:48]
Guest Expert
A lot of our conversations over the last few episodes you have brought back to Geopolitics and in particular the changing and challenging relationship between Europe and the United States under President Trump. I'm really intrigued by how you think about the sort of core principles that are at stake in this anthropic DOD deal. And the reason I want to do it is that I think right now, because Anthropic is sort of the liberal coded, slightly European. Hence the question that we answered was a lot of people like this is outrageous. You know, this is DOD trying to overturn reasonable ethical company drawing red lines around the product. But I want to do a thought experiment for you, which is imagine Kamala Harris has been elected. Elon Musk says, of course you can use Starlink in defense, and by the way, no one else has anything like it. But here are my red lines about how you're going to use it. And they're deeply ethically based. And in particular, my number one issue is I don't want it used for anything that could increase the likelihood of a nuclear event in Ukraine. And therefore you're not going to use it for blah blah, blah, blah, blah. I think the same people who are protesting now that Hegseth's overstepped would be saying, why should a private company be setting red lines over what a democratically elected government does with the technology?
- [02:04]
Matt Clifford
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think at some level the philosophical position that Hegseth holds, which is that if you've bought a bit of kit and you're a military, you want to be able to deploy it and you don't want someone stopping you deploying it. It's absolutely right. But actually, as you've pointed out with Musk, and as the Saudis found out when they bought some very expensive American airplanes and tried to use them in Yemen. And indeed, as we found in the Ukraine war, where Trump suddenly instructs American companies who we've contracted with not to provide things. Or as. Indeed, as the US Found when it took on China, and China suddenly announced it was going to stop all exports of rare earths. Nobody really has sovereignty. Not even the Secretary of War is actually able to instruct without having a lot of friction of various other actors saying what he kind of can't do. And that's partly because of all these things that you've talked about. The more complicated these systems become, the more dependencies you have. I mean, if what you've purchased is a hand grenade, nobody can stop you using a hand grenade. I mean, it's basically the explosives in the thing. You pull the handle and you chuck it. Right. It's gone, and the person who sold it to you can't do anything about it. But increasingly, what we're talking about is defense companies. And we saw this in Afghanistan. It was absolutely extraordinary. What really happened to the Afghan military was not the US decision to withdraw 5,000 troops. It was that the US withdrew about 20,000 contractors, many of whose jobs were about doing the software updates on the helicopters and who sat in these bases. And as soon as they were removed, all these helicopters and planes the Afghan Air Force had bought were complete useless because they basically needed a software engineer tinkering with them every time they landed. And if they didn't get that, they couldn't take off again. Right. And these companies have designed their contracts like that because they don't make their money now by selling a hand grenade. They make the money through the software engineers that maintain them. And that's cheaper, of course, for the Department of War, too. Right. So Department of War hasn't bought from Anthropic a hand grenade. What they've bought is Anthropic Services to run these things. They've bought Musk's Starlink and all his people who do it. So short of nationalizing Starlink.
- [04:34]
Guest Expert
Yeah.
- [04:34]
Matt Clifford
Or Anthropic, which they could do. And, of course. And is what you probably would do in war. Right. I mean, if you really were worried about Musk, you'd be like, okay, so sorry, Starlink is now ours.
- [04:44]
Guest Expert
Yeah.
- [04:45]
Matt Clifford
Right. Short of doing that, I think you are very vulnerable to companies no longer providing. I mean, just as you do when you privatize anything. I mean, I found this in the prison system where we managed to bring in a company who offered to do all the maintenance in the UK prisons for a quarter of the price the government was spending and then turned around and said, we can't maintain your prisons anymore and we couldn't do much about it.
- [05:09]
Guest Expert
Yeah, well, I am, I mean, I have to say, in general, I find myself partly because, you know, I find myself very sympathetic to Anthropic, and I think they are trying to do the right thing in very difficult circumstances. But I do buy the argument, which, you know, has been floating around the Internet the last few days, that there is a contradiction in spending 3, 4 years saying, by the way, we're building incredibly dangerous technology that is equivalent of import to nuclear weapons, then being upset when government says, well, in that case we really need to control it.
- [05:40]
Matt Clifford
Well, listen, I mean, the other thing that's going on here which is so troubling and the reason if the world comes to a grinding halt or autonomous weapons are flying around killing everybody without proper human supervision, is competition between these companies. Because as soon as Anthropic refuses to supply, Sam Altman turns up and seems to initially say, oh, well, I'm not too bothered about surveilling everyone and killing everyone with autonomous weapons. And then a couple of days later it's like, oh, okay, maybe I sadly ever did that. And I'm going to backtrack.
- [06:10]
Guest Expert
Someone point out it's the first live negotiation on Twitter between a private company and the Department of Defense.
- [06:15]
Matt Clifford
And that's also another thing that we don't talk about enough, which is you've just put your finger on it, right? This AI development could not be happening at a worse time because it's taking place in the context of the Trump administration. Right. Who is Pete Hexseth? He's a TV news anchor whose greatest claim to fame as Secretary of War is that he can bench lift 290lbs and who conducts sensitive, secret negotiations over Twitter. And we have a president who has a weird instinct for deregulation, which means he's not going to get involved in really telling anyone what to do in terms of safety, but he's also vindictive, narcissistic, capable of waking up in the morning and randomly punishing anyone. So if you were really thinking what is the ideal political framework in which to develop what could be some of the most dangerous world changing technology in the world, My God, we're unlucky that it's happening in the middle of Trump's America. I actually would put more confidence that the Chinese government has long term thoughts, protocols, procedures, processes to assess its AI development than I do with the US at the moment.
- [07:34]
Guest Expert
Well, I think one of the things that goes back to things that I've been banging the drum on for a while, I don't think to the first question that we talked about, that there is a realistic case where we relocate one of these companies and make them British. But I do think this is why it's important that Britain is building domestic compute, but also trying to build AI companies that are relevant and important. Because it strikes me that particularly with this administration, which I think it would itself say has a more transactional approach to Europe, we need to have bargaining chips, we need to be relevant, and at the moment, we don't have the hard assets in AI to have a seat at the table.
- [08:12]
Matt Clifford
Well, it sounds to me as though you've just told us at the beginning of the show that any policymaker in the European Union needs to say, okay, let's put 450 million people together. Let's put the economies of Germany, France, the European Union, together with Canada, the uk, God knows Australia, Japan, South Korea, and let's solve the problems that Matt's raised. Let's work out how the hell we do build a 2 gigawatt center. Let's work out how the hell we get the advanced chips. Yeah. And let's make it an objective to get one of these frontier AI models here because everything that you've told me is terrifying.
- [08:56]
Podcast Host
Thank you so much for listening.
- [08:58]
Matt Clifford
If you want to hear the full
- [09:00]
Podcast Host
episode, as well as the rest of our AI miniseries with Matt Clifford, the government's former AI advisor and a man who's leading so much of the policy around the world, Please sign up therestispolitics.com and become a member.