You might not be interested in politics, but politics has an interest in you.

What is politics? War by other means.

You might not be interested in that.

It is going to have an interest in you.

If we're going to analogize it to nuclear weapons, as Dario Amadeh has done repeatedly,

you have to think through what would happen in a world where a private company developed nuclear weapons.

Its attention has been brewing for years, which is are you an American company subject to American law and even beyond law, just morally compelled to support the U.S. military or not.

A private company built something powerful enough that the government threatened to destroy it for not cooperating.

That's not hypothetical.

It happened last week when the Department of War designated anthropic a supply chain risk after the company refused

to remove safeguards against mass domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons. Ben Thompson's response

wasn't to defend either side. It was to point out what almost no one was saying. If AI is as

powerful as its builder's claim, the people with guns are going to want to say.

Whether that means the U.S. government compelling access or China deciding to act because America is getting too powerful,

these are no longer theoretical questions.

In this conversation previously aired on TVPN, John Kugan and Jory Hayes speak with Ben Thompson, founder of Strateree about his essay, Anthropic and Alignment.

We have Ben Thompson in the Restream waiting room from Stratory.

Welcome to the show, Ben. How are you doing?

I'm good. Hopefully I have the right microphone turned on this time.

You do, and it sounds fantastic. Thank you so much for joining on short notice.

Thank you for writing Anthropic and Alignment. It is a fantastic piece that I think covers all of my questions.

But I want to start with just like, just how did you process

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