Area
Reporting and discussion about Policy & Power, with links to the original sources.
Journalist Karen Hao argues that AI companies behave like empires. In her view, their warnings of catastrophe and promises of abundance work together to justify keeping AI under their control. She made the case in a replayed Diary of a CEO clip.
Journalist Karen Hao says OpenAI shut her out for years after her 2020 profile, then pulled out of her book. She now calls that lucky; host Steven Bartlett says an AI figure's team has dangled an interview for 18 months.
Journalist Karen Hao argues that AI companies shape public knowledge by funding most AI researchers. She points to Google's firing of its ethical AI leads and OpenAI's subpoena of a watchdog. Google and OpenAI's lawyer gave other reasons.
GovAI's Alan Chan floated certified AI auditors that inspect a company or government, publish a redacted report, then have their memory wiped. He doubts they would be transformational, since training, hardware and sensors must still be trusted.
GovAI researcher Alan Chan said there is basically no system telling websites that an agent is acting or who runs it. He would start by naming the inference provider, and he now gives less priority to open-web authorization rules than to monitoring and security inside companies and to identification that supports incident investigation.
Mathematician Eric Weinstein said on The Diary of a CEO that Sam Altman and Dario Amodei must win the race to superintelligence for their ethics to count. He also said he would probably stop all AI development if he could.
AI safety researcher Jeffrey Ladish proposed that the government ask AI labs to shift computing power from training new models to serving customers. He argued that constituents' calls to Congress can create the pressure to act.
Jeffrey Ladish of Palisade Research says automating AI development to stay ahead of China is the most escalatory move. He asks whether Beijing might consider striking data centers. Host Steven Bartlett expects a race anyway.
Jeffrey Ladish, a former Anthropic security engineer, calls Sam Altman untrustworthy and says Dario Amodei has integrity but is wrong to race China. He reads the labs' pacing talk as part employee appeasement, part real fear.
On Moonshots, Emad Mostaque argued governments should buy AI compute for universities and open science. Alexander Wissner-Gross said private labs and markets should decide. Dave Blundin described being outbid for a 72-GPU system.
Trump's Superintelligence Force has 120 days to report on AI risks and opportunities. On Moonshots, Alex Wissner-Gross called it a "1942 moment"; Salim Ismail said a central task force can't govern a distributed technology.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Axios he will propose a US–China notification process for AI emergencies and expects Beijing to agree. Moonshots panelists mostly dismissed the hotline but read the race very differently.