💥NEW: @DavidSacks: “Do not deny the evidence of your eyes and ears — even if they call you an election denier. I personally don’t care. I deny it.” “Spencer Pratt should be in the runoff. I deny that Raman won legitimately.”

I’ve had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true: — As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable. — Fable is Mythos with guardrails. But if those guardrails fail, then you’ve exposed Mythos and its advanced cyber capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them. (Keep in mind that Anthropic itself widely promoted the idea that Mythos was a cyberweapon and needed to be regulated as such. They asked for government regulation of Mythos and championed the guardrails on Fable. If there is a vulnerability — big or small — it is Anthropic’s responsibility to patch.) — A highly credible trusted partner of both Anthropic and the USG who was testing Fable came forward with a jailbreak of those guardrails. The Admin asked Dario to fix the jailbreak or de-deploy the model. Dario refused. — In their blog post, Anthropic defended its decision by saying the jailbreak isn’t serious. That is not what the trusted partner and the USG believe; nor is that kind of minimizing language consistent with Anthropic’s brand as the AI safety company. It’s difficult to fathom how they could claim a jailbreak allowing operability of a cyber weapon could be defined as not “serious.” — In the past, Anthropic has always said that safety must be top priority and taken super seriously. In this case, Anthropic prioritized the continued offering of the consumer model over safety. — In reaction, the Admin issued the export control. The Admin did this reluctantly. It’s been very surprised that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to cooperate with a reasonable safety request (ie fixing the jailbreak issue). Anthropic’s reaction is very much at odds with their branding and ethos as a safe AI research community. — The Admin’s hope now is that Anthropic remediates the safety issue, the export control is lifted, and Fable goes back into general release. The Admin wants all of this to happen as soon as possible. It is frankly bewildered that Anthropic hasn’t wanted to comply with safety requests that it previously said were its highest priority. — Those trying to misdirect and tie this action to the prior DoW/Anthropic issues are wrong. The Admin values Anthropic’s technical capabilities and feels that this issue, while serious, should be easily resolved. The ball is in Anthropic’s court.

LATE NIGHT DROP! 🚨 Big show. Core four are back. -- Anthropic's Fable Backlash -- Nationalizing AI, and the "Capitalist Cucks" -- Inflation Heats Up -- California’s Broken Election System (0:00) Besties are back! (0:19) Anthropic gets massive backlash over secret Fable nerfing and privacy concerns (29:16) The AI regulatory capture trap, pragmatic safety solutions (37:59) Nationalizing AI: Trump/Sanders, justifications, and AI's "Capitalist Cucks" (59:22) Liquidity recap: Best moments and takeaways (1:05:39) Inflation heats up: CPI and PPI see 3 year highs (1:12:27) California's loose election laws creating integrity doubts

Next time you think of giving up, remember this photo of Elon in 2008.

"AI safety" is pretty clearly the bureaucratic successor to the misinformation lobby

If you were wondering what the "pause" was all about, Ben Thompson @stratechery has an interesting theory: "Late last week the Anthropic Institute released a new safety report warning about the danger of recursive self-improvement... I don’t think the timing is a coincidence. This is a company and leadership that has been honing safety-and-scaremongering-as-marketing-tactic ever since Amodei led the charge to close source OpenAI models because GPT-2 was too dangerous; it’s always fun to see the evolution of tactics, capabilities, and goals, and in this case publishing a widely-discussed report the week before you cite it to silently degrade your offering for potential competitors is impressive."

Worth reading.

About 8 months ago, I warned that “Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.” This take was controversial at the time; now look how many people are saying it.

Thanks to Legendary Larry Kudlow for having me on the show today to talk about the dangers of over-regulating AI. @larry_kudlow @FoxBusiness foxbusiness.com/media/ex-whi…

The AI infrastructure boom is generating strong demand for skilled blue-collar workers. In fact, there’s a shortage of electricians, fiber technicians, and mechanical tradespeople needed to build and maintain AI data centers. Meta’s new $115M America’s Workforce Academy provides paid training plus job guarantees for exactly these roles. This is the kind of practical jobs training program that we need more of.

AI is the new Climate Change.

Thank you @sriramk for this generous post. It has been one of the great privileges of my time in the Administration to work so closely with you over the past 18 months. Your skills are genuinely unique: a rare combination of deep technical fluency in AI, sharp policy instincts, exceptional strategic thinking, and true diplomatic talent. It will be a huge loss for the administration, but I’m glad we’ll continue working together with you as an outside adviser. We've accomplished a lot together, and this feels like the right moment to recap some of the key milestones: * You co-authored the Administration’s AI Action Plan, our comprehensive strategy for winning the AI race. * You helped drive the AI Acceleration Partnerships that are positioning the American AI stack to compete and win globally. * You played a key role in the National AI Policy Framework (executive order and policy document), which is now the foundation for discussions with Congress on a national approach to AI regulation instead of a chaotic patchwork of state rules. * You helped deliver the Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government executive order, which ensures that federally procured AI systems prioritize neutrality and truth-seeking over ideological bias and capture. * You advanced American interests at the AI Summits in France and India and through state visits to the UK, the Middle East, and beyond. As AI Czar, it has been a huge honor for me to work for President Trump as he provides the clear leadership and vision for American AI dominance. His policies have put America in the lead in the AI race: supporting innovation, unleashing energy abundance, building out infrastructure, pushing back against unnecessary regulation, enabling American exports, and promoting re-industrialization. Sriram was a key partner in turning these priorities into action. And as he said, this was a true team effort with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, NEC Director Kevin Hassett, OSTP Director Michael Kratsios, Secretary Rubio, Secretary Bessent, Secretary Lutnick, and too many others to mention. Thank you again Sriram for your service. You made a huge difference. I’m sorry to see you go but grateful for the work we’ve done together and looking forward to what comes next.

Jobs apocalypse narrative taking a beating.

While I’m no fan of socialism or arbitrary confiscations of wealth, I can see why Bernie Sanders’ proposal (for the government to take a 50% stake in AI companies) resonates, including with many on the right. The CEOs of the leading AI labs have told us repeatedly that they will cause massive job loss. This is not a story that I believe, nor does the data bear it out, but this is what they have told us. Similarly, they have hyped the risks of AI without putting an equal or greater emphasis on the benefits or readily available mitigations. Conservatives have another fear. The employees of the leading labs claim to be philanthropic, but what we’ve seen is massive enrichment of NGOs advancing an agenda at odds with traditional values, fueling a revolution against our cities and communities. Soros-maxxing is not charity in our book. Anthropic and OpenAI have established themselves as Public Benefit Corporations. What could be more in the public benefit than using half the wealth generated by these companies (which trained for free on the collective knowledge of humanity) to pay down the national debt? There is no ideological bias in that philanthropy. Dario and Sam have begun to walk back their claims of massive job loss, but the damage to public trust is done, and now the chickens are coming home to roost. I could almost support the Sanders proposal as a stupidity tax. There’s just one problem. Nationalization of AI will accelerate the corporate-government fusion we’re already sliding toward. Conservatives rightly fear a Central Bank Digital Currency. They ought to be even more concerned about Central Government AI — a system with even more totalistic power over information, decision-making, and human behavior. We saw how social media was weaponized to censor conservatives (including President Trump) in the last Democrat administration. The definition of “trust & safety” expanded to mean protecting the public from supposed psychological harms, micro-aggressions, and disinformation (you know, like hearing conservative ideas or true facts about Covid). That “safety” agenda as applied to AI will be vastly more powerful and Orwellian. AI won’t just moderate posts; it will curate reality — with the ability to rewrite history, enforce ideological conformity, influence policy at scale, mass surveil Americans, and condition the benefits of the many systems it controls on approved behavior. America won’t win the AI race if we beat China but end up with a CCP-style social credit system in the U.S. — and that is the danger as the government becomes more deeply involved in AI development and assumes direct ownership and control. Conservatives are right to fear where this is all headed but ought to think more carefully about how regulations they are flirting with now (that are widely celebrated among those with a long history of lust for Big Government) will be used against them the next time a Democrat administration is in power.

Is this the AI-driven job apocalypse I’ve been hearing so much about? At some point the Doomers & their many followers will have to admit that productivity-enhancing innovation creates jobs & broad-based prosperity not the opposite - just like the loom, the engine, & the PC.

Signs you might be trying to get your frontier AI lab nationalized: You compare it to nukes… threaten half of white-collar jobs… warn recursive self-improvement could end humanity… then race ahead anyway. In other words, you want the government to save us from… you.

Amazing presentation on the unicorn economy by Coatue’s Thomas Laffont at the All-In Liquidity Summit.

The jobs data coming out continues to suggest the opposite of what a lot of people had thought would happen. Just take engineering, as the prime example of the area with greatest AI impact (and perceived risk). Most companies now have far more software projects than ever before because of AI, and effectively only engineers are going to be the ones doing that work. You can get by for a while by being non-technical building software, but eventually someone has to understand what the thing is that got built, has to maintain it, has to fix security issues that come up, upgrade the systems beneath it, and so on. That’s all jobs. Now apply that to a number of other job functions. AI is going to cause companies to hire more in sales because agents can let them process more leads and do more customer research. AI will cause an explosion of new marketing roles because of how much more efficient it is to launch campaigns and target. The list goes on. AI is going to have the opposite effect that lots of people thought on jobs.

Many have reached out to me regarding the new Cyber EO. A few thoughts: First, President Trump is the most pro-innovation president we’ve ever had. He’s made it clear that the U.S. has to win the AI race and that a pro-innovation, pro-energy, and pro-infrastructure policy is the way to do that. Thanks to President Trump, AI will generate over a 2% tailwind to GDP growth this year, with hundreds of thousands of new construction jobs and 25-30% wage increases for blue collar workers. President Trump is the reason that we have an AI boom happening right now. The change in the EO from a 90 day to 30 day period is a game changer because it allows our AI labs to comply with the voluntary framework without delaying new model releases. They can synchronize their efforts under the EO with other pre-release activities. Furthermore, I’ve been advised by the lawyers who draft EOs that 30 days means calendar days, not business days. In the AI race, every day counts. As OSTP well notes, “The EO creates a process for frontier labs to voluntarily share cutting-edge cyber models in order to secure critical infrastructure and strengthen the government’s own cyber defenses. We are NOT conducting oversight of all new models, as that level of government overreach would have chilling effects on free speech and innovation.” OSTP’s characterization is completely consistent with the discussions that I have participated in, where it was agreed that the EO is intended to apply only to models that represent a meaningful step-change in cyber capabilities (eg Mythos), not to incremental version numbers of existing models (eg Opus 4.7 -> 4.8). Finally, I understand the concerns of many that this could morph into an “FDA for AI”. Of course bureaucratic mission creep is always a danger and this should be closely monitored. But the EO expressly forbids the creation of a new licensing, preclearance, or permitting regime. Most importantly, I do not believe that President Trump would allow this to happen. As AI presents new policy challenges (such as cyberweapons), I believe that everyone in the administration is working diligently to navigate the issues with the American people in mind. I look forward to working with the Treasury, NSA, ONCD and others on the implementation of this framework.