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Podcast: Plain English with Derek Thompson
Episode: "American Democracy as We Know It Might Not Survive This Technology"
Description: What happens when the two biggest stories in the world—the Trump White House and the development of advanced artificial intelligence—collide? Well, nothing good, apparently. When contract negotiations broke down between the Pentagon and Anthropic, a leading AI lab, the Department of War took the extraordinary step of labeling Anthropic a "supply chain risk," a designation typically reserved for Chinese companies suspected of spying on American technology.
It’s not just liberals like me that found this announcement jarring. The technology writer Dean Ball—who served as Senior Policy Advisor for AI at the White House as recen...