Claude, War, and the State of the Republic (with Dean Ball)

Dean Ball: Thank you so much for having me, Russ.

Dean Ball: So, I think to understand this conflict in full, you need to go back about 18 months to the tail end of the Biden Administration. In the summer of 2024, the Department of Defense [DOD]–now Department of War [DOW]–approaches Anthropic, and they agree to a contract for the use of the large language model Claude in classified contexts. That’s distinct from the unclassified uses. Right? So, the Department of Defense and many other government agencies have access to LLMs for all kinds of mundane uses: contract review and procurement, navigating HR [human resource] rules; and government has lots and lots of complex internal rules that just affect the agency, and so you need an LLM to navigate that, things like that.

This is different. This is, like, intelligence analysis, potentially targeting in active combat zones, selecting or at least recommending targets for human reviewers, things of that sort.

So, that starts in the summer of 2024, and in that contract, the Biden Administration agreed to usage restrictions. A wide variety of usage restrictions, as I understand it, but two in particular were on domestic mass surveillance and the use of AI in autonomous lethal weapons. Autonomous lethal weapons being defined as weapons that can autonomously basically identify a target, track it, and kill it with no human intervention. So, this would be machines killing humans on human instructions, but without human oversight.

So, those two things were disallowed in this contract. The Department of Defense agreed to that.

In the summer of 2025–this is during the Trump Administration–the Department of Defense still–it was not yet called the Department of War at that time–the Trump Department of Defense expanded this contract by a significant amount. This was publicly announced. And, when they did that–it was up to a $200 million contract with Anthropic–and, when they did that, they renewed the contract with the same, very similar contract, and it did have the same usage restrictions on domestic mass surveillance and autonomous lethal weapons.

Then we get into the fall of 2025, and as I understand it, a Department of War, now, official named Emil Michael is confirmed by the Senate. He had not been confirmed when this contract was renewed in 2025, or in the summer of 2025. He’s confirmed in the fall. He comes in, he reviews the contract, he sees these usage restrictions, and makes the decision to–he decides that the Department of War cannot live with these restrictions and says, ‘We have to have all lawful use only.’ So, he approaches Anthropic–and it’s worth noting Anthropic is the only LLM that is available to be used on classified systems. He approaches Anthropic, says, ‘We need to renegotiate for all lawful use.’ Anthropic agrees to drop many of their usage restrictions, but not those two. That ends up being a red line for Anthropic. Department of War then says, ‘If you don’t–.’

This goes on for months, and eventually this escalates to the point–I think there’s probably a lot of personal conflict and a lot of back-and-forth drama here that’s mostly private. But, we eventually get to the point where the Department of War says, ‘If you don’t agree to drop this red lines and allow us to use AI for all lawful uses, then we will designate your company Anthropic a supply chain risk.’ Which will mean that, a). All of your Department of War contracts are canceled; but more importantly so are all of your contracts with any Department of War contractors. So, for example, Microsoft is a Department of War contractor, and they wouldn’t be able to use Anthropic AI services in their fulfillment of contracts that they do for the Department of War.

And, that gets announced–at this point about two weeks ago is when that initially gets threatened; and then the actual designation came down something like a week ago, something like that. The timeline is now fuzzy for me because it’s been a very busy couple weeks. And, now we’re essentially in court. Anthropic has sued the government in the Ninth District of California. Or the Northern District of California, my apologies. And, that’s kind of where we are.

Dean Ball: That is correct, yes. And so, I think specifically when it comes to domestic mass surveillance, I think that’s the complex sticking point here.

So, just as an example, there are a very large number of commercially available data sets that would include information on Americans that could be private or sensitive, but that are commercially available. So, things like smartphone location data. For example, many people–you might download a third-party weather app to your phone. A lot of times, the weather app needs to know the location all the time to give you the weather in wherever you happen to be physically in the world. So, a lot of the ways these weather apps make money is the users turn on location, and then they have a location tracker, and they sell the location data. This is very common. And so, there’s tons of things like that.

There is obviously also commercial satellite data that you can buy. There’s web usage data, just a very–not only can you buy these individual data sets, but you can combine them in all sorts of ways to generate quite rich insights on individual people.

This has been true for a long time. This is the era of web-scale data.

The binding constraint, though, on the use of this data is simply that it’s time-intensive to actually analyze for any individual person. So, you have to do this for high-value targets. It’s not illegal. In many domains of national security law, what I have just described is not illegal to do. It’s not considered surveillance. If it’s commercially-available data, it’s not considered surveillance.

So, once you have advanced AI systems which can scale human expert-like attention infinitely, essentially, it is all of a sudden as though the intelligence community has, instead of thousands of analysts, millions and tens of millions of analysts. And so, you have a workforce of analysts larger than the government itself. Larger than the human workforce of the government itself, I should say.

And, Anthropic’s position is essentially that–and I agree with them here–that the law is not sufficient. The law has not been updated for this reality because this is the reality only of the last few years, and the law is not updated for it. And so, yes, that basically domestic mass surveillance as a legal term, as a legal term of art, does not correspond with what you and I might think of as the vernacular definition of the term domestic mass surveillance.

Dean Ball: Yeah. At least there’s an agreement in principle, it seems, for OpenAI models to be used in classified settings that I would say don’t contain the same red-line protections that Anthropic sought from the government, but do contain–OpenAI is essentially hanging its hat on the notion of technical safeguards. So, instead of putting these safeguards into the contract, their view is: ‘We can train a model and build a system, and if we control the deployment of the system to the Department of War, then that system could, for example, reason in real-time about whether or not what it’s being asked to do is domestic mass surveillance and say no to the government.’

Dean Ball: That would be the idea.

Dean Ball: Well, a number of reasons. I think the first is the nature of the punishment. One thing I think that’s worth being clear about is there’s this whole notion of ‘all lawful use.’ I’ve talked to defense procurement and procurement law experts: This is an abnormal notion in contracting. It’s sort of question-begging, in maybe the vernacular as opposed to the literal sense of that term. But, it’s like: ‘Well, what is lawful? What does lawful mean? Who decides?’ And, in this case it’s, ‘Well,’ the Trump Administration saying, ‘We decide what lawful is, and we’ll do it until courts stop us.’ Or someone stops us.

And so, it’s a somewhat strange term of art.

I get the principle. The principle sounds very intuitive. And, I’m actually just willing to concede for the purposes at least of this debate that it’s perfectly reasonable to say, ‘We want all lawful use.’ I actually think it’s kind of complicated and strange to say that, but there’s, like, reasons that most–like, a contract for a missile does not say, ‘You can use the missile for all lawful use.’ That’s not what it says. The Department of War’s position here is they’re pretending like that is what the contracts are like. But it’s really not.

But setting that aside, the bigger issue here for me is the nature of the both threatened and realized punishments that have been doled out on Anthropic.

So, first of all, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth threatened to issue regulations that would make it such that no DOD contractor–or Department of War–contractor could do any business with Anthropic. Which is very different from saying, ‘No Department of War contractor can use Anthropic in the fulfillment of DOW contracts.’ Right? Two very different things. One is profoundly broader than the other.

So, he threatened any commercial relations. And what they actually followed through with in terms of the regulation that’s been issued so far, is, it’s just barring Department of War contractors from using Claude in their fulfillment of Department of War contracts. So you can still use Claude for other things.

Dean Ball: Yes, this is the supply chain risk designation.

Dean Ball: Yes. It is a little bit complicated because the Department of War does–one thing that’s subject to a Department of War contract would be Microsoft Windows.

Dean Ball: They buy lots of computers that run Windows. They buy lots of computers that run Microsoft Word.

Dean Ball: Yeah. And, I mean, one way to think about this, too, though, like, even if it is the more narrow definition. Actually, Microsoft is a good example. Let’s say in the 1990s, in the early 1990s, that the Department of Defense had issued a supply-chain risk designation against Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and said, ‘We won’t use it and none of our contractors can use it in their fulfillment of Department of Defense contracts.’ One wonders, would Microsoft be the sort of world-bestriding company that it is today? I don’t know.

So, we are talking about something–even in this narrower usage of the regulatory authority–we’re talking about a government intervention in a critical emerging technology that has the potential to really radically reshape the trajectory of this industry, and one company within it.

Dean Ball: Well, yeah. No, I think that is worth mentioning. I’ll just say, stepping back a little, this supply-chain-risk designation is only used–typically is only used–against companies from foreign adversaries. This is about adversary manipulation of American military systems.

Dean Ball: So, it’s really treating Anthropic like enemies of the state, essentially.

Dean Ball: It would have been the equivalent of sanctions. And, one other thing that I think is worth noting here is that this is clearly Act I, Scene I.

Dean Ball: If the Administration decides that they want to bring the entire federal regulatory apparatus to bear against Anthropic, I imagine they will.

And, I also think, by the way, this doesn’t have to be restricted to formal, legible regulatory action. This can be jawboning. In fact, Anthropic has alleged in their complaint against the government, they have alleged already that the government is calling Anthropic customers–government officials are calling Anthropic customers–and encouraging them to cease doing business with Anthropic. So, it’s jawboning–that is, soft–and it’s very hard to sue about.

So, all this is essentially–like, if I were to summarize it in just a sentence, I would say the government is saying here that if you don’t do business on the terms we unilaterally set, we’ll set out to destroy your company. Which is a kind of usurpation of private property.

And even more, to your point, Russ, about some of the political—basically, every time senior Trump Administration officials have invoked Anthropic and talked about the supply-chain-risk designation, they have inevitably mentioned that Anthropic is liberal. That they’re supposedly woke. I think that’s not exactly true, actually. But, that they’re supposedly woke and they don’t share Trump Administration political values, that part certainly is true. Anthropic is run by people who donate to Democrats. A lot of AI companies are, it’s worth noting.

And if that’s the case, if that really does–then this is also a form of political interference, which would be in addition to private property usurpation, would also be a pretty serious abridgment of First Amendment rights.

Dean Ball: Yes. And, one thing that I think should be really clearly said here is that: one of the reasons that it’s very hard–and this is not just true of American, it’s true internationally–it’s very hard to do business with the Chinese–with large Chinese tech companies–because it’s sort of known that in particular things like information technologies, there’s a reason that Chinese companies don’t make the operating systems that define computers all over the world. And, it’s because one of the reasons is that–it’s a lot of reasons–but one of them is that everyone knows that Chinese technology companies are assets of the military and are viewed that way by the government. And, that’s not the case in the United States. And, that has aided American companies in doing business abroad because there is a trust.

One of the things I actually used to always say when I was in government to foreign governments, who, maybe they would have some concerns about doing business with America: ‘Oh, you’re an unreliable business partner.’ And, I’d say, ‘Look, yeah, I can’t deny it to you that the government changes every four years here in America and there are these wild swings in different directions, and I can’t deny that to you. But the thing is, is that don’t think of yourself as doing business with the U.S. government. Think of yourself as doing business with Microsoft.’ Which is, like, way more stable and has totally legible incentives.

The problem is that when you do things like this, you are eroding that distinction between public and private, which gives people faith in Microsoft. Microsoft has a higher credit rating than the U.S. government. It gives people faith in the institution of Microsoft that is separate and apart from faith in the institutions of the federal government. And, you erode that and all of a sudden, everything becomes political, and that’s a subsuming mentality that I think is quite toxic.

Dean Ball: Well, first of all, I think it’s worth noting, yes, there’s a picking of winners and losers here; and it is explicitly not merit-based because Secretary Hegseth has said that: ‘The reason we use Claude’–I’m paraphrasing him here, but–‘it’s because it’s the best.’ And, ‘the reason that this is so important to us’–the reason that this fight is so important to them–he said, ‘is because it’s the best.’ And yet at the same time, his regulatory actions are trying to drive the company–at least hurt them, if not drive them out of business.

And yeah: it’s also worth observing here that this is an incredibly capital-intensive industry, and all of this regulatory risk is making it much harder for Anthropic in particular, and probably the industry in general, to raise the capital that they need. And so, yeah, you are diminishing America’s ability to maintain its lead in this technology right at a critical time.

And, not to mention the fact that, by all accounts, Claude is exceptionally useful already in its still relatively nascent forms. It’s already exceptionally useful for certain kinds of military operations. So, I think it’s unambiguous to say that if Claude disappeared from military systems tomorrow, it would be a–American national security would be weaker.

Dean Ball: I think the argument is that, yeah, that, like, this–Anthropic is essentially using its private power to set what amounts to public policy unilaterally. And, there is some truth to that–

Dean Ball: I think. I don’t think that’s crazy. And, my own view is that: Look, on one level, we look at this now and it feels really restrictive. At the same time, the government purchases software, including software that’s used in really important critical applications, purchases software on commercial terms all the time. And, commercial terms of service are, like, the same ones that you purchase it under–right?–basically. And so, commercial terms of service often have usage restrictions. Government software contracts have all kinds of usage restrictions.

Dean Ball: Yes. Yeah. Right. And, AI is in fact a competitive market. It’s true that Anthropic is the only model on classified systems right now, but that’s not a fact of physics. Right? That can change.

And so–but–I think, to make their argument for them, I think it would be: No, it doesn’t matter about competition. A private party can’t do public policy through contracting.

Dean Ball: And, it’s just that simple. And also, there are some allegations that the government has made that Anthropic has done things, like threaten to remove Claude. Like, basically, to pull Claude’s services during active military operations if Anthropic doesn’t like what the government is doing.

I must be honest with you that I have some real questions about the veracity of those claims, but at the end of the day–because I will say, it doesn’t sound like a thing that you would say to the government. It doesn’t sound true. But, it’s what the government claims. I’ll be interested to see if they claim these things under oath.

Dean Ball: That’s the ultimate thing: Do the DOJ [Department of Justice] lawyers claim it under oath?

Dean Ball: Well, I think the contractual analogy actually is fair. And, in fact, you can imagine even a version of–you could imagine Anthropic having a contractual term that says, ‘We are only comfortable with our models being used in wars declared by Congress,’ or something.

Dean Ball: And, of course, there’s a long history of America engaging in basically wars that aren’t technically wars.

So, I think the nuclear-weapons-to-AI analogy is actually quite poor for reasons that I would be happy to explain, but that’s not actually your point here. Your point is more about this contractual term. And, I think the government has a very fair point here.

My observation is twofold. You can make that point without trying to destroy Anthropic’s business, Number One.

Number Two, but I think on the Anthropic side of things, you shouldn’t try–if these protections matter so much to the leadership of Anthropic, if they matter so much that they’re willing to call these red lines against a government that is threatening to basically destroy their business, I think if they’re that important, then you should have just said, ‘We’re not selling you anything until there’s a law.’ And, they should have said that in 2024. In fact, if they were in such cahoots with the Biden Administration and the Democrats, they should have said it in the summer of 2024. They should have said, ‘No, we’re not going to do this until Congress passes a law about domestic surveillance and autonomous lethal weapons; and we want those protections written in statute.’

Dean Ball: So, your question gets, I think, to one of the most interesting dynamics that we’re going to face in the next decade, two decades, maybe more. Which is: What is the relationship between this thing we know today of as the frontier lab–which is the AI companies–and the U.S. government–and the federal government?

And, it’s an incredibly complicated question because, Number One, there are national security implications, right? These technologies can be used for object-level dangerous things, right? They can be used to engage in autonomous cyber attacks. So, in other words, I don’t need to have a military arsenal to make use of these models, or an intelligence-gathering apparatus. Anyone can launch a cyber attack. So, there are these things.

There are people who talk about things like bioweapons and whatnot. There’s all sorts of catastrophic potential dangerous misuses, malicious uses of the technology. Obviously, there is a government role in the sort of mitigation of those things. Well, maybe not obviously, but I think that there’s some government role in the mitigation of those things.

But, it’s also an incredibly useful technology for national security, like, for government, for militaries specifically and uniquely.

And then, it’s also a technology that I think will be a profound part of how all of us exercise our individual liberty and express ourselves in the future. And even today. It will be hugely important, a sort of foundational tool in the acquisition of knowledge, which is a First Amendment right in and of itself. But also, the self-expression for many people, I think.

And then, on top of all that, I think that we’re dealing with a technology that, like the printing press, may well be so foundational to the capability of organizations and institutions that it actually changes sort of the institutional complex that defines the technocratic nation state. Such that what we currently think of as the government will actually change in important ways. And so, in that sense, you might think that the technology the frontier labs are developing is in some ways a challenge to the institutional status quo in which technocratic regulators are in charge of large swaths of the economy, basically. That that in and of itself might be challenged in various ways.

And so, it’s all of these things all at the same time. So, I can’t say that I know exactly what the answers are going to be here because indeed, I approach these issues with a classical liberal frame. But, I am also aware that the very notion of classical liberalism–some people would argue it’s already anachronistic; and certainly you could say that if you think about the future, that maybe all of our political concepts–all of our political theoretic concepts–are going to be somewhat outdated. Because something new: there’s some new type of institutional complex beyond the technocratic nation state is going to emerge. And so, new sorts of political relationships will undergird that.

And so, I think classical liberalism is a good starting point and all I can say is I changed my career from what I was doing before to be writing about this, because basically, this question in particular is one that I find infinitely fascinating and extremely important. And, I don’t have all the answers. I don’t have anything like all the answers. But I do think that this is going to keep coming back to us I think many times.

Dean Ball: Yes. I think that’s right. And, the thing here that’s hard for , I think, is–you know, there’s this notion of aligned super-intelligence. That we’re going to make something that is smarter–vastly smarter–than the best human experts at everything–right?–and at every cognitive task. And, I don’t know if that’s actually what we’re going to build exactly; I don’t know if that’s quite the right way of thinking about it. Yeah.

But, grant for a moment that, like, it will be of foundational importance to everything that an organization like the Department of War does, or a very large number of the activities that they engage in. And also, that it may be capable–in fact, definitionally, in order to be what it is described as or what the companies are trying to build, it will have to be able to act in the world as its own. It’s not a pure legal agent that does whatever you say. It will have to be able to make decisions. Again, anthropomorphizing language is complicated here, but we’re taking our hands off the wheel to a certain extent.

And so, I guess what I would say is imagine a world in which we build something that is smarter than all the employees of the Department of War; and when we ask, ‘What is domestic mass surveillance? What will it do and what will it not do?’ And, the answer is, ‘Well, the machine will decide.’ That’s obviously a caricatured world. I don’t think it will be that simple. But, probably that element of the machine deciding–truly deciding something–that’s probably something that a lot of people have not emotionally and intellectually factored in to their models of the future that you probably ought to.

Dean Ball: At this point.

Dean Ball: I agree with you in part and disagree in other areas. So, I think, like–like, the other day, actually I was using GPT [ChatGPT, Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer] 5.4, the newest model from OpenAI, and I was asking it about a very complex, a private issue, but related to some of the things we’re talking about in some ways–a very complex interpersonal and professional thing I’m dealing with. I was, ‘Okay, here’s what I’m thinking about saying in this situation. What do you think?’ And, it responded to me and it actually said what I should have said. It was, like, ‘No, you shouldn’t say that, you should say this.’ And, I was, like, ‘Wow, that’s really,’–like, because it knows enough about me to know what I want to sound like.

Dean Ball: It knows what I sound like at my best, in some sense. And so, what I do think though, what I think is–so I’m not sure that I agree with you that it won’t be able to reason about trade-offs and moral and ethical things. In fact, I think Claude is a better–I’d be willing to bet you, if I had a moral and ethical question for Secretary Hegseth versus Claude Opus 4.6, I bet you nine times out of ten, I would prefer Claude’s answer, to maybe more.

Dean Ball: But, that’s interesting–

Dean Ball: Right, right, right. Well, that’s interesting because that’s not true of you, Russ.

Dean Ball: I don’t think so, I don’t think so. I bet you sometimes I like Claude more than what you would say, but I bet you not every time.

Dean Ball: And so, what I do think is that, a). I agree with you that there’s a risk to just assuming the AI is right about everything because it’s actually not, especially in things like this.

But also, where I think the value of–where I think the human touch is going is really going to be on these things that are definitionally based on relationships. Based on things like trust, and integrity, and charisma, and persuasion; and politics to some extent. It’s like the notion of automating politics doesn’t really make sense to me.

Dean Ball: That seems like a category error. And, the reason for that is not that AI can’t do a better speech, that it can’t perform the–I think AI can probably perform many of the speech acts of politics better than the best. And, I’m willing to submit, one day, the best–it’ll be better than those things in even strategy and stuff. Better at strategy than Otto von Bismarck. Better at rhetoric than Abraham Lincoln. Better at writing rhetoric at least than Abraham Lincoln. But, there’s this issue of, like, politics is an inherently relational act. And, that seems much harder to automate. And so that’s my guess as to where we’re going. That’s where I think the human touch is going to be. That’s a super-different world than the one we currently live in and I don’t think our education is prepared–maybe yours, but not the U.S. education system–is preparing students to live in that world. That’s a very different world than the one we’re used to.

Dean Ball: So, I have come to a quite biological conception of institutions. I think institutions are made up of human beings and I think that nature is filled with fractals. And so, I think that while institutions aren’t exactly like human beings, there are ways of observing and thinking about living things that can also be usefully and productively applied to institutions, both as an analytic matter and for purposes of the poetry of it all. I don’t think there’s that much of a distinction between those two things, actually.

So, I open up the piece basically describing the experience of sitting at my father’s deathbed about 11 years ago. I was 22 years old. I had just started my career. And it was no secret. We were in hospice–it was me, and my mother and a few other family members–and we knew that we were watching my father die. And, I remember reflecting at the time–and I’ve reflected, of course, on that experience many times since–that death is this process, and that in some ways, my father had become sick. He had gotten heart surgery that went wrong six months prior to the date that he died, roughly. It was immediately after that six months, he was a changed man entirely. The life had been sucked out of him. And then, it was just this gradual process of just him becoming less and less there, in fits and starts, not even necessarily, but he would occasionally come back and have some life in him.

And then, the actual process of just watching him die, I realized that I don’t know: he seemed dead to me well before the machine declared him dead. And so, the machine making this declaration that his heart had stopped, or the faint signal that it was getting from the heart had crossed a point of faintness that the machine made some arbitrary decision, basically, that he had officially passed over. That is just, I think, one way of looking at where he was in the process of death.

And so, I was reflecting on that and reflecting on why is this experience of writing about Anthropic, Department of War–why is it so emotional for me? Why is it so frustrating? Why do I feel such a deep melancholy about it? And, what I realized is that it is because I just feel as though I’ve watched–throughout my lifetime, for 20 years–I’ve watched a lot of these bedrock principles of our Republic get eroded in thing after thing. It’s been the same sort of corrosiveness, but worse sequentially every year, it feels like. And, I suddenly realized–it clicked for me–that that process feels very much like death. It felt very much like the experience–I don’t know what death feels like, but it felt very much like the experience of watching my father die.

And also, the fact that, like, I think about this a lot privately, but I don’t talk about it that much. And the reason I don’t talk about it is that it feels quite painful to talk about. When my father was going through his six months of dying, we talked about his health a lot. But we didn’t talk about, sort of, the certainty of his death that much, and where he was in the process, and all these kinds of things. Because it was too painful and we knew the answer. The answer, we all knew.

And so, yeah, that’s why I started. I will say I wrote that piece in about two hours, so it just kind of came out of me.

Dean Ball: Yeah. No, I think it’s very well put. In some ways, more precisely than I communicated it. And, I think the way I think about this is you are definitely right that this is about change and not death; because, I also talk about the birth of my son briefly in that piece and how it is similar. And how my experience thus far, quite brief still–it’s only several months of being a father–is that I sort of just am watching my son progressively awaken. He just becomes more and more aware of the world. And, nature is like this. Nature is filled with phase transitions.

There’s a great graphic I saw on social media, on Twitter, the other day of a heart beginning to beat and what that looks like. And, it’s all these cells, these decentralized cells that begin to activate; and then enough of them activate, and all of a sudden you have a heart beating. But, it’s not like there’s ever one moment where it is–and by the way, I think that change from AI will be like this, too. There will be phase transitions. There already have been phase transitions in the progression of AI, and there will be in the adoption as well.

So, very much, yes. And, part of the point I’m making is–like, yeah, I’m not trying to make a point about fascism. I think probably a lot of people on the Left read my piece; and I took pains to say that this wasn’t just about Trump. But I’m sure a lot of people–and I knew this would happen–a lot of people on the Left I think read my piece and in self-satisfied fashion said, ‘Ah, yes, but everything will be solved when we get Gavin Newsom in,’ or whoever–

Dean Ball: in a few years. And, that’s very much not my view. My view is, like, the most charitable thing I could say about the Left would be that they would likelier do all the same stuff in a somewhat more gentlemanly technocratic fashion than the Trump Administration, which has a tendency to be really explicit and stumble into things like this. But, in some sense, I actually applaud the Trump Administration for that because at least it’s out in the open–

Dean Ball: At least we can talk about it with the Trump Administration.

And, the one other point I would make is, you know, I spent more time debating whether or not I should publish this piece in the form that I published it than I did writing it. Because there’s a certain aspect of, like, there’s run-on-the-bank dynamics that you don’t want to contribute to with things like this. The reason that republics work is that we all believe in the common fiction of the Republic. And that’s always been true–

Dean Ball: That’s always been true. And, I certainly did get pushback from some people, including people that you and I both respect about that, about the decision to publish it. And, one of the things that I heard is, like, ‘Well, you know, democratic–like, elections are still functioning. Right? Like, we still have elections and the results of them are observed.’ My view on that is that that’s a goalpost moving in my view–

Dean Ball: Yeah. It’s really easy–

Dean Ball: It’s better than nothing and the thing is, it’s really easy to observe–

Dean Ball: It’s really easy to observe. Did I go to my polling place and vote, and did the person who won get into power? And so, it’s very, very hard to erode that particular thing.

And, it’s interesting to me that even the Left has chosen to focus so much on this issue of, like, the erosion of democracy per se. Because that has always seemed to me that the thing that the Trump Administration or anyone else is least likely to mess with. Because it’s so verifiable. And instead, like, indeed, the Founding Fathers, if you told them that the one thing that persisted was the ability of the masses to vote–

Dean Ball: they’d be appalled!

Dean Ball: They’d be, like, ‘That is the worst part of the whole system.’

Dean Ball: Yeah. Because yeah, it’s tyranny of the masses. Democracy is just the tyranny–the idea that there’s an omni-powerful, an omnipotent executive who–we shift wildly between two different omnipotent executives based on a democratic vote–that’s not at all what a republic is. So, the fact that elections are being observed, it doesn’t feel–it’s cold comfort.

Dean Ball: It’s cold comfort.

Dean Ball: Yes. I think the one functioning branch remains the Courts and so they are this one lasting check on the unfettered power of the Executive. And, that exists in a real tension because the Courts can only do so much. At the end of the day, who enforces the Courts’ decisions? It’s the Executive.

And, once you start asking that question–

Dean Ball: that’s sort of my point–once you start asking that question, you’re in the law of the jungle at that point.

Dean Ball: And so, I’m hopeful. Part of the reason that I’m a very close observer of the Courts on a wide variety of different issues, far beyond just AI and tech-related issues, is because I like to observe this chess match in detail.

One thing that maybe is a note of optimism that I can give is that if you think about the Courts as the last umpire enforcing the rules of game as written down–the laws that are written down–well, then if you are a smart long-range actor who wants to win in court, it’s incentive-compatible for you to pretend like those rules of the game actually do govern your actions. Because then when you go to court, you will have a better case to be made.

I’m a big fan of a book called Homo Ludens: Man at Play by a guy named Johan Huizinga. It’s an old book, but it’s a great book. And, it would make this point that you should model the institutions of classical liberalism as this kind of grand game. As long as there’s one institution that enforces the rules of the game, then maybe it’s incentive-compatible for the actors to remain. But, the problem is, like, the court authority gets eroded and it’s not always clear–even today, it’s not always clear–that court rulings get observed. Biden had this problem, too. Biden ignored aspects of court rulings and so does Trump. And so, even that is starting to break down a little bit, and we could get into court packing. There’s all kind of things.

Dean Ball: Yeah. So, I’m very grateful that the Courts exist, but in the end–and this gets into this locus of control thing to bring us back to the middle of the conversation about where is the proper locus of control and how should we be thinking of AI as this kind of new institutional technology. Well, one of the problems I have is that I’m trying to analyze this and think about the appropriate locus of control in a moment when I’m also just candidly acknowledging that our republic is in not very good health. And so, there’s a certain extent to which I have trouble trusting the unfettered executive to be the governing institution over AI. I have a lot of trouble with that in a way that maybe I wouldn’t have if this were 1923–

Dean Ball: Or if Calvin Coolidge were President or something: maybe we would be in a very different world.

But, we’re in the world that we’re in. So, I think that that should affect your–well, I don’t want to be–it affects my view of the accumulation of private power versus the accumulation of public power because the thing about private corporations is they don’t have the monopoly on legitimate violence.

And so, maybe we build new checks and balances in this way somehow. But, I think whatever we’re doing, I suspect that we are in a new Founding moment–which is not novel for this country, but certainly we’re in uncharted territory.

Dean Ball: Thank you, Russ.