Derek Thompson

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Dean Ball, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

Tell me a little bit about your time with the Trump administration.

When did you join?

What did you do there?

And why did you leave?

To give people a sense of the substance of the action plan and the substance of the executive orders, maybe talk about it this way.

What are the most important differences between the way that the Biden administration and the Trump administration thought about artificial intelligence?

One difference that I've observed is that Trump's economic centerpiece is his tariff policy.

And I don't think people appreciate just how many carve-outs and exemptions there are for artificial intelligence and the computer parts that go into the building of artificial intelligence in that tariff policy.

It is billions and billions of dollars, tens of billions of dollars of carve-outs.

So

AI isn't just exempt from the tariffs.

We are also, and you mentioned this at the end of your last answer, actively promoting the sale of AI chips in other countries, including, in some cases, China, in a way that the Biden administration wasn't because, to your point, there was a little bit more forward-looking fear about what would happen if we sold these chips all over the world.

In a strange way,

Is it too cheeky of me to suggest that Trump's AI policy is slightly more globalist and neoliberal than the Biden administration's, given how much they care about the diffusion of the sale of AI chips all over the world, including into China, which is something the Biden administration was specifically worried about and trying to block?

Right.

This is why I wanted to start here before we get into the showdown between Anthropic and the Department of War, because it presents, I think, a really ironic grounding for this showdown.

You have this Trump administration come in that is more business friendly, that is more capitalist, that is more interested in the globalization of this technology.