A.I. Safety Is So Back + Mythos Mayhem with Nikesh Arora + Hot Mess Express
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, I'm Juliette from New York Times Games, and I'm here talking to fans about our games. So you play New York Times Games. Yes. Do you have a favorite? Connections. It just scratches an itch in my brain to be out of the box thinking with that game. I play with my husband every night. I refuse to let him play it without me. He will always get the purple first, and I always get like the fun ones that he doesn't think about. I love that it's like a real-life connection while you guys play Connections. Very sweet. I promise I didn't play that. You can play all New York Times games at nytimes.com slash games or on our app.
Casey, will you record my audiobook for me? Yes, I would love to, actually. Okay, thanks. Yeah, because I got the briefing yesterday on what this would entail for me. They want 36 hours in the studio to record this audiobook.
That's, wait, hold on. 8, 16, 24... That's over four days worth. That's four and a half days of recording. That's like almost a full week.
I know. Oh my God. I know. But apparently people have, you know, a connection to us because of our voices. So they didn't want me using like an AI clone to do it.
It makes it, you know what? I really think that there would be a case that I should do this because it would force me to read your book. You know what I mean? Like put me like, then I really can't get out of it. Like I'm on the hook to read this thing for real. And so that might be the best way to do it.
You can insert your little snotty wisecracks if you want. Mystery science theater it.
Yeah, a little extra commentary on the side. Like, oh, I see we're using that transition again. Oh boy, he really ended this whole thing with time will tell. I would have suggested a different direction. Was this book edited?
No, wait, now I kind of actually want you to do it. Kevin Russo, tech columnist at the New York Times.
I'm Casey Noon from Platformer. And this is Hard Fork. This week, is AI safety back? The Trump administration seems to be changing its tune. Then, Palo Alto Network CEO Nikesh Arora joins us to discuss what's real and what's hype in the freakout over Claude Mythos. And finally, the train has returned to the station. It's the Hot Mess Express. Buckle up. People don't typically buckle a seatbelt on a train. This is a very safe train. All right.
Well, the big news this week is that President Trump headed to China with a cohort of American business executives to have a series of meetings about Chinese trade policy and AI and other things with Xi Jinping and other leading Chinese officials.
Now, is it true when they walked off the plane, a bunch of H-100s fell out of the leg of Jensen Wang's pants?
No.
I haven't heard that confirmed, but I'll look into it.
Thank you.
I want to talk about this, but less through the lens of like sort of President Trump and United States trade policy, then through this sort of larger shift that I think we've both observed over the past week or so, which is that after several years of kind of dismissing AI safety and doomer fear-mongering about AI, the Trump administration, or at least parts of the Trump administration, seem to be getting quite scared about what's happening. Yeah.
Yes, and while this is something that I think was honestly inevitable, it still has been jarring to see it happen because it seems like this administration has really turned on a dime when it comes to this subject.
Yeah, so let's talk about what's been going on and some of the data points that support the idea that the Trump administration is sort of changing its AI posture, or at least has several different AI postures that it's considering. But first, let's do our AI disclosures. I work for The New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity. And my fiance works at Anthropic. So first there was this executive order or rumored executive order that my colleagues at the New York Times reported on last week. This would be a new executive order to create an AI working group that would bring together tech executives and government officials to potentially come up with new ways of overseeing or regulating AI.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–8:28
2
Why is the Trump administration suddenly reconsidering AI safety and possible executive orders?
8:28–13:59
3
What evidence suggests the administration shifted its AI posture after Anthropic’s Mythos preview?
13:59–35:45
4
How are competing agencies (CASEY, NSA, Pentagon) clashing over AI vetting and control?
35:45–1:07:11
5
How might Trump’s business trip to China affect U.S.-China AI access and chip export policy?
1:07:11–1:09:47
Speakers
4 identifiedMore from Hard Fork
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The A.I. Mob That Attacked Hugging Face + METR’s Ajeya Cotra
Meta Shifts the Blame + Do Data Center Bans Work? + The Final HatGPT
OpenAI’s Two-Week Pause + Jill Lepore on the Threat of the “Artificial State” + Train of Thought
Zuckerberg’s Anti-Doom Fantasy + Finally an A.I. Detector That Works + A.I. Math