Plain English with Derek Thompson
"American Democracy as We Know It Might Not Survive This Technology"
09 Mar 2026
Chapter 1: What are the two major stories impacting America today?
In the big picture, I want this podcast to be about everything in the world. I want to talk to experts in psychology and media and medicine and economics. But there are times when it feels to me like there are two stories whose significance towers over just about everything else. Story one is Donald Trump and this administration. And story two is artificial intelligence.
And today's show is about what happens when these two massive objects smash into each other and what we can see in the wreckage of that collision. Recently, contract negotiations broke down between Anthropic, a leading AI company, and the Department of War, otherwise previously known as the Department of Defense.
The gist is that after weeks of negotiations, the Pentagon couldn't get Anthropic to agree to the use of its technology on autonomous weapons and other military applications. Anthropic claimed that the White House was negotiating in bad faith, forcing a private company to accept contract language that went against its values.
The White House, for its part, felt that Anthropic was trying to play God, dictating to the military how its technology should be used in an emergency, rather than allowing democratically elected leaders to decide for itself. I have my biases here. I lean toward Anthropic. But at one level, you could say this was a typical, boring contract dispute.
At a higher level, however, I think it was a fight over a question with huge implications for national security, a question that could haunt the next few years or decade of our politics. That question is, who should control AI? It's what happened next, however, that was most shocking and infamous.
Soon after negotiations broke down, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth took the extraordinary step of labeling Anthropic a supply chain risk, implying that the company could not do business with any firm that holds Pentagon contracts, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.
Without access to cloud services provided by these companies, or without the ability to sell services to those companies, Anthropic will struggle mightily. This designation was broadly seen as the equivalent of the Pentagon trying to murder a successful American business for the sin of saying no. It's not just liberals like me that found this announcement jarring.
The technology writer Dean Ball said the decision amounted to an announcement from the Trump administration that there is no such thing as private property. After all, if the government can walk up to your company, make you a deal, and destroy your company if you say no to that deal, that certainly sounds a lot like a world in which the state can destroy whatever it trains its eyes on.
What gives Dean's commentary special force is that he was the senior policy advisor for AI at this White House as recently as last summer. He was the primary drafter of Trump's AI action plan.
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Chapter 2: What happened during the Anthropic and Pentagon contract negotiations?
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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?
So I joined in April of 2025. And basically, you know, I was a senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence and emerging technology at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. So those are very... White House staff roles are very capacious. And the... Sort of day-to-day changes radically depending on what's going on. And so I did quite a bit of stuff.
But the main thrust of my work was to play a role in the drafting of the administration's AI action plan and some of the other... policy moves that were attached to the action plan, such as the executive orders that the president signed when he announced the action plan. So those were the things I worked on. I worked on them, of course, with many other people.
So a lot of what I did was shepherding these documents through the interagency approval processes that these kinds of things must go through. And then I left in August of 2025. And principally, I left because I feel like my primary value add is as an independent sort of writer, you know, sort of thinker. And the action plan had been, you know, completed at that point.
It was sort of rolling downhill in the sense that the bureaucracy liked it. The bureaucracy was excited about adopting, you know, about implementing it. And so I didn't feel like this, I felt like the sales and communications job was largely done. And I said, okay, well, you know, my value add is probably doing other things now.
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?
The Biden administration, I would say, took a far more, I would say, an ominous approach from a regulatory perspective, right? There was way more foreshadowing of regulation to come. I think it's exaggerated sometimes how much they themselves actually regulated. But if you go back and look at what they did, they were clearly putting the scaffolding in place, right?
for a significant regulatory regime to come, probably in the term that Joe Biden's second term or Kamala Harris's first, right? So the Trump administration, first of all, dismantled large portions of that.
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Chapter 3: How does the White House view the control of AI technology?
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?
Yeah, I mean, I think the way that they would put it, the way that people in the Trump administration would put it, would be that they come at this from the perspective of Silicon Valley. And they come at this from the perspective of, we need to build global ecosystems around our chip technology, right?
And in the case of the export controls, things like NVIDIA's CUDA development environment for AI applications and AI models and whatnot. And that these... these types of things are, are, uh, you're really important parts of, uh, um, uh, this is how you establish tech dominance in the long run. Right. I think that's kind of the idea.
And so, um, you know, in that sense though, like you said, I, I said global ecosystems, you said globalist tomato, tomato a little bit, uh,
Chapter 4: What does labeling Anthropic as a supply chain risk mean?
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.
more of like a direct pipeline of Silicon Valley straight to D.C. I mean, David Sachs, who's in charge fully of AI policy in the White House, is a co-host of the podcast of Silicon Valley. And that brings us to the doorstep of this showdown between Anthropic and the Department of War, which I described in the open and you know all too well.
Why do you think this showdown and the announcement of supply chain restrictions, why do you think this was such a remarkable and important move from the White House?
So, for a lot of different reasons, frankly, but I think sort of the most important thing that I see here is... This is a whole different level of, this is not just a contractual dispute. This is the government saying, if we can't resolve a contractual dispute, we are going to force you to do terms on our business by essentially threatening, existentially threatening your company.
this is a general purpose type of threat that can be, you know, there's nothing in principle that stops this from being extended to other, uh, to other types of businesses or other people in the AI industry. Um, and so it just sends, it's, it creates a tremendous chilling effect. Um, and I also think that, uh,
you know, if, if you want to talk about like the AI race or the competition between the United States and China, one of the reasons that it's very hard to do business, uh, with Chinese companies, both for American firms, but also globally is that everybody knows that Chinese companies are considered by the government to be military assets. And so if you use deep seek, um,
And the Chinese military wants to know what all the Americans are talking to DeepSeek about, talking to DeepSeek's models about. They will just, well, it is not a question of can they get that data. That is like 100% yes they can and everyone in the world knows it. This is common knowledge. This is not common knowledge about American companies.
If the government demanded that Google turn over all Google search data, Google would say no. They would absolutely say no to that. This is eroding that level of trust. This allows, because of the independence of American businesses, not total, but significantly greater independence of American businesses from the U.S. military, it's easier to trust and work with them.
We were already having trust problems with American AI, this whole notion of AI sovereignty and whatnot. And I think now those trust issues are... considerably worse because our government is behaving with the same attitude that China's behaves with.
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Chapter 5: What are the differences in AI policy between Biden and Trump?
Well, first of all, I think at the object level, you can debate about whether or not the Biden administration's controlling tendencies would have worked. We can't stop China from building the surveillance regime they're going to build, right? So that'd be one thing. I just kind of don't think it would work, and therefore I don't think it's worth investing that much energy into.
I think the other thing that I would say, stepping back a little bit, would be I am pointing out a problem, but the solution to that problem, in my view, is probably not going to be you know, there's a certain reactionary tendency among the contemporary left. I felt that the Biden administration was actually a much more deeply conservative in the, like,
Uh, you know, in the sense of like, actually just like, like almost like paleo conservative trying to preserve the institutions of the mid 20th century. Um, they felt Democrats today feel far more attached to those institutions in part because they largely control them now. Um, they feel way more attached to them than most conservatives I know.
Most conservatives I know are actually like, I think the modern conservative party is like in some sense, way more like accelerationist and way more open to sort of substantial change, at least big chunks of it are. And also like way more internet native, way more like native to the institutions of the 21st century than the left is. And this is a really interesting, just general political fact.
I've pointed this out before. And so when I say like, this is a problem. What I'm not saying is we need to defend the, like we need to preserve things as they are, or as they were, you know, as, as we might remember through rose colored glasses, you know, in the 1980s or something like that. That's not how I see things.
I think we will have to be imaginative and sort of reinvent the institutions of statecraft. And that's going to be super hard.
Yeah. Let me reflect back to you why I think, um, the Dean Ball thesis that America's democracy governing norms might not survive contact with this technology as we know it. I see two trains coming down the track. Train number one is the rise of executive power. It's not just the Trump administration, although it is certainly the Trump administration.
You've seen over the last few cycles that as presidents have recognized that Congress is basically a do-nothing body, the president has concentrated more power in the executive office through the issuing of executive orders, or in Trump's case, just, you know,
starting a de facto war without asking Congress for permission and Congress essentially saying, we don't even want to force Trump to ask for permission. I think you saw the same thing with tariffs. Typically, an Article I job for Congress, in this case, something that the executive office can do through AIPA and now some other rule after the Supreme Court ruling.
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Chapter 6: How does the Trump administration's AI policy reflect its approach to technology?
Um... And yeah, then there's this, like, I think the other point I would make, though, about like the second point, the sort of the AI changing the economics, essentially, of all kinds of, in some sense, the microeconomics of tyranny would be like the way to put this, are like changed on the government side.
But like, the other point is that there's all these institutions of governance that we have that are sort of public civic institutions, right? And maybe what starts to happen is those things break down. They become less responsive. They actually insulate themselves from artificial intelligence.
And at the same time, the cost of replacing them, the cost of essentially privatizing various functions for the same exact reason. There are all these things that used to require collective effort that we funded through taxation and government. And now they don't because it's actually far cheaper to do them. And so now we can privatize all kinds of things. Could you give an example?
I mean, we're already... The technology making things cheaper has already done this, but let me just... What's a fun example? The Bureau of Labor Statistics collecting economic data, right? Like... they employ all these economists who go out and interview businesses and do all these things.
It seems to me that a company could have a totally different approach to that and actually just replace that function. And possibly even a non-profit that was funded by some sort of industry consortium. Because we can no longer trust government, in part because... the methods are breaking down and the institution of BLS doesn't seem to be updating quickly enough.
And then also there's some people, I don't know, I don't think it's actually been proven true at all yet, but there's some people that were saying, you know, several months ago that, um, uh, you know, the, the, the, the, the statistics, the economic statistics we're going to be messed with politically political will be subject to political interference by the Trump administration.
I don't think that's true, but at some point, I bet you in my lifetime, it will be true. Yeah. Uh, right. Like, um, and so we'll do all these things and courts, another great example would be courts. Like we already have lots of private adjudication in America. What if we just like, what if that trend just continues? And like, we kind of just leave the public institutions behind.
um that could be fine and good for a lot of things but i think it's also a trend to be aware of because um we might be subjecting ourselves to like essentially governance by corporations and we kind of already are in many ways as the rise of the technology companies has been you know um uber and my friend sam hammond uh at
colleague at the foundation for American innovation always makes the point that like Uber is a form of private governance. We essentially privatize taxi regulation. And now we have like peer to peer private governance through Uber. Um, and, uh, yeah, like, you know, I mean, that's fine and good, but play that out, play that out, extrapolate that out to like lots of things.
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