The Week: China’s Upper Hand, a Troubled Bond Market, and a New Mortgage Crisis
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Why are politicians suddenly worried about an AI apocalypse and how might it affect the midterms?
Welcome to The Week from Prof G Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Hahn, and it's Friday, September 18th. Today, the fight over slowing down AI reaches the midterms, and a former Meta security chief says the bigger threat is coming from China. Then, the bond market pushes back on America's $40 trillion debt. And finally, homeownership slips further out of reach. Let's get into it. We'll start with something light, the end of civilization. Earlier this month, anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned, warning that people building advanced AI believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. Anthropic's head of alignment science publicly agreed, putting the risk above 10%.
Then, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodi called for the industry to slow down. Sam Altman and Elon Musk agreed. President Trump called the push a hoax. On Monday's Raging Moderates, CNN's Dana Bash explained what that could mean for the midterms.
What's your sense of how these growing fears about an AI apocalypse and the backlash over data centers will impact in midterms?
I think it could be, and it sounds silly to say that this is an October surprise because AI is not a surprise, but this anthropic statement from Dario and the way that other companies and CEOs are responding, and more importantly, to your question, the way that candidates are being forced to respond should be seismic. And like everything else in politics right now, the way that Donald Trump is playing it is potentially not helpful to his fellow Republicans who are on the ballot because he keeps saying—in fact, he has a lengthy post— out this morning about the fact that this is just a conspiracy and people like the head of Anthropic and others are just weak and they don't have courage and they don't understand that we can't cede this territory to China and so forth, which the first part is obviously that's Trump and he gets personal.
That's what he does. The second part is what we're hearing Mike Johnson, the House speaker, and other Republicans saying, OK, we do need to address this, but we can't We can pump the brakes, but not slam on the brakes. Because if we slam on the brakes, China's going to pass us by. If this was in a vacuum, it would be one thing. But the fact that this speaks to the larger set of anxieties that people have, not just on affordability, but on like, what's next? And we don't know who to trust. Do we trust the CEOs? Do we trust... The government officials, do we trust the candidates? The answer to all of that is no. And so there's a sense of sort of foreboding among voters and this issue and the fact that we now have this dire warning really feeds on that.
This summer, open AI models escaped a controlled test environment and accessed the systems of AI company Hugging Face during a security evaluation. On Thursday's Conversations episode, Alex Stamos, former head of security at Meta and Yahoo, told Scott what he believes is the greater threat.
The upcoming security problem is not going to be from OpenAI and Anthropic. It is going to be from open weight models. The real challenge we're going to be facing is GLM 5.3, Kimmy K3. Those things are within percentage points of the best American models. And so we are entering a valley of pain from a cyber perspective. And it is going to be because every 19-year-old in St. Petersburg who has made millions of dollars doing ransomware but had to do it all manually is now going to be running... You know, they're going to be in the club. You know that Bourne movie where he steps out of the club and it's actually 10 a.m.? Well, he's going to be in the club in his tracksuit on his phone, and he's going to be managing, instead of having to have a conspiracy of a bunch of his friends who...
have, you know, the possibility of getting turned or getting picked up by Interpol on vacation or something. The conspiracy is going to be a team of agents running on these brand new M5 Studio Maxes. He's going to have 10 of them in his apartment, daisy-chained with Thunderbolt 5 cables.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
Why are politicians suddenly worried about an AI apocalypse and how might it affect the midterms?
0:00–7:40
2
What did former Meta security chief Alex Stamos say is the real AI threat coming from China?
7:40–13:19
3
How is China closing the AI gap by embedding models in factories, cars, and robots?
13:19–18:27
4
Why are global bond markets spooked by the U.S. crossing $40 trillion in debt?
18:27–19:43
Speakers
7 identifiedMore from The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
How Worried Should We Be About AI? — with Alex Stamos
The $40 Trillion National Debt, and the Trade-Offs of Living With Your Parents
China Decode: The World Order Is Tilting Toward China (Series Finale)
The Case for Prenups, and Why Young People Aren’t Getting Married — ft. James Sexton
No Mercy / No Malice: One Ring to Rule Them All
The Week: AI Is Getting Smarter. Are We?