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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thanks for listening to The Rest Is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com. Hi, Rory here.
With so much happening in the world of AI this week, both AI-powered attacks on Iran with Astropix fight with the Pentagon, I've been very lucky to be able to sit down with Matt Clifford again in our exclusive AI miniseries, where we will be talking about defense, security, geopolitics, and even some practical tips on how AI can improve your business.
So please sign up at therestispolitics.com to join our member series and listen to the discussion between me and Matt and all the other content that we produce. A lot of our conversations over the last few episodes, you have brought back to geopolitics, and in particular, the changing and challenging relationship between Europe and the United States under President Trump.
I'm really intrigued by how you think about the core principles that are at stake in this Anthropic DoD deal. And the reason I want to do it is that I think right now, because Anthropic is the liberal coded, slightly European, hence the question that we answered. But a lot of people are like, this is outrageous.
This is DOD trying to overturn reasonable ethical company drawing red lines around the product.
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Chapter 2: What are the implications of AI on modern warfare?
But I want to do a thought experiment for you, which is imagine Kamala Harris has been elected. Elon Musk says, of course you can use Starlink in defense. By the way, no one else has anything like it. But here are my red lines about how you're going to use it. And they're deeply ethically based.
And in particular, my number one issue is I don't want it used for anything that could increase the likelihood of a nuclear event in Ukraine. And therefore you're not going to use it for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think the same people who are protesting now that Hegsath's overstep would be saying,
Why should a private company be setting red lines over what a democratically elected government does with the technology? Yeah, I think that's right. And I think at some level, the philosophical position that Hegsworth holds, which is that if you bought a bit of kit and you're a military, you want to be able to deploy it and you don't want someone stopping you deploying it.
It's absolutely right.
But actually, as you've pointed out with Musk, and as the Saudis found out when they bought some very expensive American airplanes and tried to use them in Yemen, and indeed as we found in the Ukraine war where Trump suddenly instructs American companies who we've contracted with not to provide things, or as indeed as the US found when it took on China and China suddenly announced it was going to stop all exports of rare earths, nobody really has sovereignty.
Not even... not even the Secretary of War is actually able to instruct without having a lot of friction of various other actors saying what he can and can't do. And that's partly because of all these things that you've talked about. The more complicated these systems become, the more dependencies you have. I mean, if what you've purchased is a hand grenade.
Nobody can stop you using a hand grenade. I mean, it's basically the explosives in the thing. You pull the panel and you chuck it, right? It's gone. And the person who sold it, you can't do anything about it. But increasingly, what we're talking about is defense companies. And we saw this in Afghanistan. It was extraordinary.
What really happened to the Afghan military was not the US decision to withdraw 5,000 troops. It was that the US withdrew about 20,000 contractors, many of whose jobs were about doing the software updates on the helicopters and who sat in these bases.
And as soon as they were removed, all these helicopters and planes that the Afghan Air Force had bought were complete useless because they basically needed a software engineer tinkering with them every time they landed. And if they didn't get that, they couldn't take off again, right? And these companies have designed their contracts like that because they don't make their money now.
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Chapter 3: How does AI influence the relationship between Europe and the US?
So the Department of War hasn't bought from Anthropic a hand grenade. What they've bought is Anthropic services to run these things. They've bought Musk's Starlink and all his people who do it, right? So short of nationalizing Starlink or Anthropic, which they could do, and of course is what you probably would do in war.
I mean, if you really were worried about Musk, you'd be like, okay, so sorry, Starlink is now ours. Short of doing that, I think you are very vulnerable to companies no longer providing. I mean, just as you do when you privatize anything. I mean, I found this in the prison system where we managed to bring in
A company who offered to do all the maintenance in the UK prisons for a quarter of the price the government was spending and then turned around and said, we can't maintain your prisons anymore and we couldn't do much about it. Yeah. Well, I have to say in general, I find myself very sympathetic to Anthropic and I think trying to do the right thing in very difficult circumstances.
But I do buy the argument, which has been flowing around the internet the last few days, that there is a contradiction in spending three, four years saying, by the way, we're building incredibly dangerous technology that is equivalent of import to nuclear weapons, then being upset when government says, well, in that case, we really need to control it.
Chapter 4: What ethical concerns arise from the Anthropic DoD deal?
The other thing that's going on here, which is so troubling, and the reason if the world comes to a grinding halt, or autonomous weapons of flying around killing everybody without proper human supervision, is competition between these companies.
Because as soon as Anthropic refuses to supply, Sam Altman turns up and seems to initially say, well, I'm not too bothered about surveying everyone and killing everyone with autonomous weapons. And then a couple of days later, it's like, oh, okay, maybe I slightly overdid that. I'm going to backtrack.
Someone pointed out it's the first live negotiation on Twitter between a private company and the Department of Defense. And that's also another thing that we don't talk about enough, which is you've just put your finger on it, right? This AI development could not be happening at a worse time because it's taking place in the context of the Trump administration. right? Who is Pete Hexeth?
He's a TV news anchor whose greatest claim to fame as Secretary of War is that he can bench lift Ā£290 and who conducts sensitive secret negotiations over Twitter. And we have a president who's has a weird instinct for deregulation, which means he's not going to get involved in really telling anyone what to do in terms of safety.
But he's also vindictive, narcissistic, capable of waking up in the morning and randomly punishing anyone. So, if you were really thinking, What is the ideal political framework in which to develop what could be some of the most dangerous world-changing technology in the world? My God, we're unlucky that it's happening in the middle of Trump's America.
I actually would put more confidence that the Chinese government has long-term thoughts, protocols, procedures, processes to assess its AI development than I do with the US at the moment.
I think one of the things that goes back to things that I've been banging the drum on for a while is, I don't think to the first question that we talked about, that there is a realistic case where we sort of relocate one of these companies and make them British.
But I do think this is why it's important that Britain is building domestic compute, but also trying to build AI companies that are relevant and important. Because it strikes me that particularly with this administration, which I think it would itself say has a more transactional approach to Europe. We need to have bargaining chips. We need to be relevant.
At the moment, we don't have the hard assets in AI to have a seat at the table. You've just told us at the beginning of the show that any policymaker in the European Union needs to say, okay, let's put 450 million people together.
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