‘Hard Fork’ Live, Part 1: Satya Nadella and Cindy Cohn

This episode of Hard Fork is brought to you by our Hard Fork Live 2026 sponsors, premier sponsor IBM, associate sponsors Everpure, Pure Leaf, and the University of Notre Dame, and supporting sponsor Atlassian.

Well, Casey, we've got a special treat on the show this week. We are going to be playing some excerpts, snippets, and featured conversations from Hard Fork Live.

That's right, Kevin. We just had the second installment of our annual live show. It was an incredible time, and we're so excited to share highlights of it with our listeners.

Yes, it was so great to hang out with listeners and also welcome some very special guests. We'll be bringing those conversations to our listeners and viewers in this feed over the next 2 weeks.

Today, we're going to share 3 conversations with you. The first is with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. The second is with Phil Mohun, who is the wrangler of the sort of robot dogs that you may have heard about. These are a project conceived of by the artist Beeple. They have these robot dogs with Elon Musk's face and Mark Zuckerberg's face on them. They're very funny and entertaining. We brought them out onto the stage during Hard Fork Live for the open, and we'll talk with him about that project and what he's trying to accomplish there.

And then we're going to talk with Cindy Cohn, the outgoing executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a longtime activist on internet- and privacy-related issues.

Absolutely. Great lineup, some fascinating conversations, and we hope you enjoy them.

I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist from The New York Times.

I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

And this is Hard Fork Live.

Ah, Kevin, what a fine-looking bunch of humans this is.

Hello.

Truly, we are so happy to be here. This is one of the highlights of our year. We love meeting our friends, our family, and our listeners and viewers all here. It is so much fun.

These are the few and the proud who got tickets within hours of them going on sale and who, crucially, made it through the security line. So thanks for that. We haven't seen a security response like that since the time I tried to use Claude to make a bioweapon.

Now, if you are used to listening to us or watching us on YouTube, you'll notice there are a few differences that you're going to experience tonight. For starters, there's no button you can press to speed us up to 1.5 times.

Sorry. Sorry.

You also can't skip the ads.

Yeah. And you're about to find out just how heavily each week's show is edited.

Before we start tonight, because I imagine we will be doing some talking about AI, should we make our disclosures?

Let's do that. In fact, we thought we would do something really special this time because we actually had a listener make us disclosure hats, which I thought we could show off. I think this is yours, and this—

Oh, thank you.

Yeah.

So these are our disclosure hats. We'll put them on.

Yeah.

So, official here: I work for The New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity.

And my fiancée works at Anthropic.

Now, Casey, it has been such a big week in tech—

Huge.

So much has been going on. We were down in Cupertino on Monday for Apple's big developer conference, where they showed off the new Siri AI.

Yeah, it's really interesting. You can use Siri AI to set an alarm that will trigger every time Apple falls further behind in AI. So that's kind of interesting.

We also saw the release of Claude Fable, the new powerful model from Anthropic.

Yeah, this one is really big. They're already starting to use it in the government. In fact, Pete Hegseth just said it makes the best martini recipe he's ever seen.

And then we have also been gearing up for hot IPO summer and the IPOs of Anthropic, SpaceX, and OpenAI.

Yeah, and unfortunately, the OpenAI S-1 filing isn't yet available. But if you want, you can just use ChatGPT to make one up for you. So, something to think about.

Well, with that, let's get started with the show. Our first guest tonight is someone we've been very excited about. We've been trying to get him on the show for many years. He finally agreed, and he's here tonight. Everyone, please give a warm welcome to Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.

Hello.

Now, Satya, I have to start by making a confession, which is that I have not been a regular user of a Microsoft AI product since 2023, when one of them tried to break up my marriage. Unsuccessfully, I should add. My wife is right there.

Those were the days.

Yeah.

Think about a world without guardrails.

But so much has been happening at Microsoft with AI since then. Just catch us up. For people who may not have tuned in in a little while, what have you guys been up to in AI?

The fundamental thing that I feel we're about to move from is not talking about AI as one thing to having a mental picture of what an ecosystem driven by AI is. Today, if you think about it, even from when you first used Sydney to now, it has been about frontier models. You talked about Opus 4, what have you.

But if we are ever going to transition to an economy that is driven by AI, it can't be about one model. It can't be about 3 firms. It has to be something that's broadly felt, where the economy is at the frontier—not a firm or a model at the frontier. So Microsoft is a platform company. To me, that's what we're up to.

We had our developer conference last week, and it was all about this question: Can we build the platform and the tools so that every enterprise in every country can operate at the frontier? Saying, “Hey, my model does this,” but the economy is growing at 2% means this is not going to end well, unless we really get to a place where the economy is inflecting in terms of its economic growth. That's what happened with electricity and every other technology that was a general-purpose technology.

Let me ask about one of the platform shifts that you signaled at Build last week, when you announced Project Solara. You said it would be agent-first hardware, a kind of next-generation set of devices that would have agents running them. Tell us a little bit more about that and what it looks like. Can you give us an example of maybe what Project Solara—

Yeah, Casey, there were 2 things we did at Build that were interesting. One was that we took the PC itself. In fact, Jensen had done it the previous night at Computex, where he talked about it.

One of my favorite pictures was Jensen with the desktops and the laptops, because he obviously had the RTX chip, which is a new SOC with essentially a petaflop of compute right on your PC. So that is about new functionality coming to the old form factor.

Think about what I describe as unmetered intelligence: the fact that you can have a Windows computer that can run a trillion-parameter model locally. I think that's going to be very needed if you're ever going to have agents running 24/7.

But then the question it sets up is: In a world where we have these models and these agents that are long-running, can I have a badge? If I'm a nurse in a hospital and I'm walking from station to station, can I take out this device, which can scan and take input, take my speech, output it, and turn it into a prompt?

That is what I think an agent-first device looks like. So it's really a new form factor. The centrality of the phone, I think, is still going to be there for a lot of apps that we use. But in an agent world, you have that ambient intelligence that's like a sense of feel that then works with your models. And so that's our goal: to invent the new form factors that are not beholden to the old form factors for this functionality.

It's super interesting, and I want to hear a lot more about it. We have many more questions about AI. But I wanted to ask about one more device that has been in the news today, which is the Xbox.

The leaders of the Xbox division put out a memo today saying that we should expect a hard reset of Xbox coming soon. They said that there are massive increases in the prices of components and that Xbox might need a new business model.

So, as a big gamer who's enjoyed many happy hours on Xbox, Satya, I have to ask: What is your strategy for Xbox?

This is the 25th year of Xbox, and we're very thrilled about the progress we have made. Gaming, in an interesting way at Microsoft, is older than even Windows and Office. The first app we built was Flight Simulator. So it's got a long heritage. Xbox itself has been there for 25 years.

The challenge now for us is to think about how you innovate both in hardware and in the games going forward in an economically viable way. I think one of the things that Asha, who has just taken over Xbox, put out is that we've invested a lot. No one can accuse Microsoft of not having invested for the last 25 years.

And now we have to turn this into a sustainable business that delivers what is fundamentally still one of the best sources of entertainment.

The challenge we have is we're not monetizing that entertainment. In fact, if anything, we've been subsidizing that entertainment. There's more monetization of Xbox games happening on YouTube than at Microsoft. That doesn't mean we do things that are unnatural. We want to do what is really our job, which is to build great games and great hardware, but we've got to do it in an economically sustainable way.

I think Asha is really 100 days in, and she put out a post saying that in the next 100 days, she's going to take a fresh look and make sure we deliver on what our fans expect of us, both on the hardware side and on the publishing side.

Can you give us any more detail? When I hear that, I think, “Okay, so maybe the Xbox gets way more expensive, or the games get way more expensive.” Is there any sort of carrot you can offer the gamers?

I think we have to find ways to deliver the games in a way that's economically relevant for the customer and for us. Today, unfortunately, because of what's happening with cloud and AI, the prices have gone up. It's happening with PCs, it's happening with phones, and Xbox is impacted as well. The scarcity of semiconductor supply, and memory in particular, are having a massive impact on consumer electronics overall.

That's a temporal thing that I think we'll get through. It's not going to be permanent. But there is a permanent question, which is: What's the Xbox model going forward? If you think about it, PCs and consoles both have their place. Obviously, mobile has its place. People play now elsewhere. And so we have to bring it all together while staying true to what we've always done.

Satya, I want to take you back in a time machine. The year is 2023. The board of OpenAI has just fired Sam Altman, one of Microsoft's biggest partners. You and your team spend a harried weekend trying to pull together an entirely new division of Microsoft, Microsoft Advanced AI Research, to catch the employees making a mass exodus from OpenAI. You're ordering laptops. You're opening up an office in San Francisco so that all these people have a place to work. The company looks like it's on the verge of collapse, and then nothing happens. Then Sam gets rehired, and OpenAI stands back up on its feet.

As part of this time-machine experiment, I want to present you with a piece of rare merchandise that I recently acquired from an OpenAI employee: a Microsoft Advanced AI Research sweatshirt.

All right.

To be clear, this division never existed, and I was told by the person who made this that they had to fudge a little bit on the copying-and-printing-shop application, which made them prove that they were a Microsoft employee to get this. But this is for you if you ever want to take that walk down memory lane.

That is awesome.

So if that had happened—in the world where all of these OpenAI employees ended up working at Microsoft in a new Advanced AI Research division run by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman—in that world, is Microsoft better or worse off with AI than it is today in this world?

Look, we are thrilled that Greg and Sam made it back to OpenAI, and they are where they are. They're now, as you said, filed under S-1 or what have you. When we initially took the bet on OpenAI, it was a nonprofit research lab, a nonprofit entity that had created a for-profit unit and said, “Hey.” They went and shopped around and said, “Who can back our crazy idea that intelligence is a log of compute?” Quite frankly, there were lots of people at Microsoft at that time who thought, “This is nuts.” But we said, “I think this is a worthwhile thing to back.”

Quite frankly, I think we changed, and OpenAI changed the world through their work. Here we are in 2026, and we're thrilled about it.

You guys recently renegotiated your deal between OpenAI and Microsoft, and I understand what OpenAI got out of that deal. They got the ability to work with multiple cloud providers and to be a little bit more open about how they commercialize their technology. What did Microsoft get out of the revision of that deal?

We have a lot of interests in OpenAI. We're obviously on their cap table, and they're a customer of ours, a large one. They're a source of IP for us all the way to 32. At the same time, we have the ability and the flexibility to reuse the IP and build our own IP.

We just last week launched MAI models, which have hill-climbed from the ground up. We published, in fact, the paper, which I think should help people even get the capability we have. Especially if you take those 2 thoughts: Here is intelligence is a log of compute, and here is a pure-lineage model from Microsoft that hill-climbed all the way. That means we now have the ability to keep going.

And our infrastructure—I must mention that—we wouldn't have been where we are, even with Azure, but for that close partnership with OpenAI. So we have the compute, we have the model, and we still have the partnership.

Let's talk about those models. Is your goal to make the best frontier model in the world? And if so, what's the strategy for overtaking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude?

I think the way I would say it is that our real goal is to get everyone across the ecosystem to the frontier. We're going to take a slightly different tack. If you think about how one builds a frontier model, you hill-climb, you do RL, and then you need data, right? At this point, we have saturated the data, and so that means you're basically hoovering up the data from every place.

So the question is, what if you turn that around and said, “No, there's a base model that has reasoning, that has the agent loop, but you can bring it into your RLE—every company”? If the future of the firm is human capital and token capital, I want every balance sheet and every income statement in every company to have both, and that's our goal with our frontier model.

Our model should be the best model that they can use as a base and keep even the weights, definitely the harness and the context, which are theirs. They can replace our model with anything else. That, to me, is more of a vision that I think is what Microsoft is about. I always ask the question: Why does Microsoft—or why does the world need Microsoft? If we are successful, can the world around us be successful? I believe this is a more sustainable way to go at it.

We have to ask about the AI backlash that we're seeing around the country. Graduation speakers are getting booed, AI is polling terribly, and lots of people are upset about data centers. What role does Microsoft have in that image or in helping to solve that? And how do you think the industry can find a path forward that involves being a little more popular?

We can start, quite frankly, by painting a picture and delivering results. Everyone is a stakeholder, right? You can't go out there and say, “I have this unbelievable technology,” except you're not going to have a job, and we're going to take all your water and all your energy. Good luck. And then no wonder there is so much anxiety, right? You talked about the students, or you can talk about a community. Therefore, you have to do the hard work at this point.

It is what it is, right? You can't deny that the perception is terrible. At Microsoft, we want to do the hard work. Take the data centers: It's fascinating. We've been operating in Quincy, Washington, for 20-plus years, and we just celebrated our 20th year. If I look at everything that has happened in Quincy over the 20 years, its tax base has gone up, its local taxes have gone down, and it has more local employment.

Because of the data center.

Because of the data center. It's basically become a data center town. When we did this cookout, people came, and they celebrated the rejuvenation of Quincy, Washington, because of our presence over the last 20 years. That's the first 20-year longitudinal view I've seen. The communities where data centers are located definitely can't have energy prices increased. They should replenish all the water they use and create economic opportunity.

That's on the data center side. But across the economy, if there are small businesses feeling like, “Wow, AI is making me more productive,” and if every large multinational is able to say, “Oh, I'm building that token capital and human capital,” right? Because the big question is employment. Everybody thinks that all jobs are going away. But I'm not saying there won't be real displacement. The workflow doesn't change.

But take software development. Of course, software development is now all agentic, except if you think about even the evolution of the GitHub app, right? When I had 100 CLIs, what did I need? I needed a new IDE. It's called an ADE, right? A back end, again, some piece of software that helps me manage all of this complexity. So I think we have to think about new work that gets done, which will be metacognition, meta-work. That's going to have wages, and we have to be concrete about that.

But help us understand what your own view is of the potential disruption. I've been talking to so many economists and tech leaders like yourself about this over the past couple of months, and truly, opinion is all over the place. I talk to some folks who say, “Yes, you better believe I'm hiring fewer people next year because of AI.” And then I talk to other people who say, “I can't get enough engineers. I want more than I have.” So where are you on that? In 2 years, are you going to have more engineers or fewer?

Yeah. So I think if, in the early ’80s, someone had come to us and said, “Hey, we're going to have 3.5 billion people in the world who are all going to be typists,” we would have said, “Why does the world need 3.5 billion typists?” Except we do. We all get up in the morning and type, but we are doing, quote-unquote, information work, knowledge work, and so on.

That type of change is going to have to happen, and each of them will have a name, and it will have wage support. That reinvention, right? A software developer of the past and a software developer of the future may have similar sorts of skills, but the work they do is different because they're managing a group of 100 agents, 1,000 agents.

In fact, there's a beautiful term one of my colleagues has. Just like in software development, we already had this concept of test coverage, one of the new things that we are learning is what I would call cognitive coverage, right? So what does a software developer do? I have a repo full of code that was written by agents. I am cognitively understanding what happened, and I now need tools for cognitive coverage on what that has built. That's a job, I think, of a software developer.

And in order to do that, you have to go to school, you have to learn computer science, and have cognitive coverage. And so this reinvention of work—the work artifact, the workflow, right? Because software went from input to output. That's a format change, an artifact change. The workflow has changed, and the work changes with it.

I feel like what people really want to hear is some combination of: your job isn't going to change that much, or if it does change, you're going to get paid more. Do you think that either of those things will be true for most people?

I think that's the thing. Wages have always been about what it is that we as a society value, right? I mean, our growth over the last 200 years, up until 50 years ago, was about a particular form of expertise and accrual of knowledge. So when you have an abundance of some form of expertise, what is that human ability to now build a new expertise that is not trainable, right?

In fact, there was a nice blog I read this morning from Sarah Guo, which I thought was an interesting one, where she mentions, “Hey, what is the untrainable part?” And that applies to organizations and us as well. We as humans have agency and ambition that should not be counted out.

And if you look at even what human capital is today, in spite of all the digital systems we have at our disposal, we do the glue work. We will discover the new glue work that happens with all this automation, and that, I think, is the process of change.

One idea that's been floated recently, including by, reportedly, Sam Altman—and President Trump has also weighed in on it—is the idea of having the US government take direct investment stakes in frontier AI companies. Do you think that's a good idea? What percentage of Microsoft would you like the US government to own?

MSFT, you can trade.

No, but do you think that is a way for the gains of AI to be more broadly felt?

Yeah, look, this is all very new, right? I mean, the idea that there may be the United States—whether it has a sovereign fund, and the sovereign fund has equity stakes, and that somehow is part of what is considered the wealth of the citizens of this country—I think it's a novel idea. Other countries have done it. I think Alaska has some form of it in the state because of the oil wealth.

So I'm not opposed to innovative ideas like this. But at the end of the day, there's this entire movement of, if only we had invested some portion of our Social Security in the S&P 500, we would have a surplus or what have you. And to the degree to which some of these ideas can be played out and they succeed, I think we'll all benefit from it.

You told Dwarkesh Patel in February 2025 that your benchmark for achieving AGI was 10% GDP growth. It seems like we're not super close to hitting 10% yet. I'm curious how you view that kind of statement that you made a year ago now, and do you see any sort of recent acceleration that makes you think it's more possible?

In fact, it's one of the things that I think a lot about: the difficulty of even a very powerful general-purpose technology and its diffusion, and the amount of change management that is required, right? One of the challenges right now that we're going to face in the next 1–2 years is the economics of tokens.

For example, the hard truth is that the marginal cost of productivity improvement has to match the marginal cost of the token. That's a management discipline, right? You can't just say, “Hey, I love token maxing because it's sort of money in my bank.” The business has to benefit from it, and that is what is really going to drive it.

In fact, it's fascinating. The equation for 10% growth would be when you have a perfect match between the marginal cost of the token and the marginal value, and it's priced right. That means it's the best way to get at it. If that happens, 10% is definitely going to happen. Definitely, what's happening right now, where everybody goes and wipe codes and token maxes, that's not a way to achieve 10% growth.

How much token maxing has been going on at Microsoft?

A lot.

Yeah.

And I'm out of it.

Yeah.

Definitely. What I mean by that is, I'm a token maxer too, so—

Yeah.

It is addictive. It's kind of like, “Hey, I love this thing.” So then you have to step back when the novelty wears off to say, “What is it that I'm trying to create?”

In fact, the thing that I love now in Copilot is our auto mode. We have an economic model that's feeding it as well. Basically, I say, don't use frontier models for non-frontier problems, right? Please, let's match these things such that you get the outputs, you get the economics, and it can't be a race to just doing things that don't add value.

Give us a flavor of Satya's token maxing. What are some of your big token projects lately?

The one thing that I recently built was—I’ve always felt that I want a repo that is in sync all the time with discussions that are happening out of band, that I'm not in. Think about even that concept. I like that thing because it's not possible today, right?

So you'll essentially have the ability to have an agent that is literally looking at all the work discussions that may be related to your repo, creating the plan and executing the plan. All I did was put Work IQ, which is the database underneath all of Microsoft 365, as an MCP server to my coding agent, and I said, “Keep watching that, and every time people discuss this repo, please change my repo,” and it keeps working. This is the best way to keep your codebase, basically, in sync with all requirements that ever come up.

You've been thinking a lot about the political economy of AI. Obviously, the things you're talking about—diffusion and adoption and GDP growth—are all part of that. What do you think the people in San Francisco leading the AI companies here get wrong about the political economy of AI?

I wouldn't say they're wrong about the political economy of AI. But I do think, when I look back at history—there's a very cool book I read, I think, in December. I may have the name wrong, but it's written by Joel Mokyr and a couple of co-authors. I think it's called Parallel Paths to Prosperity. They describe how, over the last 1,000 years, the West grew and what is happening in China.

It is a 1,000-year history. But the fundamental thing I take from that book, and in general when I read history, is that the West in particular got 3 things into a virtuous cycle, right? They got technological revolutions, markets, and democracy, all acting as a check on one another. That's why there is no such thing as an economy; it's a political economy.

A democracy ultimately controls what happens in a market, and then technology sort of tries to disrupt the two, and you keep the checks and balances. That's magical. It's one of the most unbelievable social constructs ever to emerge in the world, right?

Think about it. It became the model. And we now need that same model to be redefined for this age, but it'll work because it worked the last time. And so, therefore, I think reminding ourselves of the balance and the checks that each one has on the other is what we have to aspire to, whether it's in San Francisco, whether it's in Washington, D.C., or quite frankly, anywhere else.

Hmm. Maybe just as a last question, I'm still trying to hone in on what I think Kevin might call how AGI-pilled you are. There's a sense in Silicon Valley that it really is different this time, and that the dragon frontier is going to keep advancing forever, and all of a sudden, the little tasks that AI can automate today are going to convert into full jobs. How much do you buy that story?

Look, I buy that anything where the loops can be closed, right? Like coding. In fact, AI research is sort of possible to close the loop on. I think we have now got sufficient, I'd say, evidence of that. But is that enough? I don't think so.

When I think about it, people talk about how verifiable this task is. And in the messy real world of even knowledge work, just saying, "I'm going to look at the traces of human activity," is enough to close the loop—I don't think so. That, I think, is the challenge, which is: when I am in a meeting, I say things, I note things, I may observe things, but what I do with it is not a trace today that I can hourly my way in, right?

And that, to me, is where we're selling short what is, I would say, the unverifiable part of human capital. So, to me, that's where—so I believe the advances keep happening. I'm still more in the world of, hey, these are platforms and tools. Very powerful, very disruptive. I have a lot of, I'd say, humility to say a lot of things will change.

But at the end of the day, so was electricity, so was steam when it first came out, and so were a lot of other technologies. And so I'm not sitting there and thinking this is the last technology we will ever invent. I don't buy that. I kind of feel like, yeah, this is in the pantheon of all technology, a big step up. But I do think that there will be more to come.

Very good. Well, Satya Nadella, thanks so much for joining us. Please give Satya a hand.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Hey, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

All right. That was our big question before the show: How AGI-pilled is Satya?

I thought it was: What is the unverifiable part of our human capital? What do you think yours is?

I'm still working on that.

Yeah.

We had a lot of show to prepare for, so.

We'll get to the bottom of it.

We'll be back with more Hardfolk Live after these messages.

I'm sure everyone in here is still thinking about those robot dogs like I am.

I was having trouble focusing on the interview because there were so many questions about the dogs.

Yeah.

And we wanted to actually bring on someone who has been responsible for training, walking, and taking care of these dogs to tell us why the hell they built such a terrifying thing. Our next guest is Phil Mohan. He's the executive director of Node, a digital art center in Palo Alto that is showing off these robot dogs as part of an art exhibit that runs through the end of the month. Please welcome to the stage our dog handler, Phil Mohan.

Phil Mohan

Thanks, guys.

Hey, Phil.

Phil Mohan

Thank you. Thank you.

Hey, Phil. Oh, God, they're coming back.

Oh, boy.

Heel.

They're very lifelike in that they don't seem to respond well to instructions. Yeah.

Okay, please go. Please leave.

Phil Mohan

See you guys.

Yeah.

Well, shall we have a seat?

Yeah, let's have a seat.

Now, I want to just describe these dogs a little bit for people who are going to be listening to this later. These are 2 Unitree Go2 robot dogs with the faces of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. And as I understand it, they are part of a whole pack. So, Phil, tell us about these dogs: How many are there, and how can we protect our families from them?

Phil Mohan

Yeah.

By the way, when you said there was a whole pack, a chill fell through the crowd.

Phil Mohan

Yeah.

Yeah.

Phil Mohan

A little different from the last conversation. These are called the Regular Animals, and they were created by an amazing digital artist named Mike Winkelmann, or Beeple. How many people know Beeple in the crowd?

Yeah.

Phil Mohan

Okay. So for those of you who don't, I'm excited to share. Mike is an amazing artist. He has been creating a new piece of digital art every day for 20 years. And these dogs are his latest creation. They're called Regular Animals, and they're part of a show we're doing at Node in Palo Alto.

And what made him, or both of you together, think of this project? What is the idea that you are trying to convey with these terrifying robot dogs?

Yeah, what's wrong with you?

Phil Mohan

Yeah. So I asked this question to Mike, actually exactly that: "Why did you do this?" Mike's entire practice is about taking technology to show you something you've never seen before. I think mission accomplished with these.

There are actually 6 dogs in total. So there's Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Mike—he put his own face on a dog, which is really interesting when you see him next to it. It's kind of this strange double take—and Jeff Bezos as well.

And I think with the Regular Animals in particular, so much of what we think about, and our imagination of things, comes from creatives. It comes from movies that we've seen or literature that we've read. But increasingly, the way that we see the world is coming through media, and specifically digital media. And so the fact that half of the Regular Animals are media CEOs and technology executives, and the other half are artists, is not a coincidence.

So you took these dogs out onto the streets of San Francisco recently.

Phil Mohan

That's right.

What happened once they were set loose?

Phil Mohan

It was the best social experiment of all time. I think there are a couple of common reactions. It has a phone factor that's very high, so about 100% of people take out their phones and take a picture. Kids, honestly, really like it.

Really?

Phil Mohan

Of course, there are robot dogs. It's 2026. Why wouldn't there be?

And I think for most people—

Right.

Phil Mohan

It feels like the future. It feels like maybe not the exact future that we're thinking about, but it feels like something that you've never seen before.

When you say this feels like the future, what do you imagine the role of robot—

Phil Mohan

Where—

—dogs with human faces will be?

Phil Mohan

Yeah. So part of what we do at Node is, there's an amazing group of digital artists who are using software to create art. Now, I love enterprise SaaS. I know you guys do. But there's—

Shout-out to enterprise SaaS.

Phil Mohan

There's huge, huge applause from the crowd here in San Francisco for enterprise SaaS. There's got to be more. There's got to be more. And if software is the defining medium of our age, we think that there deserves to be a home for these artists who are defining digital culture. And I think that Mike is an excellent example of the type of artist who's working with this medium, but he's not the only one, and so we hope to give a home to these artists in Palo Alto.

Phil, I have to ask you about—look at my card here and make sure I've got this right—poop mode. What is poop mode?

Phil Mohan

Yeah, poop mode. The dogs are constantly taking photos of their environment, and they will poop out these images. We have a person at Node who's hired to pick up the poop, who certifies it, and gives it out to guests. If anyone's looking for a job, by the way, we pay very well by the hour. Also, a robot dog walker.

These are the only 2 jobs in the future.

Phil Mohan

That's right. Yeah.

Cleaning up after this.

Phil Mohan

And so for each dog, based on the head that it's wearing, the photos come out completely different. So the Picasso dog is sort of this cubist, and the Mark Zuckerberg dog looks like it's in the metaverse. And it's just a reminder that the reality that you see is not always exactly the way that it is.

Have you heard from the real Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk?

Phil Mohan

You know, we've been trying to get them to come by, so if anyone's got a line, please send them before June 28th, when the exhibition ends.

Let me read you the sentence on the Node website that gave me a seizure. It says, "After 3 years, or 21 dog years, each robot will die with all memories from its life preserved forever on-chain." What?

Phil Mohan

Yeah, none of those words are in the Bible.

Phil Mohan

One of the challenges with creating digital art or using technology in general to create art—and there’s a long tradition of this—is that technology sort of begets new artistic movements, and the beginnings of these movements have to grapple with there not being good categories or institutions that are purpose-built for them.

In many of the conversations that we had with digital artists, they were trying to go to existing institutions and explain their work: “Hey, I can use software or computers or computation to create these amazing works of art that make people feel things or make people see a future that only I can see.” The response that they got from institutions consistently was either, “We don’t understand it,” or, “We have an opening in 5 years, and maybe we’ll talk to you then.” Or, even if they were interested and it wasn’t pure apathy, it was, “Our IT department can…”

And it’s totally out of scope of what they’re built for. This focus on preservation and keeping the art available is a big part of what we do at Node. I think that so much of what we build, if you look at the history of software, is all of these projects that get built and are amazing at the time, and then they’re discarded. Art can’t be like that. It has to exist through generations, and so that’s part of what we’re trying to do.

All right, Phil.

Well, that’s all the time we have. Thank you, Phil, and please do not attach weapons to those robot dogs.

No problem.

They are scary enough—

Not yet. No promises. Thank you.

—as it is. Thanks for showing up.

Thank you, Phil. Thank you.

Thanks, guys.

Hi, Cindy.

Hi. Hi, you guys. Thank you. Oh, my gosh.

Hey, Cindy.

Thank you.

I’m admiring your “Let’s Sue the Government” shirt.

Yes. We have the best merch at EFF, and I know they made this especially for me.

Well—

Cindy, how do we get those robot dogs banned?

Oh, they’re creepy, aren’t they? Oh, my God. Plus—

Do you have a call you could make in D.C.?

You know, the thing that’s creepy about them is what he said at the end, which is they’re taking photos all the time, and they’re going to last forever, right?

Yeah.

This kind of creepy mass surveillance in the form of a creepy dog. Ugh.

Phil Mohan

What could go wrong?

Nothing. Nothing could go wrong.

It could be a reason to sue the government, which is something that you did throughout your illustrious career at EFF. One of your first big fights, back in the ’90s, was defending the cryptologist Daniel Bernstein against government restrictions on encrypted source code. 30 years later, we are still seeing fights between the government and private individuals over end-to-end encryption. How surprised are you that this battle is still going on, and how would you characterize the state of that fight today?

We won the first round, which means that we have Signal and we have HTTPS, and when you lose your phone, you don’t lose all the data on it because it’s encrypted. That was great. But, yeah, we continue to have to fight.

In the Meta social media case, they used the fact that they offered encryption as an argument of a product defect, right? So the fight continues. I think law enforcement’s interest in making sure nobody can ever have a private conversation just never goes away, but our need to have a private conversation online doesn’t go away either.

I think in the United States we’ve managed to fend off—there are periodically bills to try to restrict encryption, and their last bill was called EARN IT—but different bills to try to restrict encryption. The U.K. is a mess, Australia’s a mess. We’re going to have to keep fighting. Canada is now debating something that Signal has said means they’re not going to be able to offer their product and their tool in Canada if they pass this law.

The fight just goes on, and I’ve come to the sad conclusion that it’s something like free speech or privacy, that we’re just always going to have to stand up for.

I remember when I started covering tech, more than a decade ago, the EFF was known for taking on the government, primarily fighting government overreach. Now you also fight Big Tech overreach. Did that shift come as a surprise, and where does that leave you today in terms of allies? Who are the good guys?

I would say in the ’90s we didn’t anticipate that spying on everybody would become the number one business model of the internet.

It’s very profitable.

It’s very profitable, it turns out, and it has also created this problem with the 5 big tech giants that control the vast majority of people’s experience online. These 2 things together have really forced us to change. We don’t make common cause with the tech giants anymore at the level that we used to, because they used to stand up for their users, and increasingly, they’re adversarial to their users.

What I tell all the tech companies is, “Look, if you stand with your users, we will stand with you, and if you stand against your users, we’re going to be the first in line.” Sadly, that second part has become bigger than I think it should. It’s dragged us into these places where we’re adversarial against the tech giants because they’re not standing with users.

Kevin and I started covering tech around the same time. I remember whenever you guys would put out a statement, Google, Facebook, and Amazon were putting out statements, and you guys were marching in lockstep. You just said that that united front is now broken. When did you first notice those cracks start to appear?

It depends on the topic. The early fights EFF was involved in were often about trying to make copyright balanced in the digital age, and we worked a lot with the companies on this because they wanted to give you the ability to make your own media—rip, mix, and burn, those kinds of things. We would stand with them.

But I think, again, as surveillance became the business model, as they became less interested in empowering their users and more interested in surveilling their users, we separated. Now we stand up for things like Section 230, the idea that nobody would host anybody else’s speech if they were responsible for it, so users need intermediaries to be able to speak.

We’ve seen the tech companies roll over and support all of these exceptions, FOSTA-SESTA and other things. They’re not even standing up for their own rights anymore. It’s really topic by topic and issue by issue. But I would say that in the last 10 years, it’s less and less of the time that we end up standing with them because they don’t stand with the users.

It obviously seems like that has accelerated quite a bit since President Trump was reelected. There’s been a major rightward shift in some of these companies. You’ve talked to these people for many, many years. How much do you think that is driven by something truly ideological, and how much of it is just they think they can make more money this way?

It’s hard to tell. Honestly, I don’t think they’re being honest with themselves, much less the rest of us, and certainly not me. I’m the civil liberties lawyer who shows up to beat up on them, so I don’t really have the ear of the billionaires.

I never count out money and maximizing the amount of money that you can make as the driver for people who have devoted their lives to making money. But I really can’t tell, and I do feel like they’re in their own echo chamber now in a way that wasn’t true before. They end up not understanding how they come off, and at a level that’s pretty high and different from when I started out in this.

I’m curious how you feel about it. I remember in the early 2010s, I found myself, maybe somewhat embarrassingly, carried away by some of the more grandiose pronouncements of these companies. They were going to organize the world’s information and make it universally useful and make the world more open and connected.

While that was always obviously self-serving in some ways, I did talk to many employees who seemed sincerely moved by that mission, and they talked about it all the time, so I took them to be at least somewhat sincere. I no longer take them to be sincere about that. Did you take them at their word back then? And as the truth emerged, how did you feel about it?

I think it depends on who in Silicon Valley. Honestly, I think when you’re at the top of the companies, it’s a whole different feeling than when you’re in the middle. EFF has 30,000 members. We are a privacy organization. I don’t know who those people are. But I think it’s fair to say—

That must make fundraising hell.

that a lot of them are people who work in these companies who still want to be in the business of making cool stuff for the rest of us and connecting all the world's people. We did that. The internet connects all the world's people in a way that is still magnificent.

So I think the split isn't between tech and non-tech. You're in Silicon Valley as well, but to me, it's between the top of tech, which is much more like the billionaires in any other industry and disconnected from the rest of tech.

We'll see, right? The AI founders have committed to a lot of things. Anthropic, for example, and the 80% they're going to give away and things like that. Time will tell, right? Are they going to walk their talk, or is it just talk? We'll just see. From EFF's perspective, if they walk their talk, we're there with them. If they're not, we're the ones who are probably going to be on the other side of the V in the lawsuit.

Oh.

Speaking of AI, there are many things to be concerned about from a privacy perspective when it comes—

Oh, yeah.

—to frontier AI systems. There's the risk of these things just becoming very charming and people entrusting them with private information, and maybe the companies not being responsible stewards of that information. There are concerns about mass domestic surveillance that could become more salient with models that are very capable. Of all of the risks to privacy and user sovereignty posed by AI, which worries you the most?

Oh, God, it's a race to the bottom, isn't it? But I would say it's not a surprise to us that the 2 hard lines that Anthropic drew, which got them in trouble with the Defense Department, were mass domestic spying and autonomous weapons. I don't know as much about autonomous weapons, but I've spent my career fighting mass domestic spying, and they're right. That will change the dynamic. It will change how democracy works.

This is part of the stuff I wrote about in my book: People with less power need privacy to have protection against people with more power, and mass surveillance supercharged by AI tends to make us a lot less powerful compared to the people who are going to know a lot about us. That can really impact our ability to vote out the people who we don't think are leaders and control what policies and laws affect all of us. The political economy questions will turn, I think, on whether we can stop mass surveillance that's AI-supercharged.

For folks who may have spent less time contemplating worst-case scenarios—

I know. I live there.

—can you sketch out for us a bit why AI makes surveillance particularly scary? Some folks might say, “Hey, I don't know. I'm already pretty scared of the FBI. What do I care if they can read my ChatGPT?”

Well, I think we're living in a time where we're seeing that if you thought you were never going to be a target of surveillance, that isn't a very safe bet anymore, right? The Dobbs decision, overturning Roe v. Wade, suddenly made a lot of people who were engaged in reproductive assistance or needed reproductive help find themselves targeted by surveillance. We've got people who've gone to jail based upon their Facebook messages.

Suddenly, the capabilities of surveillance of people's online activities, where they might have seemed completely innocuous and nothing that could ever be used against you, are throwing your mom in jail, right? That happened in Nebraska. We're seeing the same thing. You may be one of the few people who knows nobody with a green card, nobody with visa status, nobody who's here on a student visa, and nobody who's undocumented.

There's nobody you love or care about who is impacted by the fact that the government has decided those people are in the crosshairs, or you don't want to stand with them or protest with them. The people who were exercising their First Amendment right to monitor the police were the 2 people killed in Minnesota. So even if you're none of them, you've got to start looking. These circles are getting closer and closer to all of us.

If you think that the people in power who have control of this massive surveillance stuff will just never happen upon you or anyone you love, I think you're kind of living in a dream world. That matters no matter what your politics are, because if this administration isn't the one that bothers you, when the administration changes, it may.

That's why Congress is debating renewing the big mass-spying law, FISA Section 702. There is this combination of Ron Wyden and Jamie Raskin, people on the left, and the Freedom Caucus—Andy Biggs, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee—people who do not agree with each other very much, all saying, “Look, we think the FBI needs a warrant before it starts searching the mass-spying databases for its targets.” It's because I think those people on the far right realize that even if they're in power today, they may not be in power tomorrow, and it's better for all of us if we have due process and separation-of-powers kinds of things for mass surveillance.

You brought up how immigrants to this country who are here on various kinds of visas might find themselves subject to mass surveillance. In fact, we just tell people who are applying for visas, “We are going to scan your social media. You must submit it. We are going to review the contents of your social media—

Yep.

—and judge it based on your protected First Amendment speech.”

Correct.

I want to talk about this, because 10 or 15 years ago, this is something where I can imagine all of Silicon Valley standing up and saying, “How dare you? This is outrageous. This is a clear violation of the First Amendment.” They've been absolutely silent on this.

Yes.

Why?

I don't know. You're at The New York Times. Would you go ask them for me? I really don't know. I think they're afraid.

Yeah.

I think that the administration—because they depend on HB1 visas. It used to be the only thing that Silicon Valley lobbied about was visas, right? The workforce is heavily immigration-dependent, and I agree with you. They would have been standing up for this, and they're not. I would argue it's because they're either cowed or they're in cahoots. Those are the 2 reasonable options.

Cowed and cahoots, 2 of the worst places you can find yourself. I think a lot of it, too, is that I don't think there's a sense among just users of these platforms that privacy is a winnable fight anymore.

Mm-hmm.

I hear so much nihilism and fatalism about this when I talk to people. I'm asking them about their privacy practices, and they're kind of like, “Well, that ship has sailed. The government has all my data anyway.”

Yes.

“What is the point of trying to fight?” I'm sure you get this, too.

Yes.

What is your response to the privacy nihilists?

I think there are a couple of things. One is this idea that because your information's already out there, it's all over. If you talk to people in intelligence or cops, they'll tell you that old information has a very short shelf life, right? Your information isn't all out there because you're continuing to live your life.

Yes, it would have been great if 10 years ago we had passed a comprehensive privacy law that included law enforcement as well as commercial entities. That's the first-best time. The second-best time is today, because if we can begin to cut the knees out from under this massive data collection, the information will get less and less important, and their ability to spy on us will get smaller and smaller.

It's never game over. If it were game over, they'd stop spying on us, right? They're not going to unplug the spying machine because they've got everything they need, folks. That would be a different world than the one we're living in. One of the things is that it's never game over. It's not game over. Ultimately, it's game over when you're not alive anymore, maybe, but as long as you're living, your data is valuable to the government and to the companies, and the sooner we stop this business model, the better.

The second thing I would argue is that it's easy to say it's all over and there's nothing I can do if they're not sweeping up your grandma in an immigration raid. But I think it's a bit of a denial or entitled position to think that you could not care and nothing will really happen to you or anyone you love if you don't care about this.

What's going on there in the nihilism is, “I don't care about this. It feels like too big a fight, and nothing will really happen to me or anyone I love if I don't care about this.” We're living in a time where that's not a safe assumption anymore. We have to fight for our privacy.

Folks like Sam Altman have advocated for a form of privilege when you talk to a chatbot. If you were to ask ChatGPT about a medical question, for example, Sam Altman says that information should not be within the reach of law enforcement.

Do you agree with that? And how much help do you think that would be if it were true?

I think conceptually there ought to be privileged places for conversations with chatbots. I'm actually a little more interested in trying not to have the companies hold all that information and track it back to you. I'm more interested in people who are developing ways that you can have anonymity in your use of these things, so that they don't have anything they can reveal about you. I think that's a better way to go than expecting them to stand up and protect us.

Did something happen that damaged your trust in these companies?

There's an old video of Facebook's privacy promises, right? I'm an old lady. I remember when Facebook came out; they were the privacy-protective social network. And then you can see their terms of service shrink over time to what they're promising you about their privacy. If their promises to you are up against their business model, I think you know which one is going to win.

So they're now all committed to mass surveillance as a business model, and I think that means that we need to take some policy and legal actions to try to cut that off at the knees.

I'd like to end by asking about one of the longest ongoing fights in the relationship that Kevin and I have, which is whether or not you should tweet. Kevin still tweets. I do not tweet.

Uh-huh.

Recently, before you left EFF, you guys made the decision to leave X. Tell us about that decision, and has it cost you anything?

It was a long time coming, because there are plenty of people who are still on the platform who care about their rights. It's always a hard decision because we always want to be able to talk to people who care about rights, and there are plenty of people on that platform who do.

There are a couple of things that happened. We saw our reach just shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, right? There was just recently a picture of who has reach on the platform, and it's nobody who's talking about digital rights on the platform.

Well, that's on you guys. Have you thought about posting more beheading videos or crypto scams? These things can really increase your reach.

Yeah, exactly.

We were also seeing a lot of really abusive things sent to my staff. People we talked about in our posts who were standing up for LGBTQ rights would get abuse when we posted something about that. At some point, we just decided it wasn't worth the candle anymore.

It makes me sad because, again, I know there are plenty of people on that platform who are not hateful, but they are stuck in a place where the fundamental dynamic is really awful. I'm a free speech activist. Freedom of speech has to mean the right to leave. The idea that we should be forced to speak in a place is fundamentally inconsistent with the value of freedom of speech, which includes your ability to decide where you speak in the first place.

I have a hard time with people who are like, "You're a free speech organization, so you must post on this private platform." And I'm like, "I don't think you know what free speech means. It means I get to decide who my audience is, and I'm sorry if you're hanging out in the Nazi bar and I decide that that's not where I want to speak."

But, again, I'm sad about it because—

Yeah.

There are a lot of people there, especially a lot of politicians and other people who were trying to stop Section 702. There are a lot of audiences that it would be better if they weren't all on that platform.

Well, fascinating conversation. Cindy, thank you so much.

Thank you.

You're a legend. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

That was awesome. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Viren Povich. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Elisa Moxley. Original music by Alicia Be Itube, Marian Lozano, Diane Wong, Rowan Nemestó, Elisa Moxley, and Dan Powell. Video production by Sawyer Roquet, Jake Nickell, and Chris Schaub. Special thanks to The New York Times Live event team who helped us put on Hard Fork live this year. Hillary Kuhn, Beth Weinstein, Caitlin Roper, Chantal Regnier, Melissa Tripoli, Natalie Green, Kirsten Birmingham, Marissa Farinha, Jennifer Feeney, Morgan Singer, Dana Pruskowski, Hailey Duffy, Yenwei Liu, Matt Keyser, Sarah Cheever, Johnny Marolla, Victoria Kim, and SV Productions. Thanks also to everyone at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Blue Shield of California Theatre where we held the event. They were so fantastic to work with. And a special thanks to Paula Schumann, Pui-Wing Tam, and Dalia Hadad. You can email us as always at hardfork@nytimes.com or show up at one of our events and throw tomatoes at us.