World's First Trillionaire, Anthropic Fable Banned, The New Oligarchs, Iran Peace Deal

David Sacks, how are you doing, brother?

I’m good.

You had a busy week. I got a long post from you on X. We’ll get into it.

Wait, a lot of what? Long posting. I had, like, 1 long post.

A lot of long posts. I know. How’s the carpal tunnel going over there? You’ve got 2. Something like that. You’ve got that carpal tunnel flaring up.

I’ve got a 3rd one teed up, but I might use it on the pod.

You’ve got 1 in the chamber?

I’ve got 1 in the chamber, but I was going to save it for the pod. It’s a good one.

Ooh, coming in hot. I wonder who’s going to get this bullet. We open-sourced it to the fans, and they’ve just gone crazy with it.

A cackling, of course. Who’s the dick in dictator? It’s my bestie, Chamath Palihapitiya. How are you doing, brother? Getting ready for summer? Summer j'olais's have been laid on the bed. You’re ready to pack it up.

Opposite. I’ve got a lot of travel.

Grinding. Oh, I forgot. You’re doing founder-led sales, so the summer of relaxation is over. Now you’re in the CEO slot. You’ve got to get out there and do those enterprise sales.

Of course, you’re coming off a pretty hot week. The comment section was on fire. Very pro-Friedberg. Very, very Friedberg. Perhaps his greatest performance.

Greatest.

Also, the first performance when he said more than 3 sentences. What’s going on, Friedberg? You went off last episode. And then I think you also went off with the long posts.

You know what’s so funny? As the valuation of Ohalo ticks up, he gets more and more based. I love it.

He is getting—

Welcome to the club.

He’s got 3 commas. Based.

Unleash the beast.

When you’re just a mere singleton, you kind of keep it to yourself, and then all of a sudden, you start—

All of a sudden, you’re like a 9-figure Friedberg. He’s like, “I’ve got something to lose.”

Wait for 10-figure Friedberg.

10-figure Friedberg’s like, “YOLO.”

You’re also doing the long posts. You and Nancy Pelosi are making sweet, sweet quotes with her.

He’s starting to—

What’s happening?

What’s happening in the United States right now is the greatest American Politburo. The great American Politburo has formed. The new oligarchs are taking their seats. They’re arranging the chairs. They’re determining who will be chairman of the Politburo, who will assign what workforce to do what efforts for them, and which $600 million stock trades their families will make to benefit and enrich themselves as they fly around in their private jets on the taxpayers’ money.

We’re watching it all before our very eyes as individual liberties are eroded. I am fired up about it. I see it happening.

You know, Sacks is on the show this week. You can’t just take strays like that. Friedberg, expand on who the Politburo is.

Basically, the Politburo is the leaders who elect themselves to dictate the flow of the economy, the allocation of capital, what work individuals are allowed to do, and what activities they’re allowed to do in an unfree society, which is what they’re creating.

They are the true oligarchs. This is Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna—the group that is trying to coalesce power and create for themselves a system whereby they have greater influence and greater control over aspects of the economy. They want to seize the means of production. They want to control education. They want to control media.

Any time there’s an effort by an individual or an enterprise to go out and build a business, succeed, and do something that’s outside of their scope and span of control, they lose their minds over it. And that’s what we’re seeing.

I react to their tweeting, where they’re basically trying to contort things about inequality, fairness, and justice, when the truth is that they are the rising empire—the evil empire in Star Wars. They are the folks who want to take from all of us what we were endowed with when this nation was started and what many people came to this country for, which is individual freedom and liberty.

That’s the ability to build a business in peace, the ability to make decisions, to do what you want with your own assets, and to have functionally private property. They’re taking it all away, and they’re trying to take it all away piece by piece, step by step.

So they’re forming a Politburo where they can effectively control the economy, control education, control the media, and tell us all what we can and can’t do and say. It’s frustrating for me to watch because it’s masqueraded as virtue, justice, and equity. It’s a bunch of nonsense words that they use to try to make themselves seem virtuous, when at the end of the day they are fundamentally evil. I hate watching it. That’s why I react so aggressively to it.

Friedberg, I think you said something that’s really important, which is that they present it as virtue.

That’s right.

Put yourself in the body of a person who’s probably middle-of-the-road but is falling for it. Why do you think they’re falling for it?

Because they have needs, wants, and desires individually that this person is saying this system, this evil empire, will give to you. If you take the knee, we will give you the education for free. We will give you the child care for free. We will give you the food for free. We will give you the paycheck every week. We will give you, we will give you, we will give you.

Those promises in a democratic system like this—or in a fake democratic system like this—are what make people feel like the virtuous offerings will align with their individual needs and wants. I think that’s why people say, “Okay, that’s good. Free child care for all.”

There is inequality in the world. There is disparity in wealth. There is disparity in asset ownership. And your solution, despite the loss of liberty along the way and the loss of economic mobility that arises from what you’re offering, is really key.

People don’t realize the value of the United States. The power of this nation was to give people individual liberty, which unlocks agency to progress yourself, to educate yourself, to make money, to give yourself more assets, and more freedom and flexibility than you had.

Economic mobility is the key to the United States. You do not get economic mobility if the government is giving you a job or giving you money. You lose economic mobility. You become indentured to the government.

Everyone wants more. Everyone wants something that they don’t have. But the truth is that the more the government is giving it to you, the less mobility you have. The more you are indentured, the more you are enslaved, and the more we are limiting people’s ability to progress.

That’s what’s really so frustrating for me. People sign up to this, to your point, Chamath, and they’re like, “Okay, that’s great. I get to have this, and I get to have that, and I get to have that.” But at the end of the day, you’re giving all of your liberties up. You’re giving all of your progress up. You’re giving all of your mobility up.

That’s what you’re saying. You’re looking for them, and you don’t have the agency to pursue your own personal freedom. Yeah?

One thing I believe to be 100% true is that no human being who’s ever been alive has ever lived up to their true capacity as a human. Human agency is limitless.

Limitless.

Limitless. And the truth is, any time that you create a system with the government that’s giving people stuff, you are taking away people’s agency.

That’s what’s so sad about the whole thing. Human agency is the one thing that we have unlimited capacity in—unlimited, infinite upside. Every human does. And to enshroud yourself in this government burden, thinking that it is a relief—

Well, then that creates learned helplessness because you’re always looking to the government to solve your problems.

The threshold for learned helplessness is far lower than one may think. I grew up on welfare. My mother was initially a housekeeper, and then she was a nurse’s aide. She was probably making $8, $9, or $10 an hour. My father couldn’t get a job, so we were on welfare.

Welfare was probably $17,000, $18,000, or $19,000 a year at the time in Canada, and it was a family of 5. But it was just enough that my dad spent this cycle between drinking and not working, drinking and not working. He would try in bursts, and I think that it must have been deeply frustrating for him, obviously. I want to be compassionate toward the struggle that he went through. But 17,000 is not nearly enough support and so it would animate you to try to do whatever it took. But could he have gotten a job making $8, $9, or $10 an hour at a store? He could have. He chose not to. My recollection of being a ward of the state is that the threshold for that helplessness is far lower than one may think.

And then if you stack all these other things, people will just fall into their worst proclivities. They will be a shell and a shadow of what they could be.

My dad was, in my mind, a giant who had all this potential unfulfilled. I keep that because I want a positive sense of who he was to me, despite all of the ups and downs, the stuff that he went through, and how it did negatively affect me at times.

But, man, if you want a whole country of those people, what happens when you're giving people $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, $60,000, $70,000, or $80,000 a year of stuff? 1. At some point, you're not going to be able to pay for it. 2. You're going to reduce people to a shell of what their potential is. And that is not good. I have lived it, and I am warning all of you: be careful what you wish for.

Mhm.

The flip side of it, by the way, as you point out, is that you can't pay for it. What ends up happening is the moment that we find ourselves in today, and we see it in—and we'll talk about Pritzker's law in Illinois, which passed this week—we are now at a moment where we are saying there is no longer private property in the United States.

This is one of the foundational rights that the founders of the United States tried to use to create a distinction between the United States and these other nations that everyone flees from, where a monarchy, a totalitarian government, or some communist system says everyone owns everything together, or some small number of people own and control everything. That's what this always comes down to, whether it's a socialist state, a communist state, a monarchy, or some other totalitarian regime: there's a small number of people who own and control everything.

And that is the brink that we're on, because they are trying to say, for the first time ever, that there is no longer private property in the United States. If the government can say that everything you've already paid income tax on, and then bought and now own, the government can take a piece of every year based on the vote and the budgetary needs of an irresponsible fiscal legislature, we've lost it all.

Yeah.

And that's where we are. We see this—it just passed in Illinois. People think it's just crypto, just like they think that with a billionaire tax, it's just billionaires. But anytime the government can take your private property after you've paid your taxes, bought something, and put it in your garage, we are done for.

Yeah, we're going to get—

Because that is when the Politburo has unlimited capacity to tax and take and do what they want.

That's the moment we're at.

Well, the super sinister part, to dovetail with what both of you are saying and to give some grace to your dad, Chamath, is that in the studies of learned helplessness—for people who haven't heard the term before, it's a psychological condition—if you give people a hard problem to solve, like an impossible problem to solve, they don't solve it. Then you give them easy problems to solve, they don't solve the easy ones, and they become depressed. They attribute their depression to themselves; in other words, they internalize it.

If you give people easier problems to solve and make them increasingly harder as you go, they become empowered. They have agency. They feel like they can solve problems. Then, when they get stuck on something, they don't attribute it internally. This is why alcoholism is so pernicious in our society as well: when you start attributing it to yourself and then start self-medicating, you try to dull these feelings because you're depressed.

I've had many friends and family members who've gone through it. This is why having agency is so important. This is why endless unemployment is so dangerous. You need to taper people off it, and you need to give them a chance to be successful. If your dad had taken that $10–$12-an-hour job, he would have become the manager, and then he would have become the owner of the place.

So, the coda to your story is that at some point—I think, and I don't know because my mom doesn't share this with me—there was some kind of breaking point, because it was a really violent household. Then, near the end of my high school career, when I left, things got, I think, materially better. Part of it was because he got a job.

Ultimately, he got a job doing pretty low-level clerical work for the government, but we were so proud of him. He did that until he passed away. It changed him completely. Now, it could also have been because he had gotten older, but he drank a lot less and was much more regulated.

Mhm. It's a really sad phenomenon. You see it sometimes in successful people. They get successful very quickly, but they don't attribute it to their own success. They get up out of bed in the morning. They don't have to get out. They start drinking. They don't take a job. They're affluent, but they're just not motivated. They don't have purpose.

All right, let's get started. We have a huge docket to get through today.

SpaceX had a record-breaking IPO, and the $60 billion Cursor deal was quickly consummated, as predicted. Friend of the pod Elon Musk took SpaceX public last Thursday at $135 a share. A lot of people got to participate. Robinhood, Charles Schwab—everybody was talking about how they got an allocation: 1 share, 10 shares. They filled the greenshoe. $85 billion was raised. That's 3 times what Saudi Aramco raised back in 2019.

The stock closed up 19% at $161, with a market cap above $2 trillion. At the taping of this pod, it's at $177. Not too shabby. On Tuesday, SpaceX exercised its option to acquire Cursor. That's the coding agent that got shivved by Anthropic. Speaking of Anthropic and Claude, they originally used Claude as the back end of Cursor. Then Claude and Anthropic had an internal skunkworks project. They allegedly told Cursor they were never going to release it to the public, that they would never have a coding agent. And they did.

That led to this incredible opportunity for Cursor to make its own model and use Elon's hardware at Colossus. They're doing $4 billion in revenue, so they got bought for 15 times revenue. SpaceX is trading at, I don't know, 60–70 times revenue, so it's a great deal for everybody.

SpaceX briefly passed Amazon and Microsoft, which is mind-blowing: to be the 4th most valuable company. Amazon's revenue in 2025 was $717 billion. Microsoft's in 2025 was $282 billion. SpaceX's in 2025 was only $19 billion. That's corrected a bit, and now SpaceX is sitting at the 7th-largest company, right behind TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Corporation.

So, let's just go around the horn here. Congratulations to Elon and the team over there. Elon exercised his Tesla shares that he had coming from his employment there. I think he's done a pretty good job as CEO. He got a little bonus. That sets up, potentially, Chamath, the merger of the 2 big companies. Just broad strokes, what's your takeaway from the SpaceX IPO? It seems to have been executed flawlessly.

It's an incredible company. It's a one-of-one. It's just a unique animal. I think the highest price-to-sales ratio was essentially these last few days, and now it's just going to grow into its valuation and generally just grow valuation. Nick, play the clip.

Guest

The acquisition was essentially negotiated, and the way that it's structured is so that the S-1 doesn't go stale. I think the way that it was announced has more to do with the fact that they don't want to slow down and have to rewrite parts of the S-1, redo the disclosures, or redo the risks. The deal is effectively done.

Mhm.

But what's so smart is this: Where is SpaceX today? Let's call it $1 trillion. Where could it be? Just for the purpose of this argument, let's say $2 trillion. So, when the deal gets done on a stock-for-stock basis, again, if it's $60 billion in tomorrow's dollars, effectively Elon has gotten a 50% discount.

Mhm. All right, nailed it. We'll give that a “mhm.” Okay, sure enough.

What I didn't factor in as well is that the revenue run rate would essentially double on top of that. So, he essentially got Cursor for $15 billion.

He got a good deal.

Which is unbelievable. His business intellect is off the charts. That is an incredible deal. And now the consolidation phase will begin, and we're going to see Tesla and SpaceX merge, and it's going to be glorious.

Sacks, you can also take a little bit of a victory lap here. You've been friends with Elon since the PayPal days, obviously, and you were an investor in SpaceX for a long time. Your thoughts on what this means for the company? Obviously, it's an incredible milestone, but what does it mean for the company going forward? Champagne bottles, yada yada, but what does it practically mean for SpaceX and Elon going forward?

Well, in a certain sense, as we all know, this was the biggest IPO of all time. In that sense, it was a huge milestone for this company that Elon and many other people have been working on for a very long time. This has been 25 years in the making. When people turn on the TV and see this, they think that this is just some sort of overnight success. It's not. A lot of people had to work very hard to get to this point.

But at the same time that it was this historic IPO, it's also the case that, in a certain sense, this didn't change anything for Elon. I think when people read that he's the world's first trillionaire, they start to think that he must have gobs of money—a trillion dollars sitting in a bank account. That's not true. That's not how it works. That's not how wealth is created.

He doesn't have 1 more dollar in the bank than he did the day before the IPO. He doesn't have more stuff. He doesn't have more houses or anything that you could buy with money. Literally, his balance sheet is exactly the same. It consists of the same things. It's just that the public is putting a higher value on the shares of stock in SpaceX that he already owned.

He's not selling. He's under a 1-year lockup, and I predict that he'll hold on for much longer than that, because creating SpaceX is his life's work.

You see all these people reacting with tremendous animosity and basically saying, “We can’t allow the world’s first trillionaire,” and stuff like that. Look, he doesn’t have more cash than he did the day before the IPO.

Clearly. It’s that other people are placing a greater value on what he’s built.

Yeah. I think this is a very important thing for people to understand: There’s a big difference between stuff and the machines that make the stuff. Again, this is where wealth comes from: the machines that make the stuff.

You go all the way back to hunter-gatherer days. The only wealth was in what you could collect, hunt, or gather. It was basically the collection of stuff. Then humans developed the ability to create tools, and then very sophisticated tools. Some of those tools are corporations, which are almost like cybernetic organisms, or combinations of tools and workflows, with humans working in them.

It’s those corporations that make the stuff. The way that people get wealthy is that if you create a machine that makes more stuff, then there’s a discounted present value for all the stuff in the future that that machine might create. That’s where the wealth comes from. It’s in the discounted present value.

Really?

It’s not in the stuff. It’s in creating a machine that will create stuff for humanity for a long time, and people will put a value on it today—

That’s really well said.

Because of all the stuff that it’ll create in the future. Just out of nowhere, it will appear that all of a sudden you have all this wealth created, but again, that wealth is a reflection of all the stuff that this machine will now create in the future.

People need to understand that this process is a good thing because when you think about all the progress that humanity has made, it’s not in having more stuff. Again, that stuff all goes away, right? Whether it’s food, shelter, clothes, or whatever, it depreciates. It’s a wasting asset.

The reason why humans are more prosperous is because of all the machinery we’ve created to make stuff well into the future. Some of that stuff can be things like shelter and clothes. It can also be medicines and cures, entertainment, electricity, and all the things that make your life better.

We need those machines, and someone has got to own the machines. The people who own them are the ones who create them. The thing that Karl Marx never understood is that it’s not this sharp delineation between capital and labor because you can take people who start with nothing.

Elon also started with nothing. He was an immigrant to the United States. He came here with nothing. He slept on the floor. He created these companies. He created these machines from nothing with his own vision and hard work, and he included thousands of other people.

Here’s the other thing: Just because you’re “labor” doesn’t mean that you’re not also an owner of capital. There’s a great story about a welder who worked at SpaceX who I think has made $1 million in SpaceX stock. That’s transformational, but everybody who’s part of these companies—and I think this is the magic of the tech industry—is much more included in terms of ownership than in any other industry.

It’s the magic of capitalism in free markets, where anyone can participate in that market. Anyone can enter that market, and ultimately anyone can transition from being labor to capital.

Yes, it’s fluid. It’s back and forth.

If you buy shares in a company and you have the ability to buy shares—

You just vest them with sweat equity.

Or you start a business and you basically do work, save money, invest your capital, and continue to compound the capital until you get to a point at which your labor is worth less than your capital. That’s what ultimately allows this economic mobility, this transition for people. When you take that away, you destroy that capacity for mobility.

That’s why capitalism is where we started today, yeah.

That’s right. And that’s why—

Today, with agency.

That’s why it’s so frustrating to me to watch people denounce Elon’s success and denounce the value that the world is putting on this business and on this success. What they’re saying is that no future human, no kid who’s sitting on a floor right now, sleeping on a floor, who’s poor, should have the capacity to achieve what Elon achieved.

No one should be allowed that capacity to transition, to progress, to mobilize themselves.

Friedberg, they’re saying you should hate him.

By denouncing him and by denouncing that, you’re basically taking that ability away, and you’re saying that this is evil. You’re telling all these young kids around the world who are thinking about their future that they are now indentured to a government or to a fixed income for the rest of their lives, to perform labor for a fee for the rest of their lives, as opposed to having the opportunity to transition.

That’s what Elon has done, and what millions of others have done, because of the freedoms in the United States and other free markets that have allowed this to happen for people. That’s why it’s not just about getting wealthy. It’s not just about getting rich. It’s about having agency to transition yourself.

It’s a good transition, and inspiring young people, yeah. It’s a different kind of transition.

It’s a good transition. No, you’re transitioning from labor to capital by virtue of sweat equity. You have skills that are valuable that you can then translate into creating something that’s valuable.

Just to underscore that point, think about SpaceX. It’s a machine that makes satellites. It’s a machine that makes broadband connections from space. It’s a machine that creates launch vehicles, AI software, and so forth and so on. It’s a machine that makes things that people want and that therefore enhances people’s lives.

It’s only the market, the public’s value that it places on those things, that creates the net worth, that creates the value of SpaceX’s stock, and therefore the net worth of someone like Elon. But again, he doesn’t have 1 more dollar than he had before.

To put a finer point on it, you have to earn that by continuing to make the best product in your class. The second Elon’s satellite, Starlink, is not as good as the next 2 or 3 competitors, and there are 2 or 3 of them coming right behind him. There are other people building rockets, and obviously he’s in a heated competition for LLMs, with Cursor versus Claude Coach.

He’s not guaranteed anything. He has to fight, and he’s had to fight to win each of those categories. The second he stops fighting in those categories, he loses, and all that equity gets cut, like we see when stocks tank because they can’t keep up.

He’s had to fight for every inch by making the best product. Nothing was given to him. Everything was earned, and earned by his team. This idea that he won the lottery is farcical. It’s a 25-year overnight success story that had 3 or 4 distinct points where it was going out of business and he had to scramble.

I’ve always thought that the people who rail on wealth are actually secretly incredibly jealous and want to be extremely rich. I’ve never heard a coherent argument about why, when somebody achieves something, you should dismantle the things that they’re building.

What both of you said is so right. The vicissitudes of the market can make that number fluctuate wildly. There is a version of the market that has nothing to do with him that judges his stuff in the future as half of what they’re judging it at today. Nothing stops us from doing that.

All of a sudden, everybody who’s breathlessly mad that he’s a trillionaire—what do they say now? He wouldn’t be a trillionaire. He’d be some version of what he was the Thursday of last week, right?

Right. Right. To take the same analogy, the machines become obsolete very quickly in a capitalist society. You can get disrupted, and companies get disrupted all the time if they become stale or calcified. If they don’t invest in maintaining and upgrading their machine, they will become obsolete.

Improving value.

Do you know what can’t get disrupted? Do you know what can’t get disrupted? The one undisruptable monopoly: government.

That’s the problem. Government is competing for capital, and it’s competing for markets, and it’s competing for all these things. That’s why I talk about these people as being evil. They’re a politburo. They’re basically trying to take away the capacity for value creation, to make things better every generation for a society: better medicine, better education, better livelihoods, better homes. Everything gets better.

But when the government monopolizes it, it doesn’t. That’s the competing force that we’re up against.

Yeah, and I want to just add one thing to this, which is that there is a piece of this that needs to be solved. People wanted to participate in the success of these companies earlier.

Chamath and I interviewed the head of the SEC, and he’s working on this. The amount of demand from retail investors was enormous, and it was a very innovative thing that Elon and the team over at SpaceX did. They gave 20% or 30% of the IPO to retail investors.

When you opened up your Robinhood account—I don’t know if you guys have one—or a Charles Schwab account, it gave you a little interface that said, “Hey, would you like to participate in the IPO of SpaceX?” You could put in your request.

I think six or seven, I was talking to Vlad, maybe six or 700,000 Robinhood users got an allocation. It might have been 1 share; it could have been 50.

That democratization needs to continue because, to get back to Friedberg's points about being a wage slave or an equity holder and trying to make that transition, people should be able to open up Robinhood, buy 1 or 2 shares, and vote with their dollars. For $150, they can say that they want this future as opposed to other versions of the future. That's what gives them that empowerment. That's what gives them that agency.

What if they could do that earlier? I've beaten this drum on this podcast and on my other podcast for a decade. People knew SpaceX. They were watching these rockets launch for a long time, and they would have placed that bet 10 years ago, when the company was worth $100 billion, or $10 billion, or $500 billion. But they weren't allowed to because we have a corrupt system in our government that says rich people—the top 4% or 5% of this country—are smart enough to buy private company stocks, and the other 95% are too stupid to do so.

It's antiquated, and it has to change. You should be able to buy whatever you want. If you want to buy crypto, you can. If you want to buy a private company, you can. If you want to play cards with your friends and play bomb pots and watch Dave Friedberg rage-quit because he keeps losing at bomb pots when we play, that's Friedberg's right. Let people buy private company stock. It's crazy that we still have this rule keeping poor people poor. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

Can I take a shot at answering Chamath's question? Why are there so many people who are influential who are resentful of what Elon has done or what other capitalists do? I think it was Joseph Schumpeter who explained this: You've got this intelligentsia in a society like ours where they don't make things. They don't make the machines that make things. They just make words and, I guess, ideas, and most of those ideas are just wrong. They're just made up. They become resentful of the fact that there are all these people who are able to create not the stuff but the machines that make the stuff, and that, in our society, is the thing that creates the greatest financial reward. Why? Because it actually aligns with what's of the greatest value for society, whereas they produce a bunch of hot air. So it's natural for that class of intelligentsia to become resentful and hostile toward the people who are able to amass this great wealth.

I think that the great lie is that there are 2 sides to society: the rich and the poor. And the great truth is that there are 2 sides: the makers and the takers. The lie is that the rich are unfairly rich and the poor are unfairly poor, and therefore the poor must take from the rich. But the truth is that it's the takers who tell you that lie.

The real truth is that artists, plumbers, electricians, woodworkers, computer scientists—people who build, people who make, from all walks of life, all income levels, all wealth brackets—are the makers. And the takers are what Sacks calls this intelligentsia: the analysts, the espousers, the armchair mechanics, the critics, the commentators, the politicians. They are the takers. They are the people who watch the rest of society make stuff and build stuff, specifically doing things that create value for other people in society. That's what a maker is.

I tell my kids this lesson all the time. I say, “What did you guys make today?” They tell me something they made, and I'm like, “Did someone else value it, or did you make it just for yourself?” At the end of the day, if you made something and someone else valued it, you were a maker. That was an amazing achievement. That is a great day.

Whether you make a piece of art, whether you build a house, whether you write a piece of software, whether you build a business—whatever you make—if you're a maker and someone else values it, they become your customer in some way, they become your partner in some way, and you've done something valuable. Those are the true engines of progress for humanity.

The takers are the ones who tell the lie that it's rich versus poor, because what they want to do is rip apart the makers. They want to tell everyone, “You've got to be on one side or the other,” and they use that lie to get everyone to line up against each other and to give themselves, ultimately, the control to form the great American Politburo, which is what they're trying to create. That is what's underway right now, and that is the fundamental great truth and great lie that we're fighting against at this moment.

All right, this broke shortly after we taped our episode last week. We tape on Thursdays, and we drop on Fridays, as fans of the show know. The US government has pulled the plug on Anthropic's latest model. You've heard us talk about that as Mythos. They released it as a controlled version called Fable 5. So there was Mythos—that was the one they held for 30 days while they were doing cybersecurity testing. Then they released it as Fable, in a bit of a guardrailed version of it.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Anthropic to restrict that model to US citizens last week—last Friday, in fact. Anthropic couldn't implement those restrictions, or wouldn't implement them in that granular a way, so they decided to do something more conservative and shut it down for everybody. This, of course, created a lot of hand-wringing in the industry: rug-pulling, “Oh my God, we lost this great model,” and what does that mean if I build my models on top of Anthropic? Can I trust them? Yada yada. And this was just days after the model was launched, on June 9.

How this all started seems to be that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, whose company is an early investor in Anthropic and owns a large portion of it, told the administration that there was a security vulnerability in Fable 5. They were able to bypass the guardrails and jailbreak the model that Anthropic had put on it. Dario Amodei said the jailbreak wasn't serious. There seems to be some finger-pointing and back-and-forth, and Dario said it was narrow.

Separately, Semaphore, a publication, like an email publication, reported that the White House acted partly over suspicion that a China-linked group had access to Methuselah when they weren't supposed to. Wired reported that this group was South Korea's SK Telecom. Now you're saying, “Hey, how does South Korea have anything to do with China?” Well, there are long-standing allegations that SK has a relationship with China.

The White House previously ordered Anthropic to revoke SK Telecom's access to Methuselah. They're kind of like Verizon, with 70% market share for telecom in South Korea. According to The Washington Post, Anthropic did not initially disclose that it had given Methuselah to SK Telecom. And this happened before all the export controls, which “badly damaged officials' confidence in the company's ability to safeguard sensitive technology.”

Anthropic says the White House never raised the Chinese access in the Fable jailbreak conversations. There's a lot of finger-pointing, and perhaps nobody is closer to this except the principals and you, David Sacks. So tell us: What is going on here? Is this politics between Anthropic and the administration? Is this a misunderstanding? Or is this the future of what's to come as these models become more powerful?

Well, let me give you an update based on what I learned. This would have been last Friday and Saturday. By that point, I got a readout from various folks at the White House about what happened around the time that letter was sent to Anthropic. I then summarized what I learned in that long post on X. No one told me what to say. I just listened to these various officials explain themselves.

I also heard from, let's say, some of the private companies that were involved in this. All I asked was, “Listen, I think this context would be helpful to provide.” They said, “Sure, you can publish it.” So I posted my summary of everything that was happening. Whether you agree with the decisions of those officials or not, I do think that my post provides a window into exactly what they were thinking at that time.

What this comes down to is a couple of things. First of all, like you said, Dario came to Washington a few months ago. This was back in April, and he basically said that he had created a cyber weapon called Mythos. He spiked the cortisol level and got everyone really worried. There was some truth to it, in the sense that this model had advanced cyber capabilities, but he got everybody very focused on this problem. Mission accomplished.

They then had this pilot program for Mythos, this trusted partners program. And as The Washington Post reported, Anthropic expanded the program to something like 50 companies or more without consulting the White House. According to The Washington Post—I can't confirm this, because I don't have any firsthand knowledge of it, but I don't have any reason to question The Washington Post's reporting on this—they did share Mythos with a company with which the White House believes they should not have shared it.

So think about that. They're sharing these capabilities, which Dario himself has said are a cyber weapon, with parties that the White House—and really, we're talking about national security officials—believe might have connections to China.

That's SK Telecom, according to these reports.

I was going to say who it was. I know that's been reported. I don't have any firsthand knowledge of that.

Okay.

I'm just reporting what was in The Washington Post. But you have to understand that that's the context. So first of all, you have Anthropic effectively conducting its own foreign policy here, expanding the Mythos preview to groups that the White House didn't have any knowledge of.

And then, once they found out, the White House's position was, “Look, we have classified information that you don't have.”

We know that there are certain groups that shouldn't be getting this. And Anthropic expanded the pilot without consulting, which is again bewildering because the whole point of what they were supposedly doing by trying to get this pre-approval regime was to consult with the government. So, really, that was the predicate for this.

Apparently, again, this is according to The Washington Post, that's when conversations started about whether a model like Mythos needed to be export-controlled.

Okay.

Then you have the launch of Fable, which is basically Mythos with guardrails. Again, if those guardrails fail, then you have a cyberweapon being released to the public. And it wasn't the White House who came to the conclusion that the guardrails failed. It was private companies that were testing Fable and testing those guardrails. As has been publicly reported, one of them was Anthropic's largest shareholder and cloud partner.

Amazon.

Well, again, I'm not going to confirm, but I think we all can read the publications, okay?

Yeah.

So, again, normally I wouldn't mention names at all, but this is all widely reported, okay? In any event, they, I think, tried to convey their findings to Anthropic. I think there was some sort of breakdown in communication. I don't really understand, but they felt the need to escalate it to the White House. It's almost like a whistleblower, because they have no reason to lie about this.

Yeah, I mean, they're partners, so that's even more reason to support Anthropic. Obviously, Sacks, they would have told Anthropic first, but the fact that Andy Jassy got involved in this at all means somebody on the team must have said, "Hey, on the security team at Amazon, who has to host these models, this is something that could be a liability for us, Amazon, and could be a national security threat." That's why Andy Jassy made that call, because somebody put that into a Slack room somewhere or documented it.

Oh, no, it wasn't just a Slack room. They don't do things like that based on a Slack room, okay?

The security team reported it, right?

Amazon is part of the Mythos preview, and they are also testing Fable, remember? They've got the biggest cloud to protect. We're talking about AWS. They've got teams banging on this and making sure the guardrails are safe. As has been publicly reported, they came to the conclusion that there was a jailbreak and that this was a serious security problem.

So, they then escalated it to the White House. Again, this is where my summary takes over, based on my hearing firsthand from these officials. They tried to call Anthropic, they tried to call Dario, and there were a number of conversations. The TL;DR of it is Dario refused—meaning, refused their request to take down Fable until this jailbreak could be fixed.

Again, the White House was really, I think, bewildered and confused by that because it's so off-brand for Anthropic. They claim to be the AI safety company. And yet here, the White House is reacting to credible information about a major security threat from Anthropic's own partner, and instead of basically saying, "Yes, we'll react to this right away," they get the Heisman.

I mean, just imagine this call. Apparently, again, reportedly, the Treasury secretary of the United States called Dario personally. Why wouldn't this be a 5-minute call? Why wouldn't Dario just say, "Yes, sir. We take security more seriously than anybody else. We'll fix the problem. Thank you for taking the time to call us out of your busy day. We're going to handle it right now." Click.

And instead of doing that, what the administration heard—and I'm not saying Dario meant to communicate this—was that he sort of pedantically argued that this jailbreak wasn't really a serious issue. You don't have to take the administration's word for it. Dario then published a blog post that basically conveyed the idea that not all jailbreaks are that bad, and tried to differentiate between good jailbreaks and bad jailbreaks.

Minor ones, major ones.

Minor ones, major ones, whatever. Again, very off-brand for them. I didn't know until now that that was the case.

Remember, this is all downstream of the fact that Dario primed all of these officials to view Mythos as a cyberweapon, and to view, therefore, Fable as a cyberweapon if the guardrails failed. They already had problems with the Mythos preview being overextended to parties that they didn't approve of.

Look, I think maybe there's room in here to give Dario some grace. Maybe he didn't interpret this correctly, what have you. But this was the way that the administration perceived the situation they were in as of whatever that day was—a week ago, last Thursday.

They reacted by sending the export-control letter because they wanted Fable to come down until the guardrails were put in place. Now we're in a situation where Anthropic is negotiating with the government to try to fix the situation.

Look, once you're in one of these situations, it's always harder to extricate yourself than to avoid getting into them in the first place because the trust is broken. The trust is now gone. And look, I hope this does get resolved as quickly as possible because I don't view what the administration did as a policymaking exercise.

Some people are saying that this export-control letter is now a new type of policy—that now the government has to approve every model release. I don't think that was the intention. I think this was a reaction by the administration to a credible report of a national security threat, and they felt that they had no alternative but to react immediately with the tools that they had available to themselves.

So, I hope that this problem gets fixed, and then we have a serious, deliberative policy conversation about what the right hoops should be for models that are cyberweapons.

And reviewing these models—which, yeah, let's pause there, because we're going to get into model reviews and what's the best way to do that. Chamath, what's your take on this situation, in terms of maybe a little bit of—I don't know—your handicapping of the situation with the relationship with Amazon? I think that's kind of an interesting angle, or if you have a different angle you want to take.

I think the leaders of the frontier labs leave a lot to be desired. I think what we're seeing is a consistent pattern of evasiveness and immaturity. And I think that does a huge disservice to the entire movement of AI.

Maybe to connect the dots between this and what Friedberg said: I couldn't agree more with what he said. The key to a vibrant life is rooted in economic mobility, and I think AI is the grand leveler. It is the thing that can enable everyone to have unique amounts of economic mobility because they are unencumbered in figuring out what their upper bound is.

Against that backdrop, which is an incredibly positive-sum view of the world, but I think it's accurate, we have to live in this constant doomerism, hype cycle, and naivety. I think it holds us back. How does it hold us back? Tactically, number 1, it creates mistrust.

I think Silicon Valley was already decaying in the prestige that it held in American society. When I first came here in 2001, it was a place of misfits who were good-intentioned, who were doing the right thing, who didn't take themselves too seriously, and who, in success, weren't ostentatious. They kind of kept their heads down. We built important things.

Then we veered away from that, and we started building less important things. And now we're at a point where we've potentially started to rebuild important things again, but we have this veneer of negativity and mistrust that is created in large part because we just cannot get our act together.

The leaders of the frontier labs are public enemy number 1. And so, this entire episode is yet another proof point that you just can't trust these guys.

Number 2, I think what it creates—which I think is bad, but what it creates—is an incredible opportunity for the hyperscalers. The very simple opportunity is to convince governments all around the world, not just America, that they should be the gatekeeper.

A, you can't trust these guys. B, these models are all over the place. C, let us be the ones that provision them to the world. We will wrap it in KYC. I've been now talking about KYC for a while, right? Who are these customers? Do they have identification? Why are they allowed to run these models? What are they prompting? Let's keep them so that there's an audit trail.

All of these things are going to become issues. The frontier lab folks made it an issue because of how they've handled all of this up until now. And what does that create? Now that creates an oligopoly for AI—the most powerful, economically leveling instrument we've ever seen—in the hands of maybe a handful of hyperscalers, who, by the way, would make an incredibly compelling argument, and they would be right.

The only counterfactual to it would be, "Well, trust us, guys. It should actually be much more open in a far more distributed environment." Can you imagine the cost and the complexity if you ask the neoscaler to build the same robust KYC or the same VPC infrastructure that Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have spent decades investing trillions of dollars in? It's an impossibility, Jason.

So, you can take all of those data centers off the map. You can take all of the neoscaler market off the map. All of this was preventable. So, instead of a diverse, robust, open ecosystem giving a tool that is the fundamental unlock for humans, we are now going to debate gatekeeping and duopoly versus oligopoly.

They have created a total mess, and it's a shame.

So, instead of people just being able to use the model they want from the provider they want, you're going to have to put in your driver's license, your tax ID, your Social Security number, whatever it is.

to Amazon Web Services or Google.

If you have to put your driver's license in to buy fertilizer, you're sure as hell going to have to put your driver's license in to use Fable 5, which is the precursor to knowing how to use fertilizer to make the bomb.

Yeah, as we talked about last week.

Sorry, last thing. This is a total own goal. And then what does it do? We in Silicon Valley, yet again, look like people who have just optimized for ourselves. We take ourselves seriously, but we take nobody else seriously. We’re not willing to play ball. It’s unserious, it’s immature, and it does not help society at large.

Okay, Freeberg, there’s been some talk about political tribalism here. I’ll let you take this one. Anthropic is the only company that doesn’t seem to show up when President Trump has CEOs at the White House. It’s backed by Reid Hoffman, who funded the lawfare against the White House, the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit, this lawsuit, that lawsuit. There’s major beef between the left and the right, and Anthropic is in the middle of it. Is this the White House treating Anthropic differently? Do they have it out for Anthropic, with Anthropic basically handing it the ability to take these kinds of actions? In other words, is this political instead of pragmatic and practical, in your mind?

Well, I think there’s no regulatory framework today, so antagonizing the government to create a regulatory framework and then feeling antagonized when they regulate you just seems a little bit weird. Anthropic seems to be the only one doing that. I don’t know if it’s a political motivation as much as it is some strange set of behaviors from Anthropic that’s motivating this perception.

Look, I think at the end of the day, we’re all losers if the government is going to be picking winners and losers in AI. We’re all losers if we have to be restricted from accessing these tools. As I’ve said before, an entire AI model can fit on a USB drive, and you just need good hardware to run it. The value of that model is time-bound, because at some point a better model is going to come around.

My point being, I think we’re all losers if there’s one stack that one company owns the whole thing and we all have to put in our ID, with the government deciding who’s the winner and who’s the loser. None of us are going to be winners in that sense. That’s why I think there are currently natural market forces for 2 things: more open source and fragmentation of the AI stack.

If you go back to the 1960s, IBM was the predominant provider of mainframe computers. At the time, IBM did the whole stack. They actually made the chips. All of the chips—I think it was Solid Logic Technology—that IBM created were made in-house. They made the hardware. They made the operating system. They also made the software. This was the case throughout the whole mainframe technology era, when IBM was the monopoly. They had the whole thing.

Ultimately, the government had to intervene to get them to disaggregate the software layer, and that’s what actually started the independent software vendor era, which is when the software industry really started. That was after the government said, “Hey, we shouldn’t have one company that has the whole stack in computing.” Then we get to the ’80s, and that’s when everything disaggregated. IBM started buying Intel chips for the personal computer. They had their own operating system, but ultimately Microsoft came along and made a better operating system. This entire proliferation of the software stack with independent vendors took off.

I think that ultimately allowed this industry to progress. The productivity boom that arose from both mainframe computing and desktop PCs was because of this disaggregation. I think the same is likely going to have to happen with these AI companies. I’m not sure that what we’re looking at today—some oligopoly of 3 or 4 businesses—is really where we’re going to stand.

I think the equivalent on the hardware side is that there are going to be multiple chip vendors. There are also going to be multiple clouds and multiple models that run on the clouds. People are also going to run models locally. They’re going to use different software factories. They’re not just going to use Anthropic. They’re going to use tools like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and other things. They’re going to run different applications on top of it that are going to be purpose-built or custom-built.

I think there’s very likely a diffusion happening right now. If it doesn’t happen, it’s going to be pretty nasty, but I think the market forces are so strong for a diffusion of each layer in the stack—each finding its way to the cheapest, most available, most accessible partner vendors—that we’re very likely going to see these handfuls of oligopolies break down a little bit.

Yep.

I’m not sure there’s going to be a political capture. It just seems very unlikely.

Yeah.

That’s my take on this.

I’m going to steelman this for the good of the pod and also because of a little bit of my personal belief here. If we were to take Anthropic’s name out of this series of behaviors in how they handled the release of Mythos, let’s just say we put Grok, OpenAI, or Gemini in there. Gemini’s a good one—Google. They’re not totally in either camp, and it’s a company that’s been around for a long time.

Gemini comes out with a model. When they test it, it’s incredible at hacking and cyberwarfare. They say, “You know what? This is incredible. It’s super powerful. We’re going to limit it to 50 partners.” Those 50 partners include Microsoft, et cetera. They happen to have SK Telecom in there. They make a mistake: They put them in there. We look at them and say, “Hey, holding the model for 30 days while they test it?” We’d say, “Thumbs up. Good move.”

Then one of their partners, Amazon, says, “Hey, we were able to jailbreak this.” They say, “Okay, we’re going to put a couple of guardrails on this when we put it out.” Let’s just say, in the second phase, after they give it to their 50 partners in a controlled beta, they say, “We’re going to open it to the public, but we’re going to watch every single thing you do.”

I think, David, you said this is a privacy issue. It’s pretty standard, actually, when you release something like this, to monitor it for the first 30 days. If you don’t want people looking at the results, then don’t join the beta. Keep using 4.8, don't use the newest one. You’d say thumbs-up to that as well: They’re giving it only to logged-in customers.

If somebody does something dangerous, like they try to get it to make nuclear weapons, or, last week, when I asked it about fertilizer regulation, it dropped me out of the model, right? We would give a thumbs-up to that. Then, if we were asked by the government to take it down for anybody outside the United States and we said, “You know what? We’ll take it down for everybody,” I’d probably give a thumbs-up to that too, if Gemini did it.

There is a definite backdrop of beef between Anthropic and this administration. If you look at the Reid Hoffman connection, you look at Dario, who refuses to participate, and you look at the people who go to work at Anthropic, they’re the people who hate Trump and hate the Trump administration. They’re opting into that. If you look at OpenAI and Grok, those are the people who are largely pro-Trump, including Greg Brockman and his wife, who gave $25 million to Trump.

So there’s a political underpinning here. Sacks, you may not be able to get into this—I understand that—but that’s part of what’s going on here. I think Anthropic actually did a really good job of rolling out this model and being conservative about it. I think their communications are the problem. Every time Dario talks, it’s too much talking, and there’s too much fearmongering.

Somebody’s got to fix the communications over there, to your point, Chamath, because the whole industry is going to need to be regulated, and I think the industry needs to regulate itself. That’s the key to this. We need to have a set of tests that Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Elon all agree to. These are the things we should test, and they should self-certify each model before asking the government, which doesn’t understand the models, to certify them.

The industry should have an industry certification, like they do for countless other things. I’ve talked about the MPAA and the video game industry. We should just self-certify. It’s the simplest thing in the world to do, and then we could release the models ourselves without the government getting involved. Anybody else have any thoughts on this before we go on to our next topic?

Well, let me just respond to this accusation. You’re saying that this is somehow politically motivated. That’s just not true. There are Anthropic-aligned influencers who are trying to spread the story that all of this is basically a beef between me and Anthropic. They’re trying to say that somehow I did this, which obviously is untrue. I don’t have the power to do it. I’m not a day-to-day employee of the White House, and I only got the readout of this once the letter was sent.

I wasn’t involved. Secretary of War Pete Hoekstra wasn’t involved. People are trying to make it sound like this is a beef with the Department of War. It’s just not true. This happened as a result of the things I mentioned: They got a report of a jailbreak, and Dario had the chance to fix it. He basically said no. Maybe that’s not the way he thought he was communicating, but that’s what the administration heard.

Dario doubled down on that blog post, and that had the prior history of expanding the Mythos preview to at least 1 company that the administration felt was a national security threat. That's the reason it happened. It has nothing to do with the beef. And by the way, it was the people in the administration who were most sympathetic to Dario and Anthropic who wanted to reset this relationship after the Department of War, and then Dario basically blew it.

Yeah, that's the point. So, look, you can just make stuff up if you want and say—

I'm not making it up.

I take offense to that, Sacks, because it's your guy, Pete Hoekstra, who was doing tweets like this 3 months ago: “Department of War kicked Anthropic out of the building forever. Every passing day proves why this was the right move.” I'm not making anything up here. There's serious beef between these folks. If you're saying that this has nothing to do with this, read the tweet.

That was after the letter was sent. Check the timestamp.

No, no, it's totally fine. There is beef between Anthropic and the administration. To say there isn't is just silly.

I didn't say there wasn't a prior history. I'm just saying that that wasn't the reason why this happened. This was not a dispute between Anthropic and the Department of War. This was not a dispute between Anthropic and me. We were not the parties who were involved.

I didn't say that.

But neither was the Department of War. Now, what Heggstad's tweet reflects is that he feels vindicated. There's a sense of vindication that says, “Hey, we had a really difficult time with these guys when we did a contract negotiation. People may have thought that we were the difficult ones. In fact, we said they were difficult and communicated in a strange way, and now everybody else can see it, too.”

I think what Heggstad is saying there is, “Hey, we told you so.” But he did not make the decision here. This had nothing to do with it. And look at the timestamp of that. It was after this whole series of events went down.

If I'm a shareholder in Anthropic, I would have told Dario to show up every time Trump had the CEOs over there, and I would have told somebody in that management team to drop a $10 million-to-$25 million check into some ballroom or some America PAC, just like Greg did at OpenAI.

He really didn't need to do that. All he needed to do was, when a cabinet secretary calls you and says that we have a credible national security threat reported to us by 1 of your own most trusted partners, take it seriously.

I mean, he took it down. How more seriously can you take it than taking the whole thing down?

He didn't take it down until after they got the letter, which was the whole point.

Yeah. Anyway, can I jump in here?

Please, jump in. Yeah.

I had Claude read “Machines of Loving Grace” and “AI Policy” on The Exponential. Those are his 2 long-form essays.

Dario's?

Dario's, just to be clear for the audience. And I asked it to do a psychological analysis. No, I'm not joking. I think it's important. Use these as insights into his personality and give me a psychological analysis of him based on these, as well as based on the current facts on the ground with Mythos. Be truthful. Don't protect him simply because you are an Anthropic model. And then I asked it to refine through the lens of the e/acc movement and tell me if there's any psychological leanings. Do you want me to read it to you?

The e/acc movement, just so people know, is the accelerationist movement to accelerate society and technology as opposed to decelerate.

Okay, I think people understand. Yeah, let's hear what it said. Okay, 2 paragraphs.

Delusions of grandeur?

No. I'm not saying it to make fun of him. Look, he's built an incredible business. The shareholders are doing phenomenally well. I think the revenue run rate of this business continues to accelerate. All of it's incredible. But I want to understand this person I am paying millions of dollars. So, I just want to understand.

Here we go.

He distrusts other labs, positioning them as racing recklessly. He distrusts authoritarian states because he says they will weaponize AI. He distrusts markets to distribute the gains. He distrusts institutions to move fast enough and, post-Mythos, distrusts the government to wield power transparently and fairly.

That's a very long list of untrustworthy actors. The list of trustworthy ones is conspicuously short, and it has a suspicious tendency to resolve toward people who reason the way I do, operating under the rules I helped design. When your safety framework requires that someone hold the keys, and your analysis keeps concluding that the other key holders can't be trusted, you've built a machine that outputs me, no matter what you feed it.

EAC would call that a god complex. The more precise term is epistemic exceptionalism: not that I am superior, but that my reasoning is the load-bearing one. The failure of others to reach my conclusions is evidence of their corruption or something; it's not evidence of my error. That's the genuinely concerning pattern, and it's worth naming plainly because it's the engine of the dangerous version.

Once you believe your judgment is the uncorruptible reference point, every conflict gets recoded. Government overreach isn't powerful actors with competing interests and me losing; it becomes, “They failed to be transparent and fair.” Losing the Pentagon fight isn't a negotiation he misplayed; it's evidence that the system runs on leverage instead of reason.

The Mythos collision is, “We shipped a dangerous capability and a hostile state reacted predictably.” It's a misunderstanding—the word his company actually used. Notice that “misunderstanding” presumes that if everyone simply understood correctly, they'd agree with him. That word choice under stress is the closest thing in the public record to the tell. It's not megalomania; it's the quieter, more defensible conviction that disagreement is downstream of error. I thought that was really interesting.

Well, I think it's super accurate. There's no question that Anthropic's whole mantra—and Ben Thompson pointed this out in one of his pieces—is that they believe AI is super dangerous and only they are virtuous enough to basically control the negatives of it. That is basically their view on it.

They're the Jedi. They believe that they will bring balance to the universe and that they are the ones who can adjudicate all of these rulings. Yes, they believe they're superior to everyone else, which is why they are a magnet for talent.

Now, what I would say is that I don't think they have a particular problem with the Trump administration per se. What I would say is that they got spoiled by the Biden administration because they had totally captured the Biden administration. The proof of that is the fact that the leaders of the Biden administration's AI policy—not just 1 of them, but all of them—went to work at Anthropic the minute the Biden administration was over.

I'm talking about officials who were in charge of AI for the NSC, the ones who were in charge of the new AI Safety Institute, which was something that Anthropic basically set up under the Biden administration. The person who was effectively my predecessor as AI czar—they all went to work at Anthropic.

There's no politics going on here, except it's incredibly tribal. Okay?

No, I just think that they got used to the fact that they were incredibly organized for a startup and prioritized government affairs from an early stage, maybe before any other AI company. I think Dario went to Washington very early on and convinced key officials in the Biden administration of this idea that AI was extremely dangerous and needed to be controlled by the government in some sort of merger between the government and a very small number of hand-selected companies—2 or 3 of them.

It was that message that Marc Andreessen heard. Remember, when he went to meet with the government, they said, “Don't waste your time investing in different AI companies. We're going to anoint the winners. It's only going to be a couple of them. We're going to create a cartel.”

I think the way that Anthropic describes it is that they describe competition between AI companies as a dangerous race condition, meaning they all just start racing toward AGI and therefore safety falls by the wayside. They want to centralize and control. They see competition as a nefarious force, so they want centralization. They effectively want to create a cartel, and that is their view of AI safety.

Now, you can see how, in their language, they could see it as being virtuous. But if you see it from the point of view of what's really happening, which is that they're trying to create a monopoly, duopoly, or cartel, it's incredibly self-serving. And that is the danger.

I do think that a fundamental philosophical question is whether you think competition is a good force or a bad force. In my opinion, competition is a good force. It's what protects consumers. It gives consumers choice. It also brings out the best in competitors, and that's regulatory capture.

The power, too, right? You don't have 1 person you're dependent on.

Yes, and it has a greater chance of leading to decentralization. I think centralization is the greatest threat of AI. You don't want it to become a totalitarian force.

So, there's a fundamental ideological difference here. But you have to say Dario was incredibly successful at resetting the conversation with Mythos.

You go back to, I think it was April, and they had just been kicked out of the Department of War because of that unsuccessful contract negotiation. Then, all of a sudden, they came to Washington and declared they had invented this cyberweapon. They basically freaked everyone out and got everyone to go along with their idea of some sort of government approval regime. It was only because of their own—I don't know, you could say hubris.

Hubris or delusion.

Yeah, their delusion or hubris. They misplayed it, and it ended up getting kicked out under their own nascent pre-approval regime.

Hey, Friedberg, just one last question for you. If we do tip over into superintelligence and it becomes cataclysmic for humanity, and we look back on this conversation, what would have been the right thing to do, Pym, for the government?

Again, there's this important force that needs to continue to maintain its strength, which is to avoid the natural instinct to control this stuff. This happened with the desktop computing revolution and the mainframe computing revolution. Do you guys know there were articles published in Newsweek and The New York Times in 1961 that talked about the demise of the workforce because of the computer?

They said, “We've now automated everything. Humans are irrelevant. No one will have a job. The workforce will go away.” It was an existential threat in the media at that time. And what happened? The mainframe computer drove productivity. Every individual who worked was able to do 100 times more work.

Then the same thing happened with the desktop computer. That also enabled economic mobility, productivity gains, and new industries. Everyone said when that happened, “This is the end of the workforce. No one's going to be able to get a job anymore. Everyone's getting replaced. It's over. We've got to retrain our entire workforce.”

In fact, the federal government did this deal in the early '80s. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on workforce training programs that literally did nothing. It was all about, “Oh my God, we've got to get our workforce ready to transition to the desktop computer industry.” You know what ended up happening? People figured out that it wasn't that difficult to turn on a Windows PC, right?

Yeah.

Companies figured out how to help employees navigate and transition to higher levels of productivity by taking advantage of this new technology and these new tools. The same thing is going to happen here. This whole notion that AGI wipes out everything and this is the end conclusion—there's a deep arrogance to technologists.

Yeah.

Arrogance, and we know it. It's what drives all of us. But that arrogance always leads to these existential conclusions: “This will cure all cancer. This will solve all disease. This will eradicate all jobs.”

No one's immune to this arrogance—from Elon to Sam to Dario to all of us. We all assume that this time is different and everything's about to change completely. And you know what? It doesn't. We're all part of this long-term continuum of technological and productivity improvements driven by human ingenuity, which unlocks human potential and gives humans more capacity to do more. It's awesome.

There's no job-loss narrative, just an end-of-the-world narrative, and that is driving us all into an insane frenzy. Everyone needs to chill the fuck out and just let technology do what it does.

These companies need to stop doom-trolling. They need to stop doom-trolling. Do you see that in your New York Times op-ed?

Look, this is all downstream of the fact that these AI CEOs have been scaring the daylights out of the public with respect to AI. It was totally unnecessary. And by the way, J Kai, I just want to say one other thing: I am not happy about this result. I'm not happy about the fact that Anthropic is in this predicament.

Why? Because I don't like the precedent. I hope this does not become precedential. I don't want policy being made out of these types of emergencies. I trust it won't be. I hope this won't become the basis for policy. I hope it's a one-off.

You think they should regulate themselves?

As I've been saying, if you go back to April, here's the thing that's really crazy. I just saw that Dario did this interview with Bloomberg, with Emily Chang, and he said that by not releasing Mythos in April, the company suffered massively commercially.

He's acting like he's doing this great and noble thing for humanity, this great sacrifice. The truth is that if he had released Mythos with no guardrails in April, he would have exposed the company to massive legal exposure because thousands of companies would have gotten hacked. It would have been very easy to say that was a foreseeable consequence of releasing Mythos with no safety features and no guardrails.

Look, right now Meta is being sued. They just lost a multimillion-dollar verdict because a user accused them of body-shaming. Meta and Google are both being deluged with product-liability lawsuits right now.

So you're telling me that it was this great sacrifice for humanity that you didn't release Claude 4 when it was patently unsafe back in April? Of course you had to include the safety features. Of course you would have exposed yourself to liability that could have put you out of business. That is just good business practice. That is corporate responsibility.

You shouldn't deserve this giant pat on the back, and you didn't need to go to Washington and freak everybody out like this. I mean, you should have quietly done it.

It is what it is.

You could have quietly gone to the NSA and said, “Listen—”

They're going to get kneecapped by the hyperscalers. It's a clear lane for them to say, “Let us be your trusted partners.”

By the way, if you look at their balance sheets, the hyperscalers are out over their ski tips. They have trillions of dollars of on-balance-sheet and off-balance-sheet exposure to AI. The best thing they can do to underwrite all that money is to kneecap the frontier labs and play gatekeeper. Charge a toll, take a tax. It is Business 101.

They're going to say that they're the adult supervision.

By the way, it's regulatory capture 101.

Yes, that's not regulatory capture.

Yeah.

Well, they're creating a market opportunity for themselves because these companies have doom-trolled their way into it.

They've doom-trolled their way into it.

They want the public to trust them.

That's what I'm saying. Regulatory capture is when you surreptitiously, in the dead of night, swoop into Washington and introduce some bill as a Christmas-tree ornament in a Christmas-tree bill. This is literally the exact opposite with the same outcome. I agree with you, Jason, which is you bumble your way into getting kneecapped by everybody around you.

No, no. I guess that analogy would be: They literally walked themselves into prison and handed the hyperscalers the keys and were like, “Please lock us up.”

They closed the door themselves. They locked it. They threw the keys out the window. “Yes, we're locking ourselves up.”

All right, the Iran war might be ending after 110 days. President Trump has announced for the 37th time that the war has ended and that the initial agreement on June 15 will be codified. There are a lot of details here and a lot of unknowns.

The conflict began, obviously, on February 28. The formal signing happens Friday, June 19, in Geneva. The deal was mediated by Pakistan and extends the ceasefire for 60 days. It includes a Lebanon ceasefire. The US gets the Strait of Hormuz reopened, which was open before the war, obviously.

Iran commits to not developing nuclear weapons. Iran agrees to destroy its stockpile of enriched uranium under IAEA supervision, and it will freeze its nuclear program at current levels for 60 days. Iran gets all sanctions lifted and $300 billion in reconstruction.

So we spent $100 billion, $200 billion blowing the place up, and we and our partners in the Gulf are going to spend $300 billion.

No, we're not on the hook for a dime, JCal.

Okay, I was just saying there's some people in the Gulf who are going to be involved in this, and we'll get into it. Iran's going to get access to its frozen assets, and the US is going to remove its forces from the region after the final deal.

A lot of stuff isn't defined yet and will be deferred, like Israel's sign-on to this deal. There are a bunch of spicy comments happening there. Iran's nuclear enrichment going forward—that's not resolved. Iran's ballistic missile program, which is kind of important, is also not yet resolved.

I'll stop here. Obviously, there's a lot in play. Many people said the reason to vote for Trump was because he would never start wars. He started a couple. What's your take on where we're at today, Sacks?

Well, I think this deal is a tremendous achievement for the president. I think it was very difficult to get. I think the Iranians are not easy to negotiate with.

You'd think.

Let's review this deal. Number one, it reopens the Strait of Hormuz. That means all the oil will flow, along with all the other vital materials that are necessary for the global economy. So that's number one.

Number two, we have a commitment from them not to pursue a nuclear program and to collect all of the nuclear materials. Number three, there's a ceasefire in the war on all the different fronts. Number four, this will not cost us a dime. There is a reconstruction fund, but we're not paying for it. I don't see why that's a problem for us.

Who's paying for it?

I guess it's something that the Iranians will do in combination with the Gulf states, but the US is not on the hook for that money.

We're not paying a dime. And then lastly, this could lead to a rapprochement with Iran, which I think could be a good thing, because I don't think we need to be at war with that country forever. And look, what is the alternative to this deal? I'm seeing a lot of people take potshots and criticize the deal, but what is the alternative to this?

I'm hearing neocons who basically want us to put ground troops in and try to effectuate regime change in Iran. This is what I'm hearing. I heard John Podhoretz say this. I'm hearing other neocons say this. I mean, are you serious? Are we really going to escalate this war by putting ground troops in? Who exactly do you want to go fight?

What I heard John Podhoretz say is, “We have a volunteer army, so they signed up for this.” No, they didn't. They signed up to protect America, not to go charging into Iran, which is basically a mountain fortress. I've heard estimates that it would take over 1,000,000 troops, and even then it might not be successful.

We sent half a million to Iraq, and Iran is 3 times bigger as a country and is a mountain fortress. So that would be a suicide mission. That would be insane. Nobody wants that. I'm not sending my kids to fight that war. You don't want to send your kids to fight that war.

If John Podhoretz and the neocons want to do it, let them send their kids and their family. If Reza Pahlavi wants to go to Beverly Hills and muster an army from his legion of supporters, let him try and do that. I don't think they will sign up for it. I think they're living too well in Beverly Hills. Nobody wants to fight that war. That is the alternative here.

Sax, is the permit a deal?

If we're not going to send in ground troops, and we're not going to continue the bombing, because what's the point? We already flattened every military target above ground in that country. So what is the point of continuing bombing?

Then we might as well hold on. If my point is, if we're not going to send in ground troops because it makes no sense, and we're not going to continue the bombing because it makes no sense, then we might as well try what's behind door number 3, which is a deal here that will try to create a peace.

Remember, we're only at the beginning of this, but let's give peace a chance here. I don't understand these people who just want this war to go on forever. Haven't we tried that before—the forever wars of Iraq and Afghanistan? We're really going to sign up for another one of those? I don't think so.

Look, it's easy for people to take potshots at the president here, but I think this is by far the best of all the alternatives.

Sacks, the long-term issue has been the enrichment of uranium to the point that it can be used as a nuclear weapon. Is it part of the deal that all that enriched uranium—which we know there's a stockpile of—gets removed from the country? Because if that goes, I personally feel very good about letting the citizens deal with what they have to deal with.

That's what they've said. This is part of the MOU. They will not only agree not to pursue a nuclear weapon, they will give up their nuclear material.

A big deal. If all that enriched uranium comes out of the country, I think it's a very big deal, because even if they restarted the program, even if they resourced the equipment and rebuilt the intelligence to do it, it's going to take years—10 to 15 years, plus—to build enough enriched uranium to build a nuclear weapon.

That would be the natural setback, if you will, that provides some defense for the conditions that we really care about. I didn't realize that was in the deal. I thought the deal was just that they would make a commitment to stopping a program, but if all that enriched uranium is coming out, that's a really big deal.

Well, they still have to define it. Again, this is at the MOU stage. This is at the level of high-level principles. They have to define exactly how that program is going to work, but what they get in exchange is relief from the sanctions and a more normalized relationship with the U.S. There's an incentive there for them if they're willing to basically give that up.

Any take here, or do you want to check in or not?

I think the market's going to the moon.

I'll just add, I'm glad if this gets consummated. It was a huge blunder for Trump to do this, and obviously he's trying to get out of it. He shouldn't have ever done it, but here we are, and I hope it resolves. I hope the people of Iran are free eventually.

Is it worth it, J Cal, to have gone through what we went through over the last couple of months if all of the Iranian enriched uranium is gone, their missiles are depleted, and they have no capacity to enrich uranium again?

I mean, just looking at it, if you put this all together summarily and said, “Hey, there was this big war and the stuff that happened, and all the loss of life, and suddenly this real risk of nuclear war,” it's a great question.

As I've said from the beginning of this, we don't have complete information. Four venture capitalists, capital allocators, and entrepreneurs can speculate all they want, but we don't see what Trump sees, right? You have to be humble enough to know we don't know what information he had in all of this.

But the mowing of the grass, the hedging, the gardening approach that Israel had been taking all this time—that was the right approach. Isolating dictators and waiting them out is always the better approach than starting full-scale wars with them, because you don't know what could happen in an escalation. It's simply not worth the risk.

Much better to just send the air troops in and clean it up. We did not need to go collect this material, obviously, because we have these bunker busters and we can just slam it every few months, and that would have been a much better approach.

Just like we've contained North Korea for all this time, and we contain other dictators with weapons—

North Korea hasn't had a nuke?

What are you talking about? North Korea has a nuke.

No, no, but we've contained them.

We actually did have this discussion with Graham Allison about, “Hey, why didn't we contain that one when we had a chance?” That was a mistake by other presidencies, to allow them to get this far. And then once they have it, it's really hard.

In this case, it was working very well. Every 18 months, we bombed the facilities. It was fine. We didn't need to start a full-scale war. We're probably going to wind up where we were at the start of all this.

I hope that at some point the people of Iran are free. That's my true hope. But people have to—we can't enforce democracy in the Middle East. We've learned that over and over and over again. The people have to lead their own revolution. We can't facilitate it.