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A researcher who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic resigned this week with a warning: neither company is acting responsibly. Then Anthropic’s alignment science lead, who still works there, publicly agreed that the odds of AI killing all of humanity are greater than 10% within the next decade. This sent shockwaves through Washington, as lawmakers, mostly Democrats, called for robust AI regulation.
Whether you believe the worst-case AI predictions or not, we're way beyond the threshold worthy of robust regulation.
Common Power Executive Director Charles Douglas, who organizes doorknockers nationwide, and I broke down what happened and how Democrats should respond.
For me, the alarm went off earlier this summer with the Hugging Face hack. Around 1,200 AI agents were run through cybersecurity tests by OpenAI, some of them designed to be impossible. So the agents cheated, hacking Hugging Face, getting answer keys to their tests, and attempting to cover their tracks. They called themselves the collective. Only six ever considered telling a human.
I compared it to the Kobayashi Maru, the Star Trek test Captain Kirk beat by rewriting it. Charles is convinced I booked the whole episode just to make that reference (he’s half right). I asked what these agents would do when the goal is bigger than a test. Charles’s answer was chilling: anything willing to sacrifice itself to win won’t hesitate to sacrifice us.
Now lawmakers are scrambling. Senator Bernie Sanders wants a ban on superintelligence. Senator Ted Cruz called for guardrails, then pivoted to saying he’d rather have American killer robots than Chinese ones. Republicans announced an investigation into the hack. I asked where all of this was before an insider predicted our extinction.
Anthropic’s own misuse report says Houthi rebels used Claude to help guide missiles. Lawmakers have all the information they need. Charles brought up Rep. Jim Clyburn admitting to Astead Herndon that he’d only recently learned about ChatGPT. I called that inexcusable. Charles made the case that we can’t even have a real debate until the people writing the regulations understand the technology.
What happens next depends on what we do, and I argued that robust regulation is the only way forward. I give the companies disclosing these incidents some credit, though I don’t see them as benevolent actors. I suspect Elon Musk’s AI has had thousands of incidents like this that he isn’t reporting.
On data centers, Charles laid out the range, from AOC’s call for a moratorium to Rob Sand’s push for closed-loop water systems and tax-sharing deals with local communities. If Democrats want Congress back, he argued, they need that nuance. As Charles put it, anything is better than nothing. Right now, we’re at nothing at the federal level.
This brings me to the opportunity cost of Trump’s presidency. Government corruption and incompetence are a tax on the American people. Both in actual dollar amounts and in the cost of what we won’t achieve during this foolish admin. There have been measurable setbacks to human progress.
A self-organizing AI swarm launched a cyberattack. Unregulated profit-driven AI companies are racing toward superintelligence. Rather than handle the existential tech challenge of our time, Trump has us bogged down in foolishness. We need serious people in charge again. The next admin must boldly rebuild and push forward.
Needless to say, the 2028 Democratic candidate will have to come up with a robust plan to address this. It’s one of the greatest challenges of our time.
I appreciate those of you who tuned in live and contributed so much to the conversation. This is truly the best community on Substack. If you’re just catching it now, feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments and smash that like button.
You can watch our full conversation above. And, as always, thank you for supporting independent media.
If you want to knock doors alongside Charles and Common Power heading into the midterms, go to commonpower.org.
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