The Ledger, every show

“Well, they came up now because as I started to look at the contracts that had been written during the last administration for the use of AI. I had a whole, holy cow moment because there were things not well beyond what you've been hearing in the press in the l…”

“And then second, after the Maduro raid, one of the primary vendor for this had raised the question, senior exec about whether their software was used during the Maduro raid, which is one of the most successful op military, military operations of our lifetime. …”

“Your models are getting stolen by the Chinese. They're going to unguard rail them and use them against us.”

“After the Maduro raid, one of their execs called Palantir, who we buy themselves through and asked them was our software used in that raid, which is by the way, classified information.”

“He was trying to protect anthropic to his credit. He was like, don't do, don't call him a supply chain risk. That's bad for the industry. Let me, maybe I can negotiate terms that they'll find acceptable.”

“That's why I think Benchmark ultimately is going to, is, has no innovation. Forget the reputation, which most entrepreneurs, if they do their deals, will find out about, but just not innovating stuck at four hundred thirty-five million for the next 10 years is…”

“I think the notion that a First Amendment claim is going to hold up is, is, would be shocking, because that means that the government has no choice to make.”

“In 90 days, I think we've had 1.2 million of the three million people at the department. Use some form of AI when that was, that number was 80,000 before I started.”

“In terms of boots on the ground, there's no scenario where we have some protracted boots on the ground, Afghanistan, Iraq too, like scenario.”

“Anthropic has its own constitution. It has its own soul. It's not the U S constitution.”

“And Throbic's not going to be one of them if they continue sort of with their sort of posture.”

“It's a criticism on me because it's not like Trump, President Trump dipped in and he's like, hey, Emil, by the way, those guys didn't get me any money. You can't use them anymore.”

“You called president Trump and your 5000 word essay on Friday, a wannabe dictator. You're gonna have to apologize to more people than just me.”

“They were the first of the big frontier AI companies to say, we want to work at Department of Defense. They were easy to work with on the contract. We're paying 47 cents For the whole year for all of this. So they're like taking, taking a loss to make sure tha…”

“I think we, instead of buying Kareem in the Middle East, Postmates, Jump Bike I think all of those will be a hundred percent write downs. Those are some of the worst acquisitions done in tech. Maybe Postmates may be the worst acquisition done tech in the last …”

“We just did a RFI for space-based interceptors, which is how do you put something in space that could take something down in space.”

“And one of the examples I use Palantir and Roland, SpaceX, all had to sue the government for their first big contract, because the primes were sophisticated at selling, sophisticated at protecting their interests.”

“It's, you have the same rules of engagement, the same approval system. What you now have is better aggregation and synthesis of the data that you would already use to make that decision.”

“Look what happened in Venezuela. The speed at which that execution of that operation happened meant that we didn't have any casualties on our side.”

“I think if you think about the biggest military buildup in world history in China, and you think of it, you've seen the purge of the generals and sort of the military hierarchy there,”

“The provisions that were in the contracts that ultimately serve the Department of War said you can't use it for planning kinetic actions, you can't use it to develop weapon systems, so all the science, engineering, aerodynamics, all...”

“They wanted us to rewrite the law because they thought Congress was just behind. They weren't understanding that new tech allowed new capabilities, but again, it's not our mission.”

“You have four companies that you could call frontier companies, and then you have this sort of major league baseball roster of researchers, like a thousand who they're trading amongst themselves, who, if you ask the leaders of these companies are so incredibly…”

“Google didn't want to bid on the contract. Now Google is a great partner, you know, and so I'd hope some of the newer companies would learn from what Google did, which is, you know, they didn't want to serve the government because that employee mob issues, but…”

“And so they've learned a lot of lessons and you compare that to the Chinese military. They don't have a lot of experience. In fact, the decapitation they did in the Chinese military, the one guy they took out was the one guy who had experience in Vietnam. So t…”

“They say you can't use them for, you can't use them to plan a kinetic strike. You can't use their AI model to move a satellite.”

“So then that culminated in the Tuesday kind of dramatic meeting with Hexeth and Secretary Hexeth and me and Dario with the Friday deadline that, that got blown.”

“Yeah, so they put their model in AWS GovCloud. And then Palantir serves it from there. And they refresh it. They held the control plane for the model.”

“These, the leaders of these companies say they're going to cause 50% white collar unemployment.”

“Grok's all in. For all lawful use cases across all classified and unclassified networks”

“The number one reason we were having this conversation at all is because they were deeply embedded.”

“I believe in 12 months codex is not going to be close.”

“Generally I do think warfare is going from big carrier ships that cost twenty billion dollars and a decade and a half to build To mass attributable, low cost things.”

“It is true that Chinese have had the greatest military buildup in world history in the last 15 years”

“So, you know, in 10 years, it wouldn't surprise me if 20, 30% of the budget is, is, is spent on those kinds of systems.”

“The buildup, the military buildup in China is the biggest military buildup in world history.”

“SpaceX and Anderil and Palantir all had to sue the Department of War for their first contract.”

“So all these funding cycle mechanisms are a way to get at that valley of death. And I think we've got, we're really close to sort of pinching, pinching that. Into, to being very minimal if it exists at all.”

“A brushless motor goes into a drone. We're dependent on China for brushless motors.”

“I mean, you know, fiber optic cable, we don't make fiber optic cables in this country. Fiber optic, you know, basic fiber, which they're using in the Ukraine and Russia war to do drones because they're jamming and all that, and we use for telecom and all that.”

“I think we're already caught up in so many areas and surpass them, but they've made a lot of ground.”

“Which is why in two months of owning, being the chief AI, having the chief AI office run in my world, which was a new move, we were able to launch gen AI, which is Google's Gemini for four million, every, every employee, military and civilian in the department…”

“Palantir and Roland, SpaceX, all had to sue the government for the first big contract, because the primes were sophisticated at selling, sophisticated protecting their interests.”

“So they've developed certain capabilities in certain hypersonic missile categories, ah, at a price that, ah, that we haven't achieved yet, which is why one of my critical technology areas is high, scaled hypersonics at cost.”

“99% of the people who went through Uber say it was the best experience of their life. What you read about is that one percent, and I think people are really longing for that culture again in business.”

“Uber over time has probably paid a hundred billion dollars to drivers. A hundred billion dollars.”

“I'd say that the deal that Was under my watch. I didn't like it at the time, but I, you know, it got done was Uber acquiring auto, which was the autonomous car division that that gets started out of Google guys. It was, and I didn't like it for different reaso…”

“I think we're at the end of the beginning, though, not the end of the end. The next phase is structured rounds, down rounds, like true down rounds and then sales were, unfortunately, companies sort of not making it, and I think that'll happen in Q one, you kno…”