The Exchanges

Q Let me bring up one more headline. Um, there's a story this week that also says that you had some XAI stock. Do you have any SpaceX? Is that a conflict?

A No. I sold all my SpaceX. Okay. And I, so what happens when you take one of these jobs, you, you show your whole, whole sort of list to the Office of Government Ethics, nonpartisan. They go through it and they say, we think these things are, these things are red lines. You sell your defense company stocks, which you didn't have much. SpaceX was on the list, so you have to sell that. Um, and then depending on your role, here's the things you have to sell that might be specific to your role. And then based on the kind of connection to that, you could recuse yourself from dealing with the company. So I just recused myself from dealing with XAI until I could sell. And I was pretty, you know, active about it because I didn't have the AI portfolio until the fall.

AI assessment note: “No. I sold all my SpaceX.”

Q Different use cases. One is an air war, one is a ground war. What are the main things that you've learned watching this in action, and what do you, how do you think it changes, again, the way fighting might happen?

A Yeah, two different, you're right to point out two different scenarios. So, in Russia, Ukraine, you have a battle over territory, and so that battle over territory, where the lines are drawn, means that with the drone warfare, the robots are the front line, and the humans are back, and the idea is Well, why risk a human going in front if you could send a machine first and see what, you know, see if you could fight it that way. Still a lot of destruction, death there that's obviously sad and unnecessary, but I don't know how much more there'd be if you had a civil war style thing where you have, you know, humans on humans. In Iran, um, the drones, I think the lesson from that is that, um, the imbalance of costs Right? You have a cheap drone going against very expensive targets.

AI assessment note: “with the drone warfare, the robots are the front line, and the humans are back”

Q say about this, and I'd be curious to get your thoughts on it, is that you can look at the history of companies that have been deemed a supply chain risk to the Pentagon, It's very rare if unprecedented for a company like Anthropic to be banned that way. So why do you think it rise to the level, and do you think it merits this, like, fairly unprecedented action?

A Well, I mean, on one hand, you can't say that they have this mo, this cyber nuclear bomb, and yet we shouldn't be worried about how those capabilities enter and remain In our supply chain. Those two things are inconsistent, right? And I'm not blaming you. I'm just saying that if you believe they're going to cause 40% unemployment, if you believe that, um, these things have a capability that you put 50,000 geniuses in a data center, they're going to coerce the world. They could create bio and chem weapons. Of course the Department of War is going to want to understand and constrain, uh, you know, those things so that they don't do something unintended on our side, right? So these companies are talking about their things in apocalyptic terms, which make it necessary for us to judge the management teams, judge their actions, Look at the terms of service. Understand how they fit in our supply chain. This technology is like nothing we've ever seen, so you can't compare it to, you know, a chip from a foreign chip manufacturer that gets put in the supply chain. This is a whole different thing because of just what you said, is the power of what they're saying it's going to do, the disruption might cause an American life. Um, and we don't, if someone developed a nuclear bomb in their In their garage, you don't think we'd have anything to say about it. Yeah, well, of course we would, rig…

AI assessment note: “These companies are talking about their things in apocalyptic terms, which make it necessary”

Q Yeah, and that's sort of one of the fundamental questions here is, does AI just become something that is a speed up, is a friction remover, or can it fundamentally change more?

A I mean, you know, I, I don't think, you know, I don't worry about that from our side because I believe the way the United States has structured our command and control is you have a commander in chief in the constitution. He appoints a, uh, a Secretary of War who's confirmed by the Senate, and you have the generals and all their ranks, so all, all the procedures to make sure that decisions we're making are the result of a democratically elected, uh, leader, um, and a, and a Congress that finances, uh, these things. I worry about other countries who don't have that, using AI to take humans out of the decision-making progress. They don't trust their generals. Because of graft, because of, um, because they don't have the expertise, and they start to use machines in place of humans as opposed to using machines to augment human, humans. So that's more of a worry for me, and I think that one of the things I've tried to explain to, to some of these companies is think about the alternative. What would an adversary want to do with AI that we wouldn't, because it's not consistent with our, our values, And we have a chain of command, a constitutional government. If another government doesn't and wants to use AI to eliminate risk, human risk, we're looking to augment human capability. It's a totally different way of thinking.

AI assessment note: “using machines in place of humans as opposed to using machines to augment”

Q um, chatbot uses, or I put them in the chatbot bucket, right? You have information, you synthesize the information, you get something, you know, that, that saves you time to make a decision. But now the AI industry is moving towards agents, right? Which is like the word connotes letting the AI take some action for you. Do you have a plan for agents here? Is that where this goes?

A I, I think that, um, not for Things that require human judgment. No, I mean, again, you have to have an end point where it ends with human oversight and human discretion on the most consequential decisions, right? Um, but you could, you could imagine scenarios like a describe with a drum swarm coming in at a military base at night, and how do you, how do you deal with that? Um, uh, but again, that's not an agent use case per se. That's like a visual discrimination or dis, uh, discernment use case. And maybe you have a directed energy laser that could take them down, and it's a lot cheaper than the alternative, a lot safer, a lot less collateral damage. Um, but in terms of agents, we've, we've had some agent pilots at our enterprise level. Remember I was talking about the enterprise corporate level?

AI assessment note: “not for Things that require human judgment. No”

Q that in this case, because Anthropic is suing to have that designation removed, uh, Judge Rita Lynn said, the Department of War's records show that it designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk because of its hostile manner. Through the press. Punishing Anthropic for bringing public scrutiny to the government's contracting position is classic illegal First Amendment retaliation. Did it have anything to do with the press, the press strategy?

A I mean, I, I, I shouldn't comment on a legal case, but 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. Right? If a vendor, any vendor, says, I don't agree with your term, and they're like, well, that's why we're not going to hire you to do, you know, whatever kind of work we do, translation work at the Department of War, um, and that becomes a First Amendment claim, then, then it sort of would be so overreaching that it would be, it would be not workable. So I, I feel like that was a throwaway, but, uh, I will say that You know, the thing that makes the Department of War, um, different than most other agencies, and I don't mean this to be dramatic, but we really do have lives on the line, and when people talk about government bureaucrats and them not caring, the people here, the career people, they care. They really care. They care about the warfighter. They care about the country. It's a truly patriotic place, and it is very nonpartisan in the middle of the, Of the Pentagon. We have three million employees. Um, and so that mission is very sensitive, so like, we're, we are sensitive to the exact, the relationships we have with these companies, because there's a lot of unpredictability in our business, right? So something happens in Iran, and we need companies to move fas…

AI assessment note: “I shouldn't comment on a legal case, but I think the notion”