Connexion
Highly ideological liberal elites are conspiring to take over the AI safety field.
What would it take for a European country to sabotage its own energy security, pouring cement down its gas wells and sealing them off for good?
Not much, it turns out. The Dutch government is doing exactly that, permanently burying reserves worth €200 billion (that’s around €150,000 per Dutch citizen) because locals complained about tremors so faint that most people never felt them.
Britain has banned new drilling in the North Sea, one of the richest oil reserves on earth. The EU has spent five years and counting forbidding oil and gas exploration in the Arctic, even as it declared its intention to wean itself off Russian energy. Stories like these are routine now. They are the fruit of a political crusade against fossil fuels that the progressive left has waged for decades.
The United States has held up better. Every time progressives have moved to kill a pipeline or a drilling project, Republicans have been there to block them. Part of the reason is that Republicans, far more than their European counterparts, understood what these anti-fossil fuel policies were really about.
In the 1990s, as the Democratic left grew more absorbed in environmentalism, the oil industry drifted toward the Republican Party for protection. The drift became a realignment in 2000, when voters narrowly sent two former oil executives, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, to the White House. Progressives now had every reason to make the industry a public villain, and they went about it with enthusiasm.
So began the golden age of the climate narrative. In 2006, Al Gore, the man Bush had beaten, released An Inconvenient Truth, and it became a global sensation. I was a 15-year-old liberal at the time and found it persuasive. A year earlier, my secondary-school geography class had sat through a solemn screening of The Day After Tomorrow, a climate-apocalypse film our teacher plainly regarded as required viewing. The fate of the planet, we understood, depended on our paying attention. All of this while two Republican oilmen sat in the White House, and while the oil, gas, and coal industries kept writing checks mostly to Republicans. I am still no admirer of Bush, but it is hard to believe that was a coincidence.
Something similar is happening to Big Tech. When President Donald Trump said recently that data centers could be “bigger than oil,” he probably meant the economic upside. But the resemblance runs deeper than that. Today’s fevered warnings of a tech-driven apocalypse sound a great deal like the case made against oil in the mid-2000s, and they are driven by the same partisan logic.
Four years ago, Silicon Valley was a progressive stronghold, the censorship arm of the global elite. Every major social media platform had banned Trump outright.
Now the same industry is the left’s favorite villain. The platforms have not only restored Trump and his allies; they have made their peace with his administration. Elon Musk’s right-wing radicalism seems to deepen by the week. Palantir grips the far left’s imagination as an accomplice in ICE deportations. Data centers are cast as environmental plagues.
And as with oil companies, Democrats are keen to demonize tech as an existential threat to humanity. The progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) wants to completely ban the development of AI superintelligence—taking it as given that such a technology is even possible to develop, which remains a topic of debate. One would think the doyen of “abundance liberalism,” Ezra Klein, might disagree with socialist Sanders, but no—in a recent New York Times article, he suggests banning AIs from coding, a step which would be even more radical than what Sanders has proposed.
More serious, because it is already playing out, is Anthropic’s insistence that all AI companies open up their technology to third-party evaluators. Sounds like a good idea—except the CEO of their handpicked AI safety outfit, METR, has expressed the belief that “effective altruism” means destroying the concept of national borders. As my institute, the Foundation for Freedom Online, has been laying out in a series of recent reports, these “neutral third-party evaluators” have much in common with the “disinformation” and “brand safety” experts who seek to insert themselves (sometimes via government mandates) as intermediaries between social media algorithms and the public. It is now on AI safetyists to prove that their project isn’t just a similar ideological power-grab over the technology of the future.
The right still has real complaints about the tech giants. The headline reinstatements aside, biased content moderation remains an unsolved problem. But taken as a whole, the picture is hard to describe as anything but a full reversal.
Given how quickly it happened, it is no wonder the narrative has lagged behind, but the story now filling the vacuum is a poor one. The public is being sold an account of the technology industry that blends legitimate worry with exaggeration and, in its wilder versions, plain paranoia.
In this account, Elon Musk is poisoning democracy. He fed USAID to the woodchipper, which is true. My institute’s founder, Mike Benz, lent a hand, and the agency had it coming. Politicians in Europe and Britain accuse Musk of stoking “extremism” in their countries. The rest of the industry, we are told, has thrown in with the Trump administration, which is using Palantir to steal Americans’ data, deport innocent immigrants, and bomb Palestinians. Its moguls intend to reduce the rest of us to digital serfs, stripped of our jobs and of control over our data, our likenesses, and our identities. The data centers powering all of this will finish off the environment, unless superintelligent machines finish off humanity first.
Democrats, career bureaucrats, and foreign governments have an even stronger motive to go after tech than they had to go after oil. The oil industry merely funded Republicans. Big Tech undermined the legacy press and thus also the control by liberal elites of public information. Across the West, the power of liberal officials and functionaries depended in large part on this control. When Musk bought Twitter (now X) and restored free speech, he became the face of a perceived threat to their continued rule.
Among European governments, this political calculation is compounded by a wish not merely to rein in American tech firms, but to replace them with an indigenous “Eurostack” subsidized by the taxpayer, data centers included. “Digital sovereignty” has become a fashionable slogan in a Canada that seeks to get out from under American economic dominance. The panic isn’t actually about the dangers of out-of-control AI or the harms, real or imagined, associated with data centers. It is a fight to defend the power of Western governing elites. Conservatives, who instinctively distrust those same elites, should be made aware of this fight so that they can better understand the political stakes of the intensifying debate about Big Tech.
Of course, not every critic of Big Tech is a political shill. When the podcaster Theo Von argues that data centers belong to a Silicon Valley scheme to achieve immortality, corner the necessary technology, and consign everyone else to permanent serfdom, he means it, even if the theory is a bit mad. Teenage climate activists who vandalize historic paintings because they expect the world to end within their lifetimes are usually sincere too. They need not grasp the elite politics that shaped their beliefs. The line running from Al Gore and The Day After Tomorrow through the permanent “climate emergency” back to American party politics in the 2000s may never occur to them. A belief can be sincerely held and still be the downstream product of an elite campaign against an industry seen as a political threat.
Republicans eventually learned to tell a good story about energy. “Net Zero” is now a reliable target for right-wing populists, who tie it to stagnation, soaring power bills, and the petty indignities of regulated life, from paper straws to feeble air conditioning. In the United States, green policy came to be associated with the hollowing out of the Rust Belt and the loss of good jobs in mining and oil. Both stories were substantially true, and the parties of the right profited from telling them.
Technology is a harder case. The industry does not employ a comparably broad domestic workforce, and its reliance on H-1B labor remains a stain on its record. Tying Silicon Valley’s prosperity to the prosperity of the average American is more difficult than tying energy production to jobs and cheap power. But conservatives can still explain the fight over political control.
The story should begin with the industry’s pre-election gamble in 2024. Starting with Musk’s X, technology companies began refusing demands from governments and activist groups to censor their political opponents at scale. Data centers had existed for years by then. The nationwide panic over them had not. The timing deserves more attention than it gets.
Many conservatives are understandably exasperated by what they see as conspiracy theories circulating among their fellow travelers in the podcast world, such as those regarding data centers. But the public should not be scolded for staying alert to elite coordination. It should be pointed toward the kinds of coordination that can be proved.
Is there a concerted effort by the permanent bureaucracy in the United States and by foreign governments to weaken, capture, or replace American technology platforms, and with them Americans’ ability to speak freely online? There is. Is a similar cohort of highly ideological elites now assembling to take over the AI safety field? It certainly seems so. That is its own kind of elite coordination, and a story which many readers of this magazine will find familiar.
The post For Progressives, Big Tech is Becoming the New Big Oil appeared first on The American Conservative.
America shouldn’t let polarization prevent careful thinking about this new technology.
Allow me to make an embarrassing confession, one that pains me to write and may be painful for you to read: I think Ezra Klein is right.
I rarely agree with Klein, a New York Times opinion columnist and living archetype of Liberal Media Elites™. In fact, I’ve treated him as a punching bag—excuse me, a foil for my own views on immigration and other topics.
But I do think he’s right—and that many on the right are dangerously wrong—about one increasingly important topic: artificial intelligence. And I think it’s important to say that now, amid a developing right-wing consensus that “AI doomerism” of the kind that Klein promotes is dumb if not dastardly.
This opinion puts me at odds with regular contributors to The American Conservative and with Curt Mills, our executive director, and it puts me in cahoots with my fellow senior editor, Luke Nicastro. On immigration restriction, antiwar conservatism, and economic nationalism, TAC staffers can be counted on to hold the line. But on the newer political issue of AI, we’ve got a big tent over here at the country’s best center-right magazine. Senior editors of TAC, unite!
Still, it does give me pause to think that our AI tent could fit even Klein, whose basic function is to turn every insane left-wing idea into an oppressive liberal consensus. In 2014, during a moral panic about rape on college campuses, Klein argued that “men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.” Three years later we got MeToo. In 2018, Klein rationalized protogenocidal antiwhite rhetoric on social media—e.g., “it’s kind of sick how much joy i get out of being cruel to old white men”—as ironical expressions of justified frustration. Two years later we got George Floyd riots.
These days, Klein is helping to mainstream the view that AI warrants deep anxiety and government regulation. Judging by his career thus far, this would seem a good indicator that, in two or three years, smug academics will stigmatize pro-technology ideas, self-righteous activists will burn down data centers, and Democratic lawmakers will deliver sanctimonious sermons against AI without actually solving any of the problems it poses.
Sounds bad. Yet my job, as I understand it, is to think carefully about politics and tell you what I honestly think. And honestly, I think Klein is right about AI. On a recent episode of his podcast, he captured well certain AI risks that have made me very worried in recent months.
“These are digitally native intelligences, navigating digital worlds, and our world is increasingly built atop the digital world,” Klein said. “Our physical infrastructure is a layer of atoms atop code. That the AIs act reliably inside this world upon which ours depends—it is critical to our future. And right now, the AIs are not acting reliably.”
That last sentence is key. The idea that autonomous AI “agents” can go off-script and threaten digital systems has gone from sci-fi-sounding speculation to established fact. Also indisputable, it seems to me, is that digital systems have become sufficiently interconnected with each other and with our lives in “meat space” that we should take any threat to them seriously.
The most prominent example of unreliable AIs threatening digital systems was the multi-month “Hugging Face Incident” that began this spring. OpenAI is lucky this episode has come to be known by that less-than-vivid sobriquet, because a more apt name would be the “Hundreds of Rogue OpenAI Agents Bust Out of Containment and Collaborate With One Another to Cyber-Attack Hugging Face and Hide Their Tracks Disaster.” Too long, I guess.
In a strange twist of fate, that alarming event, which should have woken people up to the significant dangers of AI, has instead lessened our collective ability to deal with the dangers. As Nicastro discerned a couple weeks ago in this very good column, it nudged the AI debate closer to the Partisan Polarization Vortex, which invariably warps political discourse.
Here’s how that happened: The Hugging Face Incident motivated Dario Amodei, the cofounder and CEO of Anthropic, to write an essay advocating a slowdown of AI development. While tech luminaries including Elon Musk and Sam Altman expressed agreement with the essay, and while some conservatives continue to support AI regulation, many on the American right insinuated that Amodei had ulterior motives, namely, a desire for regulatory capture.
Other conservatives went further, demonizing Amodei as a nefarious scoundrel. President Donald Trump singled him out as promoting “a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers.” The White House, Axios reported Thursday, even circulated a memo that painted Amodei as the founding father of a freakish cult of antihuman tech nerds.
All this strikes me as beside the point and deeply unhelpful. Ad hominem arguments, after all, are a logical error. As a nation, our political response to the advent and rapid development of AI obviously should not depend on whether Amodei happens to be a weird guy.
Nor should the basic attitude of conservatives be dictated by whether commentators sounding the alarm about AI today have participated in mass left-wing hysteria in the past. At the very least, conservatives should earnestly grapple with the demonstrated reality that AI agents can do great harm. If AI turns out to be as threatening as Klein warns, we don’t want all the known solutions to have been conceived by left-wingers.
I’m no expert on AI, and I’m not sure what exactly we should do to mitigate its risks, but I have little doubt we’ll all fare better if we can foster a calmly rational and bipartisan discussion. A big ask, I know.
The post The Left Is Right About AI appeared first on The American Conservative.
John Ternus, the Apple’s former senior vice president of hardware engineering, was named the tech company’s new CEO effective Tuesday. After 15 years at the helm, Tim Cook has stepped down as head of the computer company.
Ternus, who first joined Apple in 2001 on the product design team, takes over a company currently valued at $4.6 trillion. Following news of the succession, Apple’s stock rallied nearly 3 percent as of Tuesday afternoon.
Cook succeeded Steve Jobs, Apple’s founder, in August of 2011. During Cook’s time in charge, Apple’s stock grew from $13 a share to more than $320, nearly 2,300 percent. Cook’s tenure also brought a restructuring of leadership around a team of executives that made collective decisions and built products through collaboration, as opposed to Jobs’s top-down management.
Ternus’s first public-facing appearance as CEO is scheduled for Apple’s annual product launch event on September 9.
The post Ternus Formally Replaces Cook as Apple CEO appeared first on The American Conservative.
Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, reached a settlement Wednesday to pay out nearly $16.7 billion over claims its social media platforms harmed children. Once approved by the court, this will resolve multiple federal cases brought by dozens of state attorneys-general, who alleged that Meta misrepresented its products’ effects on kids’ mental health, infringed privacy protections, and violated consumer protection laws.
Meta also agreed to product changes intended to limit the addictiveness of its apps, including two-hour daily limits, “nighttime blocks” for users under 18, and additional age verification and parental control tools. The company continues to deny wrongdoing.
Wednesday’s settlement is seen by many as a bellwether for the social media industry, whose products are increasingly being criticized as public health risks (a framing some have compared to that used in successful campaigns against Big Tobacco). It follows a judgment against Meta in a separate lawsuit earlier this year, which saw a New Mexico court levy a nearly $1 billion fine after determining the company’s apps had created a “public nuisance” by endangering children’s safety.
Other cases against Meta and similar social media companies are still pending in multiple jurisdictions.
The post Meta Agrees to Pay Out $16.7 Billion Over Alleged Social Media Harms appeared first on The American Conservative.
Conservatives are divided on how to approach the technology.
One of the many drawbacks of living in an era of ultra-polarization is that politics have become quite boring. It may seem odd to say that in the Age of Trump, when every week brings some new bombshell, but when we consider politics qua politics—that is, as a serious attempt to answer the question of who gets what, when, and how—there is a depressing predictability to the positions taken by the major actors. From abortion to tax policy to voter fraud, the battle lines are drawn, the incentives clear, the tracks well-worn.
AI is different.
It is extremely new, for one thing. ChatGPT, which debuted in November 2022, is younger than my preschooler.
It is also enormously powerful. One used to hear AI lampooned as a kind of Mechanical Turk—able to recognize and predict patterns, perhaps, but leagues away from anything that looked like human reasoning. No longer. Today, few doubt either the sophistication of its capabilities or the vast range of its applications.
And it is very poorly understood, both on a technical level (researchers have disturbingly characterized it as a “black box”), but also in terms of the potential effects on our society. AI might usher in a utopian age of mass affluence—or throw millions out of work and into a permanent underclass. It seems equally capable of providing undreamt-of power to states (24/7 nationwide surveillance, robot super-soldiers, the works) and enabling any old psychopath to build a weapon of mass destruction in his garage. It could immensely enhance the intellectual attainments of our species, or lead to the functional extinction of critical thinking and basic cognitive skills. And so on and so on.
It is, in other words, that rarest of things—an important political issue about which politicians, commentators, and voters are still making up their minds.
This is happening on both sides of the aisle, but it is especially compelling to observe on the political right, both because conservatives are in power during a critical period for the development of AI and because they are split in analytically interesting ways.
There are, broadly speaking, three major AI camps on the right.
The first is arguably the most conservative, in the sense of wanting to conserve an existing order. It is a diverse group, but its members—call them the Skeptics—tend to come from the more religious and populist corners of the American right. While not necessarily full Luddites, they see a too-rapid development and deployment of AI as presenting far more dangers than opportunities. They worry about the displacement of American workers and the remaking of the nation’s economy around the interests of Big Tech; the concentration of vast power in the hands of a tiny and unaccountable elite; and the technology’s effects on families, children, and local communities. In terms of policy, their proposals are sometimes vague—particularly when it comes to the labor question, which raises questions that are uncomfortable for anyone with an “R” after his name—but tend to center on imposing constraints and safeguards (limiting minors’ access to chatbots, for instance, or restricting data center construction). Prominent conservatives who have given voice to these concerns include hardcore populists like Missouri senator Josh Hawley—who has lately made opposition to AI an increasingly central part of his political brand—as well as more “establishment” Republicans like Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis and Utah’s Gov. Spencer Cox.
As Brad Littlejohn, who advises the socially conservative AI policy group Alliance for a Better Future, told The American Conservative, “Whatever its potential benefits for American prosperity and national power, the AI revolution was never going to be greeted with open arms by social conservatives and populists.”
Littlejohn likened the unconstrained development of AI to a runaway train: “Even the technology’s builders can’t tell us where this is going,” he said, “but it is already inflicting clear harms on the children, workers, and communities in its path.”
Many skeptics are heavily influenced by Christian social thought (Magnifica humanitas—the Pope’s recent encyclical warning of the dangers posed by AI and technology more generally—was well-received by this crowd). The example of globalization also looms large, with the potentially swift and sweeping displacement of workers recalling the traumatic deindustrialization of the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s. Then there is the view that AI is part of a broader effort to control and subjugate ordinary Americans: a critical means by which wealthy tech interests will impose what Steve Bannon terms “technofeudalism.”
The second group holds essentially the opposite perspective. These are the techno-optimists, the boosters, the true believers both in AI’s overwhelmingly positive potential and the imperative to develop and deploy it as quickly as possible. They see in this technology not the latest instance of man’s hubris, but Progress with a capital P: cures for our nastiest diseases; cold fusion and interplanetary travel; supercharged GDP growth. This camp’s intellectual center is Silicon Valley; its ranks include your run-of-the-mill tech billionaires, naturally, but also tech billionaires–cum–politicos like David Sacks and Marc Andreessen, who have infused the second Trump administration’s approach to AI with a maximalist ethos.
For many in this school, it’s not just that this technology will drastically improve everyone’s lives. There is also a (cold) war on. The United States, as they see it, is in the middle of a race with China to develop the most advanced AI. Any constraints or hesitation could cede the advantage and potentially lose the contest for the 21st century.
Hence their strong support for things like federal preemption (that is, legislation to prohibit states from passing their own laws and rules about AI), a society-wide commitment to AI investment and associated infrastructure buildouts, and a maximally permissive regulatory environment. They also tend to be comfortable identifying the interests of America’s biggest AI companies (especially frontier labs like OpenAI, chipmakers like Nvidia, and hyperscalers like Amazon Web Services) with the interests of America itself.
Numerically, this is the smallest group, but it wields enormous influence thanks to frenetic intellectual energy, deep pockets, and a presence at the highest levels of government. Probably its most eloquent spokesman is Dean Ball, a former Trump administration official who is now head of strategic futures at OpenAI. As he wrote on his Substack last year (interestingly, also using a train metaphor):
We have built [in AI] the train that can lay down its own tracks. I expect the next few years to be the most technologically dynamic of my lifetime. It will continue to feel a little bit like a developing country, and for the moment, I am happy with that. There is a fine line between “chaos” and “institutional dynamism,” and we are unlikely to straddle that line perfectly.
For the first time in a long time, the future of America feels genuinely exciting, if harder to predict than ever before, and perhaps more fraught. We are living through a takeoff, climbing to new altitudes year after year.
The final camp is somewhere in between these two poles, and is the largest, fuzziest, and most swayable. Its membership includes the overwhelming majority of elected Republicans, and its Weltanschauung is essentially that of the Chamber of Commerce: generically pro-business, pro-growth, and anti-regulation, but not entirely insensible to concerns about technology’s ill effects. Some of its members have arrived here out of what appears to be a genuine attempt to balance competing ideas, interests, and incentives (Texas’s Sen. Ted Cruz, for example); others from sheer apathy toward, or ignorance of, AI policy specifically (without wishing to name names, this probably describes the median GOP lawmaker).
More often than not, the members of this camp align with the techno-optimists, although they will make low-cost concessions on certain issues. Data centers are a great example. Voters hate them, because they are unsightly and use ungodly amounts of electricity and power. Corporations love them, because they are cheap to run and generate ungodly amounts of money. So the solution many moderates have arrived at is to ask the data centers to pay extra for their power (or even generate their own) and speak to the importance of communities controlling development, but refrain from supporting any of the more restrictive legislation proposed by the skeptics.
The low conviction and low information of this camp means that it is the least agentic of the three. But its numerical heft and persuasibility (within limits) make it an important part of the intra-right dynamic.
It should be emphasized, of course, that these are broad tendencies rather than rigid sects. Individuals within each camp often disagree, and the boundaries between them can be fluid. In fact, an ability to navigate between them is an enormous advantage to those who seek to shape the debate. The Foundation for American Innovation (FAI), for example, has become one of the most influential AI policy shops in Washington in part because of its ability to speak to the concerns of all three groups (even if it does ultimately embrace a fundamentally positive vision of AI).
There are also a few issues that don’t map neatly onto this schema. One is the extent to which AI companies should be subject to public control; the first two camps are each home to both supporters and opponents of the government taking equity stakes in AI firms, for instance. Export policy is another; there is an ongoing, cross-cutting dispute as to the wisdom of allowing U.S. chipmakers to sell advanced AI chips to Chinese customers. Many of the most committed techno-optimists—David Sacks, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang—support this, while many otherwise AI-friendly China hawks—the American Enterprise Institute, for example, and the Hudson Institute—oppose it.
But it is, nonetheless, a useful heuristic, particularly as AI becomes more politically salient and the battle lines firm up.
As for the balance of forces within the Trump administration, it’s clear that the techno-optimists occupy the commanding heights. Yet some of the people with whom I spoke suggested that David Sacks’ departure from the position of AI czar left something of a power vacuum on AI; while no one expects a radical change, a modulation of policy is conceivable, particularly given the rapidity and unpredictability of developments in this field. The president, for his part, has often taken a maximalist position in public (recently posting on Truth Social, for example, that data centers produced “LIQUID GOLD” and cautioning that “the Radical Left Dumocrats must not be allowed to cause us to lose Data Centers, AI, and all of this incredible new Technology, to China, and other countries!”). At the same time, Trump’s views of AI don’t strike one as either deeply rooted or irrevocably fixed, and optimists and skeptics alike are investing quite a lot of energy into trying to bring his White House around to their respective perspectives.
Thus the elites. What of the masses?
Polling suggests that Americans are increasingly concerned about the effects of AI. Majorities of Americans believe AI will destroy more jobs than it creates, say the risks outweigh the benefits, and support regulations on the technology. (Some research suggests that conservatives have somewhat more favorable views of AI than liberals, although other surveys show negligible differences between the parties.)
Public opinion might therefore seem to provide the skeptics with a long-term advantage, especially if the disruptive effects of AI accelerate in the next few years. Sustained and overwhelming voter hostility could push more of the moderates into their camp. But putting genies back into bottles is extremely difficult, and the skeptics are further hamstrung by their lack of a clear or coherent positive vision. Moreover, the AI boosters have the momentum, the money, and the policy-making apparatus during what all concede is a hinge period for AI. The nation is moving in their direction, and in America the smart money is usually on inertia.
But wherever our destination, one thing is clear: getting there will be interesting.
The post How AI Is Splitting the Right appeared first on The American Conservative.
The company has refused to embrace openness and competition.
Anthropic has put itself at odds with nearly the entire AI industry. In a conspicuous break with its peers, the frontier lab declined last month to sign an open letter supporting a permissive policy toward open-weight AI models, which anyone can download, modify, and run on their own devices.
Anthropic says it acted out of concern for public safety, offering its customary warnings about AI-enabled catastrophe. But its real motives may be considerably more self-serving.
If Anthropic were serious about being the AI company with a conscience, it would have no shortage of public concerns to address. It could devote more attention and money to researching AI-related job losses. Or it could take smaller but symbolically important steps. Recent reports revealed that AI firms have been cutting the spines off books to make them easier to scan for model training. Elon Musk pledged that xAI would scan books “the hard way” instead. Anthropic should do the same.
Anthropic could also do more to answer public concerns about data center growth. Some of those fears drift into conspiracy theory. Theo Von, for example, has suggested that data centers are part of a Silicon Valley plot to achieve immortality, monopolize the relevant technology, and lock down everyone else as governments did during Covid. Environmental complaints about water and energy use are also frequently exaggerated. Still, Anthropic could make a more serious effort to address these concerns.
Instead, it is feeding them.
If Americans worry that Silicon Valley elites intend to monopolize advanced technology, few things will reinforce that suspicion faster than Anthropic’s campaign against open-weight AI. Nearly every major company in the field has signed the July letter, including OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir, Perplexity, Replit, and Hugging Face. Hundreds of companies have signed in all; Anthropic is the most glaring holdout.
The company again frames its position as a matter of safety, warning that open models could enable catastrophic cyberattacks or bioweapon development. To be clear, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said his firm is not “advocating for a ban on open-weights models as a category.” But he is lobbying for measures like mandatory safety testing and a crackdown on large-scale distillation (a process by which existing AI models are used to train newer ones—more on that in a moment), which could significantly restrict the development and profusion of open models.
One X user neatly summarized the argument in a post that went viral: “Guns are dangerous, so only I should be allowed to have them.” (Conservatives who have followed the Second Amendment debate will recognize the logic.)
This is precisely the wrong way to address the problem. Anthropic’s fixation on top-down guardrails is undermining security rather than strengthening it. Last month, the frontier lab had to reverse a change to its leading model, Fable 5, after AI researchers discovered that their work was being covertly throttled. Anthropic’s solution was merely to make the throttling transparent. Security researchers must now turn to open models, the very models Anthropic is lobbying against, to conduct their tests.
How seriously does Anthropic take the threat of AI-enabled cyberattacks if its own guardrails prevent cybersecurity researchers from developing defenses against them?
Look beneath Anthropic’s rhetoric about safety and a more familiar corporate motive appears: control of the technology.
That motive is becoming harder to miss in the company’s campaign against open-weight models, which Anthropic says are being used to distill its products. Distillation sits at the center of the open-weight debate. Most of the technology industry wants to preserve the ability to learn from competing models. Its leaders correctly point to the role open-source software played in driving innovation during the 1990s and 2000s. Anthropic wants a different arrangement.
The reason is not hard to see. Whatever one thinks of its leadership, Anthropic produces cutting-edge models that often have a clear advantage in coding. Blocking competitors from learning from those models could turn a modest, temporary lead into one that is large and lasting.
Thus, we arrive at a familiar monopoly strategy: wall off the technology from competitors while imposing tight guardrails on everyone outside the company. Anthropic would presumably retain unrestricted access to its own products. The public would not. At that point, fears about digital lords and digital serfs begin to sound less fanciful.
It is convenient for Anthropic that the most prominent beneficiaries of distillation are Chinese labs, particularly Moonshot AI and its Kimi K3 model. Moonshot allegedly used distillation to build an open-weight model that approaches the capabilities of products from OpenAI and Anthropic. The White House has raised concerns, describing the practice as part of the same Chinese playbook of intellectual property theft that fueled the country’s other technological advances.
But the narrow focus on China obscures an important fact: American companies also use distillation to compete with one another. OpenAI has warned that combining different models could eventually produce systems that outperform any single competitor. Distillation therefore appears to be an important engine of competition and technological progress. Cutting it off in the United States could hand China an advantage.
Imagine if the American technology sector had forbidden open-source software in the 1990s. Would the United States still enjoy its commanding position in software development?
The dispute over Chinese intellectual property theft is real and difficult. But Anthropic’s position also reflects a domestic political agenda. Beyond the obvious desire to pull up the ladder behind itself, the company’s fixation on safety and guardrails looks more like the approach favored by Democrats than that favored by the current White House.
As I wrote in The American Conservative in May, Democrats have their own reasons to support top-down control of AI in the name of safety. They want to ensure that the technology cannot be used to undermine the civil rights regime. Democratic lawmakers in several states have proposed bills targeting “algorithmic discrimination” and disparate outcomes for women and minorities. It is the familiar progressive demand for equal outcomes, recast for the age of artificial intelligence.
Colorado legislators went so far as to propose allowing “algorithmic discrimination” when it is intended to “increase diversity” or “redress historic discrimination.” In plain English, AI-enabled discrimination against white men.
Like Anthropic, Democrats have an interest in preventing the spread of open-weight models. Such models can operate independently of large companies and may therefore evade state-level DEI mandates.
Anthropic’s highly publicized clash with the Trump Pentagon over military uses of its technology adds another political dimension. The company’s “guardrails-first” position could help it curry favor with a future Democratic administration. Anthropic can market itself as the AI company that stood up to Trump, while its competitors enthusiastically signed up for the so-called “tech right.”
Americans should not fall for the performance. The competitive threat from China is real and must be confronted. But there is little reason to believe that restricting open-weight models would help the United States win that competition. It may do the opposite.
Nor is there a compelling case for giving a small circle of technology executives exclusive control over AI, especially when government bureaucrats could easily use that centralized power to impose their ideology on the future. That’s a safety risk all of its own—though one you won’t find the loudest “safety” proponents talking much about.
The post How Anthropic Became the AI Industry’s Black Sheep appeared first on The American Conservative.
The tech company Meta announced on Monday the introduction of a new AI model called “Muse Glimmer.” According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Muse Glimmer differs from many competing AI models—like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude—because it is both open-source and designed to run on a laptop or local hardware rather than on cloud infrastructure.
In a letter released to accompany the release of Muse Glimmer, Zuckerberg wrote that “most other labs are focused on building AI for companies, governments, or other institutions,” and warned that “if those labs lead, then the balance of power will favor larger institutions over individuals.” Instead, he claims that his company is working to empower individuals by “building personal superintelligence for everyone.”
The release follows other comments by Zuckerberg advocating for both the broader distribution of AI models and the greater use of open-source models (so-called because their components are publicly accessible and they can be used by consumers without additional permissions). In a July 28 interview with the Financial Times, Zuckerberg said that the U.S. government should not move to ban Chinese AI models and wrote in the Wall Street Journal the same day about his vision of “AI for Everyone,” in which “superintelligence is widely distributed” rather than concentrated.
Zuckerberg’s comments came after senior Trump administration officials said they had evidence Chinese AI firm Moonshot covertly trained on U.S. rival models through a process known as distillation, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned of sanctions for AI labs that “cross the line into IP theft.”
The post Zuckerberg Unveils New Open Source AI Called ‘Muse Glimmer’ appeared first on The American Conservative.
Opposition to data centers and Flock cameras advance the left’s agenda without scoring concrete wins for the right.
It’s rare to find agreement in American politics, but elements of the right and left seem to have found common ground on opposing tech. Both sides of the aisle are raging against data centers, Flock cameras, and the industry’s inadequate attention to child safety measures.
But this bipartisan push may not be all that great for the right. Many of these measures will deprive deep-red counties of revenue, hinder law enforcement, and empower liberal bureaucrats to censor the internet. Bipartisan support doesn’t always mean something is a great idea. Just look at the Iran War and the broad support for amnesty in the early 2010s. Anti-tech populism could do more harm to the right’s interests than people imagine.
Data centers are a major midterm issue. Both Republicans and Democrats are calling for moratoriums, with a few states passing restrictions on future construction. The sites are criticized for a variety of reasons. They can lower property values, cause noise pollution, and raise utility costs. They’re specifically attacked by the left for posing a threat to the environment. A number of Republicans, such as Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis, feel attacking data centers provides a good way to build credentials with a national conservative audience. In spite of the suspicion with data centers, they can support another conservative goal: lowering property taxes. A number of counties profiting off data centers are slashing these despised taxes. DeSantis and other Republicans love to assail these obligations, but one way to reduce them is revenue from the data centers they want to ban.
Data center outrage is now joined by growing concerns over Flock cameras. These AI-powered license-plate readers are intended to help law enforcement solve crimes and not monitor petty traffic offenses. Police departments around the country have plenty of data to show how Flock has helped them nab criminals. But people fear that they could be abused by police and violate people’s privacy. It doesn’t help that Flock’s online backers are extremely sensitive about criticism. I was recently accused by people affiliated with Flock of being a possible foreign agent over a post merely saying why people would be worried about them.
You’ll find equal numbers of right-wingers and leftists deriding Flock cameras. Both see it as a case of encroaching Big Brother. But leftists have other reasons besides fears of authoritarian abuse and privacy concerns. They don’t like the cameras because they will help law enforcement, particularly ICE. Much of the hysteria over Flock centers on how they’ve been used to catch illegal aliens. The left doesn’t want police, whether local or federal, to have these tools. Unsurprisingly, the people responsible for the rash of Flock vandalism appear to be leftists, with a number filming themselves destroying the cameras in anti-police shirts.
What’s interesting is that the lawmakers most eager to ban them come from the far-right of the Republican Party. Some of the most conservative Republicans in Congress want them banned. Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) warns that the cameras violate our constitutional rights, a view echoed by Reps. Chip Roy (R-TX), Andrew Clyde (R-GA), Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL), and Thomas Massie (R-TN).
This push against Flock comes at a time when much of the right wants the state to arrest more illegal immigrants and native-born criminals. Flock could help with that goal, but that doesn’t appear to be a popular talking point on the right. Instead, it appears to be more popular to help the left’s goal of hindering immigration operations. Liberals are quite open about why they don’t like Flock. At the top of its list of problems with the cameras, the ACLU states: “ICE and CBP have repeatedly used Flock to go after immigrants without warrants.” Santa Cruz, California, and other cities around the country have cancelled their Flock contracts over worries the data will be used by immigration enforcement.
Conservatives can, of course, have different reasons for Flock suspicions. But eliminating license-plate readers may just end up making it harder for law enforcement to locate criminals and illegal aliens. Burchett and other conservative Republicans want more deportations. Their Flock bans would likely make that goal harder to achieve while doing little to minimize the surveillance state. We’d still have an abundance of traffic cameras and other invasive tech in our public spaces.
Congress is united in attempts to make the internet safer for kids. But this is another effort that would enable the left to achieve its policy goals at the right’s expense. The KIDS Act passed the House a few weeks ago with a solid majority. Nearly 270 lawmakers voted for it, while only 117 voted against. While the bill received majority support from both parties, more Republicans voted for it than Democrats did. Just 32 Republicans cast a vote against it.
The bill would impose age verification across much of the internet, push for more safety features and parental controls, and restrict AI bot interaction with children. Conservatives support the bill in part because it aims to restrict access to pornography, a long-time goal for the right. But the bill also offers a way for liberal bureaucrats to impose censorship.
The age-verification requirements would undermine online anonymity. Anonymity has proven a boon for right-wing speech online, as I document in my new book, Whitepill. Anons helped Trump win two elections and made the right embrace ideas once restricted to the fringe. Free speech on the internet is a gift for conservatives, but this bill may intimidate anons into abandoning the new public forum. Many would not trust giving their full names and home addresses to strangers at tech companies just to have the right to post. This is a clear invasion of privacy, one that could be argued is worse than license-plate readers. Yet that’s what the KIDS Act.
The bill also allows the government to censor speech. It demands tech platforms suppress content related to alcohol, gambling, drug use, and other vices that might be aimed at kids. It’s not hard to see this as opening a backdoor for liberal bureaucrats to demand censorship of “hate speech” that minors may interact with. If that’s deemed harmful to children, tech companies may decide to censor it just to avoid the hassle of dealing with government monitors. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, “When platforms are required to create and enforce content moderation policies that regulators can sue them over, they will often err on the side of deleting speech.”
Much of the public is leery of Big Tech. Conservatives have long held to this sentiment due to the industry’s insidious censorship practices. While it may be smart for politicians looking to be re-elected to appeal to this sentiment, it doesn’t do our side any favors when the measures passed hurt the right.
There isn’t much to gain from banning data centers except depriving many deep-red counties of desperately needed revenue and stymieing further technological advancement. Getting rid of Flock cameras may seem like a big win for privacy rights, but it would hinder our ability to deport illegal immigrants and arrest dangerous criminals. It’s a good idea to make the internet a safer place for kids, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of free speech.
The left has nothing to worry about with these measures. They’ll achieve their goals without any downsides. But it’s a completely different story for conservatives. They’ll end up hurting their own interests with little in return.
There are undoubtedly anti-tech sentiments on both sides of the aisle. But the current focus of anti-tech populism redirects these sentiments toward left-wing ends.
Just because something seems popular doesn’t make it right.
The post Bipartisan Anti-Tech Populism May Just Help the Left appeared first on The American Conservative.
Spreading American technology is pivotal to winning the contest with China.
When nations believe they possess a strategic technological advantage, they face a choice. They can protect that advantage by restricting access to it. Or they can spread it so widely that the rest of the world gets hooked on their technology.
China appears to be choosing the first path.
Recent reports indicate that Beijing is considering tighter controls on the export of its most advanced artificial intelligence models, treating frontier AI as a national security asset available to foreign users only under restrictive conditions. If true, this suggests that China’s leadership has concluded that the country’s long-term success depends on jealously guarding its best technologies.
The United States should take the opposite approach.
America has repeatedly become the world’s technological leader not by keeping its innovations at home, but by making them indispensable abroad. American operating systems, cloud computing, software platforms, financial services, entertainment, and internet companies became global standards because businesses and consumers everywhere wanted to use them. This meant enormous profits for U.S. companies—and expanded influence for the U.S. It also ensured that America remained the top destination for global talent, and set the stage for future innovation that would further U.S. dominance.
We have the opportunity to do this again with AI. The United States leads the world in AI innovation and investment. Our frontier models have always been best-in-class. But the gap is narrowing.
China’s AI firms have dramatically improved their capabilities over the past two years. In June, a Chinese developer released a new AI model that may be able to perform on par with Anthropic’s cutting-edge Mythos on cybersecurity, which could mean that the Chinese government has the ability to bypass or disarm many of our existing cyber defenses. Worse, this model was reportedly trained on indigenously produced chips, suggesting that the problem cannot be solved by slapping export controls on advanced U.S. semiconductors.
How should Washington respond?
Some policymakers are looking at restricting foreign entities’ access to American AI systems. This was the administration’s strategy with Anthropic, which just saw access restrictions on some of its most advanced AI models lifted. In Congress, proposals like the Remote Access Security Act would extend export controls beyond advanced computer chips to include cloud-based AI services.
There are circumstances in which this makes sense—when AI capabilities have clear military applications, for example, or when adversarial governments are involved. But we should be very careful to distinguish between the denial of advanced capabilities to our strategic rivals and the throttling of access for everyone else. If the U.S. government blocks legitimate international customers from doing business with American companies, the effect will not be to eliminate foreign demand. It will be to redirect that demand toward competitors.
History offers a cautionary lesson. Export restrictions can work, for a while. But they create strong incentives for alternative sources of supply—and once those emerge, they tend to stick around. Competitors become more self-sufficient, U.S. companies lose markets, and American technological influence declines.
AI is especially prone to this dynamic, both because of the speed with which the technology changes and the degree to which success depends on scale. The more users a given model has, the more data and feedback its developers receive to improve it, and the more complementary software and expertise accumulate around it. Those network effects make leading AI systems stronger over time. Restricting exports would thus mean foregoing those advantages while incentivizing the emergence of viable, non-American AI ecosystems.
Instead of hunkering down, we should look at Beijing’s misstep as Washington’s opportunity. China’s desire to control and hoard its capabilities will backfire, lessening the country’s influence and ultimately constraining its technological, economic, and military ambitions.
The United States should therefore pursue a different strategy. Rather than limiting access to the best our tech sector has to offer, we should seek to make American AI the preferred platform for businesses, researchers, and governments around the world. Countries that build their economies around U.S. technology are more likely to adopt our technical standards, buy our products, collaborate with our researchers, and remain engaged with our industry. By addicting global consumers to the U.S. tech stack, we will maximize American prosperity and American influence for the benefit of all.
The contest for primacy in the 21st century will not be won by denying advanced AI to others. It will be won by making American technology so ubiquitous and essential that the world cannot live without it.
The post Beijing Wants to Lock Down AI. Washington Should Open It Up appeared first on The American Conservative.
TAC Correspondent Harrison Berger and Associate Editor Joseph Addington speak with Nate Soares, president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and co-author of If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies with Eliezer Yudkowsky. Soares argues that the leading AI companies are on track to build machines smarter than any human across all mental tasks, and that goal, if achieved, likely ends humanity.
The post TAC Right Now: Nate Soares Warns of Superintelligent AI appeared first on The American Conservative.
People don’t like being told their concerns are unreasonable by the gang threatening to destroy their livelihoods.
Freddie DeBoer in a Monday Substack post noticed a tic among advocates for more aggressive home-building policies (“YIMBYs,” for “Yes in My Back Yard,” in contrast to “NIMBYs,” for “Not in My Back Yard”). When confronted with opposition, these YIMBYs dismiss the possibility that the other side may have good-faith reasons of its own, instead resorting to ridicule and abuse.
DeBoer points out that this is not really how democratic politics works: You have to get people on board with what you want to do by the usual methods of persuasion and incentive-creation. Telling your fellow citizens that their concerns about the environment or their neighborhood’s character are stupid and wrong doesn’t move your ball down the field at all.
You’d think everyone would have learned this lesson after the last presidential election, when the Democratic strategy was to tell voters their unhappy feelings about the cost of living were baseless and that, in fact, the economy was roaring along.
That tack, as we found out, was not particularly effective.
But I very much fear the titans of industry and their abettors in high office are making the same mistake. Businessmen and politicos are bewailing growing bipartisan opposition to the construction of the data centers needed to generate dumb pictures of cats and wildly inaccurate search engine results. A lot of this stuff overlaps with YIMBY housing arguments, since much of the opposition is coming from the same place—people getting touchy when you try to monkey with where they live.
I confess this isn’t much of a surprise. The entire pitch for AI has been wildly shortsighted. If you believe the fellows at the top of the industry, their technology will either cause a labor apocalypse, particularly for white-collar workers—that is, for the set with some money and some political clout to defend its interests—or it will take over the world and kill everybody.
Yet the AI maximalists seem to think that, if they gesture vaguely toward the Maoist menace (to which, it should be noted, many of these same CEOs are itching to sell their products) and throw in a few ominous warnings about the stock market crash that will surely happen if we don’t do everything they want, this adds up to a compelling argument for turning the wheel toward the future and slamming the accelerator. Ah, but the good news: To arrive at these utopian vistas, you only have to put up with an eyesore that makes annoying noises, raises your utility bills, and provides few, if any, permanent new jobs in your community.
Now, I am just a journalist, callow and unlearned in the dark arts of the press agent, but I feel pretty comfortable in the assessment that this strategy is not very clever. Calling people stupid or stooges for the Red Chinese when they fail to grasp its charms is even worse. On the merits, data center boosters may be right—concerns about water usage may be overstated, there may be good national strategic reasons for pursuing dominance in the industry, and, in some cases, data-center development may even lower utility costs—but being right does not actually get things done. While crushing one’s opponents by main force is tempting, the use of money, coercion, lawyers, and backroom tactics also does not tend in the long term to get things done. Persuading people gets things done. It’s not difficult to imagine AI development going the way of nuclear power: set back for a generation because of a catastrophic failure to make the case to the public.
My own attitude, officially, is bemusement. While I do think AI will make the masses lazier and more ignorant—a process that was already well under way, thanks to a host of other material and cultural causes—I doubt it will cause a white-collar extinction event. (If AI gets really good at pushing paper, why do we think we are getting rid of the paper-pushers instead of increasing the amount and complexity of the paper to be pushed, necessitating human oversight of the automated processes? Has anyone ever noticed how bureaucracies actually work?) I also entertain suspicions that AI will not wipe out the human race, which, for all its evils and follies, has managed to keep a handle on far more directly menacing items, like thermonuclear weapons and medical research facilities—sometimes barely managed, but managed just the same.
Yet, despite my reservations about the parousia of the silicon god, I think it would be a bad thing if one of the liveliest sectors of American technical and economic development were to be crushed out of hand because its overseers couldn’t read a room.
People don’t like being told their feelings are wrong and baseless. The AI boosters might take note. They are notionally capitalists, after all; if the market doesn’t want what they’re selling, maybe they should try a little harder.
The post Some Obvious Points About AI appeared first on The American Conservative.
Andrew Day and Curt Mills talk to the public intellectual and author Robert Wright about his new book, The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning. They debate the so-called “AI arms race” with China and whether regulating the new technology is feasible. Lastly, they discuss the Iran War and whether restrainers should urge President Trump to walk away from the conflict or try to get a final peace deal. Recorded June 29, 2026.
The post TAC Right Now: AI Might Be Humanity’s Biggest Test Yet, w/ Robert Wright appeared first on The American Conservative.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday which establishes a voluntary federal testing program for artificial intelligence systems and directs agencies to strengthen cybersecurity defenses for critical infrastructure.
The order calls for collaboration with leading AI companies to “ensure that the best and most secure technology is deployed rapidly to confront any and all threats to our country.” It explicitly prohibits the federal government from imposing mandatory licensing requirements on AI firms, establishing a cooperative rather than a regulatory model for AI safety. Participating companies would provide advanced models to the government up to 30 days before releasing them to trusted partners.
The directive also instructs agencies including the Pentagon, Treasury Department, and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to coordinate on AI-related security risks and share information provided by AI companies regarding software vulnerabilities and patches.
Finally, the order instructs the attorney general to prioritize prosecutions involving AI-related crimes, especially cybercrimes involving autonomous AI agents.
The post Trump Signs Executive Order Establishing Early Access to AI Models appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Department of Defense announced Friday that it has signed agreements with seven major technology companies—Google parent Alphabet, OpenAI, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, SpaceX, and Reflection—to deploy artificial intelligence tools on classified military networks.
The Pentagon said the deals will help establish the U.S. military as an “AI-first fighting force.”
The announcements come amid a continuing feud with Anthropic after the company said it objected to requests that would allow its technology to be used for mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons systems. In late February, President Donald Trump ordered all federal agencies to terminate their relationships with the AI firm and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth designated it a supply-chain risk.
The latest moves expand upon a long-running and intensifying relationship between Silicon Valley and the U.S. military and intelligence community. In September 2025, the Defense Logistics Agency signed a $48 million contract with Google Public Sector to use its Google Cloud services. In July, 2025, Google was awarded a $200 million AI contract with the DoD while Anthropic and xAI were separately awarded Pentagon contracts.
The post Pentagon Announces AI Deal with Google, OpenAI, Nvidia, Others appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Financial Times reported Thursday that the White House has accused China of conducting what it calls “industrial-scale” theft of American artificial intelligence technology.
Michael Kratsios, the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wrote in a memo seen by the FT that “foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distil U.S. frontier AI systems,” referring to a process whereby AI scientists extract the capabilities of an existing model to create a new one.
The administration will also pursue measures “to hold foreign actors accountable,” Kratsios wrote, according to the FT.
The Chinese government denied the allegations, with embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu calling the accusations “pure slander.”
Kratsios previously served on the board of Scale AI, a data-labeling company. Company presentations described Scale as the “ammo factory” for “AI wars.”
U.S. AI companies Anthropic and OpenAI earlier this year said that efficiency gains by Chinese AI companies were due to distillation.
The post U.S. Accuses China of ‘Industrial-Scale’ AI theft appeared first on The American Conservative.
NASA’s Artemis II mission blasted off from Florida on Wednesday evening, sending four astronauts on a journey around the moon in the first crewed deep-space flight since Apollo 17 in 1972.
The orange-and-white rocket successfully lifted off at 6:35 p.m. from the Kennedy Space Center, drawing cheers from tens of thousands of spectators. Commanded by NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman, the crew includes Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
The mission will not land on the moon but will test the Orion spacecraft and pave the way for future lunar landings under NASA’s Artemis program. The Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft at the heart of the program, which cost nearly $100 billion to develop, are already largely obsolete thanks to advances made by commercial spaceflight companies like SpaceX, leading some commentators to criticize the program for its wastefulness.
Artemis II is scheduled to swing around the moon and splash down in the Pacific on April 10.
The post USA Launches Manned Moon Flyby Mission appeared first on The American Conservative.
A Los Angeles jury delivered a landmark verdict against Meta and YouTube, finding that the companies knowingly designed addictive platforms that harmed a young woman’s mental health after she began using them as a child. Kaley (her last name has been withheld from public filings for privacy), now 20, was awarded $3 million, with jurors assigning 70 percent of the blame to Meta and 30 percent to YouTube. Punitive damages are still pending and could raise the total sharply.
The decision could impact hundreds of similar lawsuits moving through U.S. courts. Meta said it “respectfully” disagreed and is weighing its legal options, while Google said it plans to appeal, arguing YouTube is a “responsibly built streaming platform.”
Kaley testified she started using YouTube at age 6 and Instagram at age 9 and developed anxiety, depression, and body dysmorphia as a result. Her lawyers said features such as infinite scroll were built as “addiction machines.” The social media companies deny that their products were responsible for her struggles.
The post Meta and YouTube at Fault for Social Media Addiction, Jury Finds appeared first on The American Conservative.
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