With WiFi connections still unavailable on most flights back then, Sacco tuned out the internet for several hours as her plane crossed oceans and continents — before landing and finding her life and career destroyed. By the time Sacco reached Cape Town, millions of Twitter users, including Donald Trump, had branded her a racist and got her fired from her job.

To many internet historians, this episode marks the beginning of the “woke” and cancel culture era, which lasted until about 2022 (or never went away, depending on whom you ask). Yet in retrospect, it’s clear that the Sacco incident epitomizes something else: the era of social media, a fundamentally populist mode of communication that wreaked havoc on rational public discourse and made possible the populist politics, both Left-wing and Right, of the decade that followed.

Now, as artificial intelligence eclipses social media, it is possible that period is coming to a close — ushering in something closer to a new era of technocratic rationality. 

The writer Dan Williams recently made a version of this argument, pointing out that while social media is populist, AI is technocratic (I’ve made a similar contention about social media in the past). If you believe that we’ve suffered from an impoverished public discourse since Twitter took off, there might be good reasons to hope that there is relief right around the corner. While the social-media era was one in which everyone had a voice, and any random person could go viral, AI speaks with authority and is trained on practically the entire corpus of human writing — only, with rational thinking ability and a tilt toward sources deemed credible by elites.

More from this author

The Great Stupidisation

By Richard Hanania

This means that the more that AI cannibalizes public discourse, the less conspiratorial and more fact-based it is likely to be. Interestingly, there is evidence suggesting that the American Right — the side that most needs to get back in touch with reality amid the rise of figures like Candace Owens — is making more use of the best tool we have for being able to do so. 

With social media, each individual is his own content producer, and engagement is the coin of the realm. Since most people are either not that smart or not that interested in truth, if not both, the largest social-media accounts tend to be sensationalist and not exactly sticklers for intellectual probity, factual accuracy, or logical coherence. People want to hear about how their tribe is more morally upstanding and righteous, and they enjoy emotionally charged rhetoric and conspiracy theories that make the world seem more legible. AI systems, in contrast, are by definition optimizing for intelligence. People pay for these models because they want accurate representations of the world.

It’s interesting that when you try to program AI to reflect certain political biases, it goes haywire. There was the famous Google Gemini experiment, in which the model was told to add diversity to pictures. The result: early Gemini became a laughing stock after spitting out images of black Nazis. There is also the experience of Grok. When Elon Musk tried to create an “anti-woke” AI, the model started to take after fascistic and Nazi Right-wing accounts. Musk then pulled the plug on this experiment, and since then, Grok behaves much more like other prominent AI models, albeit with a more subtle Right-wing tilt.

The lesson here is profound. Arguably, you can’t create an artificial intelligence that is worth using while also telling it to accept Elon Musk’s view of political reality. The training data and model parameters may skew things in one direction or the other, but there are some limits to what a system can believe and still be, well, intelligent.

This kind of convergence can also be seen among humans. Let’s say you have two individuals who are both highly intelligent, enjoy access to the same sources of information, and have a good-faith interest in finding the truth. They may end up differing in their politics, but they probably won’t differ nearly as much as any two randomly chosen members of the population. Neither will end up believing that communism can work or adopting Hitler’s views on race and geopolitics. They also likely won’t end up believing more humdrum sorts of misinformation, such as 2020 election denialism. There is probably something similar at work with AI. Can you create a model that is good at coding and having rational conversations about the widest possible range of topics — but also thinks that Libs of TikTok is an excellent source of information, superior to what you find in the prestige press?

Theoretically, you could surely design an AI platform that is simply a propaganda machine. Take a highly intelligent system and simply direct it to act as an effective partisan. Such roleplaying is already possible with today’s models. But the thing about conspiracy theories and biased reasoning is that people need to believe they’re getting the information straight in order to be influenced. Individuals rarely wake up and declare, “I want to be brainwashed.” See how often partisan hacks sell themselves as people who are just telling it like it is. All of this is to say: there’s unlikely to be much of a market for an AI marketed as telling you what you want to hear.

One could imagine more subtle biases through market processes. Say Grok wants to appeal to Republicans, and so tilts information in a Right-leaning direction. But given the power of AI, most people are probably going to choose the models that they can gain the most benefit from. Someone made a Right-wing alternative to Amazon called Mammoth Nation, and nobody uses it, because even Republicans are more interested in being able to get shoes delivered to their door quickly than in backing “anti-woke” firms.

In 2021, conservative influencers were hyping a $500 “Freedom Phone” that would allow the user to avoid Big Tech censorship. But it turned out to be a rebranded Chinese Android that normally sold for $119. Most people aren’t considering politics when purchasing goods and services. Thus, they will use the most affordable and useful AI models they can find, instead of looking for products that will shape their thinking about current events.

This raises a natural question, however: why would people who have completely turned against elite institutions — from the mainstream media to their local hospital — trust large language models? Williams points out that LLMs will listen to all your concerns and don’t condescend to you. This is a powerful tool for helping people whose worldview is shaped by Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson podcasts, who do not misunderstand just one or two events, but whose entire picture of reality is warped. Few human individuals have the patience or the time for deprogramming such unfortunate souls. Luckily, AIs don’t get tired or emotionally overwhelmed by human stupidity. And they’re constantly on call.

Take conspiracy theorists. One reason they’re difficult to deal with is that they will often know more about a topic than the ordinary person. Conspiracy theorists spend their lives researching an event. But in doing so, they push the mountain of facts through a distortive filter so that “the Jews” or Freemasons or the Royal Family always end up blamed. No human fact-checker could hope to answer conspiracy theorists’ claims without making a massive time investment just to find out what they’re talking about. Again, AIs solve that problem. A 2024 paper found that LLMs are effective at debunking conspiratorial beliefs, with the effect lasting for months, in part because they could tailor the arguments needed to each specific individual.

Then, too, AIs are so useful that individuals come to trust them in their day-to-day lives. People might ask AI what to say to a love interest, or the best way to lose weight, what their digestion problems are telling them, or how to plan a vacation. In school, they’re constantly relying on it to study and even do their assignments. How do you then turn off your trust when you’re curious about a political or social question? The professional fact-checker also serves as their study buddy, dating coach, nurse, travel agent, and all-around oracle. That’s a powerful combination in terms of improving the quality of people’s thinking — and the quality of public discourse.

I remember my amazement when a year or two ago, I observed my car dripping some kind of fluid in the back and went to AI for help. I took a picture, uploaded it to ChatGPT, and queried it on what was going on. The app asked some questions, and then reassured me that since the fluid was clear, this was simply the natural result of running the air conditioning on a hot day. I remember going to an actual mechanic soon after this happened, recounting the story, and raving about AI and how I couldn’t believe that he wasn’t yet using it in his own business. Now imagine transferring the same feeling of wonder to a machine that also shreds conspiracy theories.

Suggested reading

AI is a gift to my students

By Susan Pickard

In the past few years on X, you might have noticed users interacting with dubious stories or videos by asking, “@grok, is this true?” Epistemology, to be sure, is indeed quite difficult, presenting a profound bundle of questions that even scholars and academics often argue about. It’s overall salutary, however, that people in their day-to-day lives are discovering that AI is a good source of information on a whole host of issues; and that they are, correctly, beginning to assume that listening to AI on politics is better than trying to do their “own research” or talking to people they know, who often share the same cognitive limitations and biases. 

People’s worldviews aren’t built or deconstructed in a single interaction. Your average conspiracy theorist isn’t going to fact-check a few pieces of information and suddenly become rational. But over time, incorporating chatbots into our processes of opinion formation — by means of asking Grok or reading the replies when others do so — could create better intuitions regarding whom and what to believe.

In a new preprint, economics professor Thomas Renault and his co-authors investigate how fact-checking is used in the wild. They investigated all X posts between February 2025 and September 2025 that tagged either Grok or an AI service called Perplexity, analyzing 1,671,841 fact-checking requests. They found that Republican-leaning accounts were more likely to ask whether information was true. Not only that, but Republicans are targeted more for fact-checking, from both fellow Republican (107.5% more) and Democratic (83% more) accounts. Overall, Grok and Perplexity were more likely to say Republicans were not being truthful. Thus, we have the remarkable finding that even though Grok was designed to be anti-woke by Elon Musk, and Republicans are the ones who disproportionately use it, the tool still rates Democrats as more truth-oriented. This is consistent with what we see with community notes, which flag Republican posts more often, along with other data showing that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to share false information on social media, and less able to differentiate fact from fiction overall. None of this is surprising, given that today’s Republican base is both less educated and less likely to interact with credible sources of news.

So we have the interesting and seemingly paradoxical result that Republicans on social media are more reliant on AI, even as it tells them their favorite narratives are more often wrong than those of the other side. This should be seen as a positive sign. We’ve been asking, “What would happen if fact-checkers had infinite time and patience, considered all aspects of problems, and weren’t a bunch of smug Left-wing know-it-alls?” The answer might just be that those who have lost trust in our institutions begin to recover their sanity. 

It has been a busy few weeks for Claude: its ever-improving coding capabilities were also credited with wiping trillions off software stocks (dubbed the SaaSpocalypse). Now, one of these developments Anthropic’s leadership was, presumably, very happy about. The other, rather less so. For months, Anthropic has been trying to maintain some say over how it is used. While the company is reportedly willing to loosen its usage restrictions, it still wants assurances that Claude wouldn’t be deployed for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons systems. These demands are not out of character. They are the founding commitments of a company whose CEO, Dario Amodei, has staked its identity on being the responsible actor in an industry not known for responsibility. Indeed, Anthropic is a company that has pushed for greater regulation at a moment when the White House has made deregulation the centerpiece of its AI agenda.

That tension has been building since last summer, when Anthropic was awarded a $200 million Pentagon contract, making it the first AI model developer deployed in classified military operations. But it was the Maduro raid that brought it to a head. First reported in Axios last week, the Pentagon’s response to Anthropic’s concerns has not been an apology, but an ultimatum. Grant us unrestricted rights to your models, or be designated a “supply chain risk” — a label normally reserved for foreign enemies like Huawei. This is the American state telling a private company that its ethics are a threat to national security. That its values are, in the language of trade policy, a hostile act. Not only would this see Anthropic’s contracts with the Pentagon voided, it would force other companies that work with the Pentagon to certify they aren’t using Claude in those workflows.

Suggested Reading

How Big Tech killed literary culture

By Nicholas Carr

The writing had been on the wall for weeks. Secretary of War Hegseth had already made this explicit at a January event announcing the Pentagon’s new partnership with Elon Musk’s xAI. Back then, he announced that the agency would not “employ AI models that won’t allow you to fight wars“. He was talking about Anthropic. This week, the rhetoric led to a physical confrontation. Hegseth has summoned Dario Amodei to the E-Ring for a Tuesday morning meeting that senior Defense officials described as a “sh*t-or-get-off-the-pot” moment. According to reports, Hegseth said: “The problem with Dario is, with him, it’s ideological. We know who we’re dealing with.”

In the meeting, Hegseth reportedly told Amodei that when the Pentagon buys a Boeing plane, Boeing doesn’t get to tell them where to fly it. He set a Friday 5pm deadline to sign away their “safety filters”. Officials have even discussed invoking the Defense Production Act, which enables the government to exert control over domestic industries during national security crises. This would move beyond a contract dispute into a form of digital nationalization, giving the government the authority to essentially seize control of the technology and strip away the guardrails themselves.

Regardless of Anthropic’s decision on Friday, the state is making it clear: AI is no longer a product; it is a requisitionable resource. Now, ideological clashes in AI are nothing new (rumor has it that Musk built xAI to stop “woke AI” from ruining his mission to Mars). But the transition we’re seeing is from a boardroom culture war to an existential test of state sovereignty. In the 2010s, tech CEOs were treated like heads of state. Today, they are being reminded that their “safety filters” and private ethics cannot dictate American foreign policy. The state has reclaimed the veto.

This is a far cry from the world Alex Karp himself pitched to the tech world last year in his bestselling book, The Technological Republic. In it, Karp argued that Silicon Valley had a civic obligation to re-engage with the American state. Not because it was forced to, but because liberal democracy required it. It was a rallying cry for voluntary partnership: from software to hard power.

Silicon Valley’s old California ideology — apolitical, libertarian and vaguely utopian — was dying. Karp wanted to replace it with something more serious. In his view, the world’s best minds were busy building phone apps and marketing algorithms. Brilliant people, Karp argued, wasting their talents on shiny new toys while China built weapons.

His diagnosis is correct, but it is not without its flaws. If you accept his premise that Silicon Valley must serve the state because the stakes are existential, then voluntary cooperation was always going to struggle. The higher the stakes, the less the state was ever going to ask nicely. When Oppenheimer told Truman he had blood on his hands after Hiroshima, Truman’s response was withering: “He hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.” Dario Amodei is not Oppenheimer. But both the logic and the tension are the same. Like nuclear, the ability to deploy AI at scale is likely going to be the defining strategic capability of the 21st century. Karp wanted a new Manhattan Project. In many ways, he got one.

This is what the White House’s AI Action Plan makes plain. It mandates that the government will only contract with frontier AI developers whose models are deemed free from “ideological bias”. Anthropic’s safety filters are precisely what they had in mind when they wrote this. The Pentagon’s ultimatum is not a departure from policy. It is the policy. The truth is that Karp’s book never truly specified what voluntary cooperation would actually require. Now the Pentagon has filled in the blank. The answer is that cooperation need not be voluntary. Karp called it a republic because that’s what he hoped it would be. After all, his own company was already aligned with the state. But the republic is already dead. The strategic importance of AI means that it was always going to be an empire waiting.

Like the merchant-captains of the 18th century, frontier companies are granted the right to profit only so long as their prizes, compute and intelligence, serve the Crown. They can chase commercial success, attract investment, hire the best engineers, build the most capable models. But the moment their values conflict with the state’s requirements, they learn what they actually are: subjects. The Pentagon’s ultimatum to Anthropic is not an aberration. It is a message to the entire industry: you are either an instrument of the state, or you are a pirate ship to be scuttled.

Some have already read that signal. Meta bent the knee and rewrote its policies in 2024 to permit military and defense applications of its open-source models, after reports emerged that Chinese researchers had adapted them for PLA use. On Monday, Musk’s xAI signed an agreement to allow the military to use its model, Grok, in classified systems. Google and OpenAI have also been in talks to move into the classified space. This is the trajectory.

However the Trump administration’s recent launch of the US Tech Force, billed as America’s elite corps for the AI revolution, reminds us that the privateer era is transitional. States have always, eventually, built their own navies. But while that navy is still being built, the Crown still needs its privateers. And it intends to extract its due. When Trump approved H200 chip sales to China in January, he imposed a 25% tariff and a 50% volume cap. Just as the Spanish Crown demanded the Quinto Real — a royal fifth of every privateer’s plunder — Washington now claims sovereign royalty on the most strategic resource of the century: compute. But the Quinto Real was never just about the gold. The Crown controlled the ports, the licenses, the routes. Who could sail, where, and on what terms. Washington is doing the same. The tariffs and caps are not trade policy. They are the architecture of a technological empire: the terms on which the rest of the world gets to participate in the intelligence age.

Suggested Reading

Military drones will upend the world

By James Kingston

The strategic logic here is not new. Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that whoever controlled the sea lanes controlled the century — not just by sailing them, but by setting the terms on which rivals could access them at all. Britain didn’t just use the oceans. It ruled them by decree. Today’s sea lanes are chips, clusters, and the models trained on them. Washington is not simply trying to win the AI race. It is trying to become the power that decides who else gets to run it, and on what terms. As Trump’s AI Czar David Sachs has repeatedly stated, “I would define winning as the whole world consolidates around the American tech stack”.

But America is not the only technological empire. On the other side of the Pacific, Beijing is playing a similar game. Already its internet regulator has banned its biggest technology companies from buying Nvidia chips entirely, ordering ByteDance and Alibaba to switch to domestic alternatives. The message, as one executive put it, is “loud and clear“. That AI is a sovereignty project, not a tech one.  Data centers have been instructed to purge foreign components entirely. Beijing is calling it “algorithmic sovereignty” — complete control over its computing infrastructure by 2027. That logic is already visible in the behavior of Beijing’s so-called “Six Tigers”: Zhipu, Moonshot, DeepSeek, MiniMax and their peers — which in recent weeks have launched a flurry of highly specialized frontier models focused on coding, reasoning, and cost efficiency. The emphasis is not simply on capability, but on independence: training on domestic chips where possible, optimizing for lower computational footprints, and aggressively undercutting Western pricing in emerging markets. For China, the main aim is not to reach AGI, but to diffuse its technological sovereign stack around the world.

This is looking less farfetched than it did even just a year ago. In December, China built a working prototype of an EUV lithography machine — the technology Washington believed it had successfully ring-fenced. Beijing is building its own empire, on its own terms — and its frontier firms are integrated into that project from the outset. Both Beijing and Washington understand that whoever controls the compute, the models, and the political authority to deploy them will likely own the next century. Unfortunately for Anthropic, that framing leaves no room for negotiation. You are either an instrument of the empire, or you are an enemy to be managed. Karp wrote the right book. He just gave it the wrong title. The technological republic is dead — if it ever existed at all. The Anthropic saga shows that the technological empire, however, is well underway.