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Earlier this week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth sat down with Dario Amodei, the CEO of the leading AI firm Anthropic, for a conversation about ethics.

Right before armed guards escorted me from the rally and left me on the edge of a Texas-county road, I was informed that I was no longer welcome at an event that I had already attended. For the past hour, I’d watched as Representative Jasmine Crockett riled up her supporters in deep-red Lubbock, where voters were thrilled to receive a visit from the Democratic Senate candidate.

On a winter night last year, shortly after Donald Trump was sworn into office, senior officials at the Department of Homeland Security assembled discreetly at a private home in Washington, D.C., to discuss what they saw as a gathering crisis inside the agency: the relationship between their new boss, Kristi Noem, and Corey Lewandowski, her adviser, enforcer, and rumored boyfriend.
The officials were under enormous pressure.

Humanity’s real problem, the great biologist Edward O. Wilson once remarked, is that “we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” There is no better proof for this aphorism than the American military’s escalating spat with Anthropic, the creator of the artificial-intelligence model Claude.
If the most fervent believers are correct, AI might one day challenge the power and sovereignty of nation-states.

At the age of 30, I became an editor. On my first day, while I was at lunch, a colleague tossed a photocopy of an essay onto my office chair, with a passage underlined. She’d highlighted a quote from a letter that Harold Ross, the founding editor in chief of The New Yorker, wrote to Katharine White, who ran the magazine’s fiction department: “An editor’s life is certainly a life of disappointment.