Anthropic researchers have been warning that AI could cause human extinction. More colleagues have publicly backed those concerns. It is a frightening possibility. But there is another thought experiment worth considering: what happens if we build something vastly more intelligent than ourselves that genuinely wants to keep us safe?
Category: politics
Non-Proliferation, AI Edition
In June, the US government ordered Anthropic to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for foreign nationals, including those inside the United States. Unable to verify everyone’s nationality immediately, Anthropic switched the models off for all users. Washington had decided who could use some of the world’s most capable artificial intelligence. The rest of the world could wait.
The restrictions were lifted on 30 June, and Fable returned globally the following day, with Mythos access restored more selectively. But the reversal did not erase the demonstration of power. If advanced AI becomes central to economic life, a decision taken in Washington could interrupt productive capacity across countries whose citizens had absolutely no say in it.
Who Will Buy the Washing Machines?
There is something peculiar about the enormous numbers being attached to the future AI economy. The technology is expected to transform almost everything: employment, production, science, education and perhaps the balance of power between nations. Yet the money in the projections seems to inhabit a reassuringly familiar world, in which customers still have budgets, households still have incomes and a trillion dollars means roughly what it means today.
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The Cloud Has a Flag
Imagine that your company has spent the past year getting used to a remarkably capable assistant. It helps write reports, searches your documents, explains awkward bits of code, prepares presentations and turns a week’s tedious preliminary work into an afternoon’s. It is not quite a colleague, but it has become part of how the place thinks.
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The Actual Three Laws of Robotics
Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics are among the neatest ideas in science fiction:
- A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
On AI, Citizenship and the Multiplier
On 12 June 2026, Anthropic announced that the US government had ordered it to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for any foreign national, “whether inside or outside the United States”, including Anthropic’s own foreign-national employees. The company said the practical effect was that it had to disable both models for all customers while it worked out compliance. Access to other Anthropic models was not affected, but the principle had been established: the most advanced AI systems could be treated not as ordinary commercial software, but as strategic assets controlled by citizenship.
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Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will watch the watchers?
Juvenal was not thinking about datacentres, model weights, recursive self-improvement or the possibility that the most powerful minds on Earth might one day be housed in racks of humming machines, but good questions have a way of returning in new clothes. For most of history, “who watches the watchers?” has been a political question. Who watches the king, the priest, the judge, the soldier, the civil servant, the expert? Liberal democracy is largely an answer to that question: divide power, create institutions, make authority answerable, never trust any single guardian too much.
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The End of the Age of Labour
For the past two centuries, almost every major political and economic argument has taken place inside the same hidden framework: labour matters. Left and right have disagreed about ownership, markets, planning, wages, exploitation, freedom and redistribution, but they have shared one enormous assumption. Human beings are needed because their labour is needed.
Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman are normally treated as representatives of radically different traditions. In many ways, they are. Smith gives us specialisation and markets, Marx gives us labour exploitation and class struggle, Keynes gives us demand and employment, Hayek gives us dispersed knowledge and the price system, Friedman gives us monetarism and market liberalism. Yet seen from far enough away, they all belong to the same age. They are thinkers of the capitalist-industrial world, in which production depends on human labour and capital matters largely because it organises, directs, equips, disciplines or replaces parts of that labour.
The Resumption of History
For a while, it seemed as if history had ended. Not in the banal sense that nothing would happen any more. Events would continue, politicians would embarrass themselves, wars would break out, markets would wobble, technological wonders would appear and human beings would still find ways to queue badly. But the great ideological argument appeared to have been settled. Communism had failed. Liberal capitalism had won. The market had not merely proved more efficient; it had acquired a moral aura.
This last step matters. It is one thing to conclude that the Soviet Union was authoritarian, stagnant and doomed. It is quite another to conclude that capitalism, in the form developing in the West in the 1990s, was therefore morally vindicated. Yet that is largely what happened. The collapse of communism did not simply remove a geopolitical rival. It removed the restraint that had forced Western capitalism to behave itself.
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The Pope, Prince and Golgafrincham
There are moments when the future arrives not as a prophecy, nor as a cinematic catastrophe, but as an executive classification scheme. Builders build. Sellers sell. Measurers measure. The formula is neat, memorable and slightly terrifying, which is often how history chooses to introduce a new social order. Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, recently explained why his company had laid off more than a fifth of its workforce despite strong growth and healthy revenues. It was not, he argued, because Cloudflare was failing. It was because artificial intelligence had changed the shape of the company itself. Some people were still needed to create products. Some were still needed to sell them. But the large category of people who measured, coordinated, checked, reported, audited, managed and interpreted the organisation to itself could now, in many cases, be replaced or compressed by AI systems.
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