In early 2025, J. D. Vance paid a visit to Les Invalides, in Paris, where he was invited to clutch the sword of the Marquis de Lafayette, a hero of the American Revolution. In a speech the next day, Vance drew a parallel between that sword and artificial intelligence, calling them both 'weapons that are dangerous in the wrong hands but are incredible tools for liberty and prosperity in the right hands.' Whether the rollout of AI in the U.S. ends up in the right hands will depend to some degree on the vice president himself. Since President Trump returned to office, Vance has taken a prominent role in articulating how the administration should approach the AI revolution. Many Republicans, including Trump, broadly favor a hands-off approach. Vance, in a series of speeches and interviews, has offered a more substantive framework for the interplay among government, AI companies, and workers'with the occasional political barb thrown in. He, too, has called for avoiding regulations that slow innovation. But he also believes that some forms of power are too important to leave to Big Tech to self-regulate. And he has sought to tackle one question on the minds of many Americans: What will happen to workers'...

On the latest episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Sean O'Kane, Rebecca Bellan, and I discussed what actually prompted the administration's moves against Anthropic, and what this might mean for the broader AI ecosystem. As Sean put it, 'Anthropic has not had the best relationship with the Trump administration in a way that stands apart from the other leading AI labs,' so perhaps other Anthropic's rivals don't need to worry about a similar crackdown. But Rebecca also noted that leading cybersecurity experts have 'signed an open letter to ask Trump to revoke the order, and they say it's actually dangerous to have to pull these advanced cybersecurity capabilities from network defenders in the U.S.' Rebecca Bellan: As I'm sure many of our listeners know, the U.S. government basically just forced Anthropic to pull its two newest models offline ' Fable 5, and then there was also Mythos 5, which was the one that was available to current Mythos users, [whereas] Fable 5 was more available to the public....

Early one evening in August 1798, a sitting justice of the Supreme Court named James Wilson died in a sparsely furnished boarding room on the second floor of a North Carolina tavern. He had been holed up there for nearly a year to avoid creditors, to whom he owed unspeakable debts from land speculation. Delirious and destitute, he died from malarial fever, which burned through the Carolinas every summer. There was no public announcement of Wilson's death. It was an ignominious end to a man who was not only a Supreme Court justice but also arguably the most influential, prescient, and democratic drafter of the Constitution, one of only six men to sign both that document and the Declaration of Independence. The other Founders had acolytes who promoted their legacy and preserved their records, but Wilson died a pariah, which kept him out of history books as the conventional narrative of the founding took shape. Even today, his headstone in Philadelphia lists the wrong date for his death. Recovering his role in creating America is essential if the nation is to recommit itself to the ideals of democracy and popular sovereignty, which he championed with greater force than any of his contemporaries did....

Asked about the privacy implications of chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude, Signal President Meredith Whittaker answered, 'These are not your friends. These are not conscious beings. These are not sentient interlocutors.' Whittaker made those comments in a broader interview with Bloomberg about policy, privacy, and Signal. She acknowledged that she uses AI tools 'to format a document here and there,' but insisted, 'I don't ask them questions. I'm very serious about my thinking and writing, and I don't want the process of working through an idea ['] to be foreclosed or eclipsed by the response of a system that's averaging what's already out there.' As for Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman's prediction that users could let Microsoft Copilot handle all their Christmas shopping this year, Whittaker argued this scenario ' where Copilot is eavesdropping on the family group chat to determine who wants want ' means giving it 'access to my credit card, my browser, my Signal, the ability to message my siblings on my behalf, my home address [and] my calendar.'...