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Who gave AI companies the right to build the future?

AI companies say we have a choice. They already made theirs.

In 1954, years after he led the project that created the atomic bomb, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was called to testify before the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The ostensible subject of the hearings was Oppenheimer’s position on the hydrogen bomb, a far more destructive version of the atomic bomb that the US had developed and first tested two years earlier.

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Oppenheimer, who in the years after the war had become increasingly conflicted about atomic weapons, initially opposed work on the hydrogen or thermonuclear bomb, partially for moral reasons and partially because he was skeptical it would work. But he later changed his mind and supported work on it. The lawyers at the AEC wanted to know why.

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It wasn’t because Oppenheimer had changed his mind about the morality of city-vaporizing thermonuclear bombs. Rather, it was because American physicists had struck upon a new design for hydrogen bombs that wasn’t just workable, but positively elegant, or “technically sweet” as he called it. For Oppenheimer, that was enough. As he told the AEC hearing: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it, and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.”

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What Oppenheimer described was a kind of moral helplessness dressed up as resolve: the pull of a scientifically beautiful answer to an ugly problem, and the accompanying habit of holding the moral accounting until after the technical success. It is one of the most honest things anyone who built the bomb — or any other world-altering thing — has ever said. And it has never stopped being relevant, because the people now building the world-altering technology of our own moment keep saying versions of it too.

You go ahead and do it

Jack Clark, the co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic, the company behind the Claude models, is one such person. So it was worth paying attention last week when Clark sat down for a long public dialogue with Samuel Kimbriel, the founding director of the Aspen Institute’s Philosophy and Society, just six days after the federal government had abruptly cut off access to Anthropic’s two most powerful models, ostensibly over fears of what they could do.

Much of the conversation circled around a single idea that will be familiar to those who read Clark’s work: Powerful AI is coming, and it presents us with a choice — a........

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