Claude AI: Gods and Monsters

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This week, we learned that Claude is God. 

Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI platform, has invented an advanced model, Claude Mythos, so powerful that it could get into and ruin pretty much all software, and every website. 

It is a digital nuclear bomb.

Anthropic, consistent with its do-gooder image, says it has no plans to release the bomb, and is sharing it with other big tech companies, so everyone is aware and builds firewalls. 

But what really matters is this: The tech exists to blow up all other tech. Including firewalls.

Mega-developments like that, combined with the steady death-by-a-thousand-cuts drip of all the new things we need to know about, and how they could affect us, for good or bad… It’s a lot. 

Is it any wonder that more and more people are simply checking out? I recently read about older people deciding that, no, they don’t want to put in the work to learn how to use AI; they’d rather just leave that to younger generations. 

“Someone else can deal with this” is a mantra of growing appeal, if perhaps unrealistic in a time when everyone is living longer and the technology — like it or not — is rapidly permeating everything we need to navigate. 

It has been said that you may not be interested in politics — but politics is interested in you. Well, the same is true of AI and the scammers who use it. They are definitely interested in you.

Scams are everywhere now — but AI is pretty good at cutting through them. One example is booking sites masquerading as hotel-direct reservation sites that jack up your rates, impose unnecessary restrictions that the actual hotels wouldn’t, like making your booking nonrefundable, or screwing up/ignoring specific needs/requests. Ditto with sites pretending to be airlines, that aren’t. 

You can ask AI to show you only search results from hotels and airlines themselves. How hard is that? There’s a good reason to try it. You’ll likely find it your friend in plenty of instances. Which, ironically, may be part of what many find so objectionable: AI’s seductive utility, as with smartphones and social media, paving the way to dependence and loss of agency. 

Claude seems a good option among the competitors, on account of generally principled stands — and it is powerful, but it also collects massive amounts of personal data.  Meanwhile, regulators are in full panic over the threats exposed: The Treasury and Federal Reserve convened an unscheduled emergency meeting of bank CEOs over Claude Mythos’s revelation of thousands of previously unknown zero-day vulnerabilities across major operating systems, browsers, and critical software.

Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei posted this optimistic comment: 

The dangers of getting this wrong are obvious, but if we get it right, there is a real opportunity to create a fundamentally more secure internet and world than we had before the advent of AI-powered cyber capabilities.

That’s a big if.

Whatever one has concluded so far, this topic of How to Live with AI is not going away.

***

Another thing that’s not going away, at least for the moment, is Trumpism, but some are learning to live with it. While others are not. Just as some idealistically say Hell No, I Won’t Code, plenty are taking a principled stand not to enable the country’s headlong descent into the abyss. 

This includes rising calls for Donald Trump’s impeachment, and decisions, such as that by my colleague Jonathan Simon, to not pay federal income taxes as long as Trump is president. 

The latter presents a gamble that the IRS — in tatters, thanks in part to DOGE’s chainsaw — will be so slow to take action against those who so refuse that it will drag into 2029 when Trump, according to the Constitution at least, should be gone. 

Maybe passion and edge and high-minded grumpiness are the thing. According to new studies, very few self-described “moderates” actually want “moderate” policies. As G. Elliott Morris noted, 

When you ask voters to describe what kind of political party they want, in their own words, only 8 percent of self-identified “moderates” actually call for an ideologically moderate political party. Most instead want a party focused on affordability, political reform, or general left-leaning priorities — particularly economic ones.

This number comes from Blue Rose Research, which recently replicated my earlier LLM voter segmentation work at larger scale. Blue Rose asked thousands of Americans to describe their ideal political party, then used a large language model to cluster the responses. Most self-described moderates landed in left, right, affordability-focused, or anti-system camps — not centrist ones. Compared to my work, Blue Rose finds comparatively more Americans in the left-leaning and anti-system buckets.

Other polling finds a pattern where a surprising number of ruby red congressional districts are home to a majority growing disenchanted with Trump. Not only have Tucker Carlson and Majorie Taylor Greene slammed Trump for his threat to destroy Iran’s “civilization” — but even the triply reprehensible Alex Jones is now calling for Trump to be a goner. “Seek his removal immediately,” he wrote on X.  

As I noted last week, Russians too are becoming more agitated, and pushing back against Vladimir Putin. Since then, as the Russian independent news site The Bell reported, Russians are up in arms over their government’s internet crackdown, intended to curb dissent and free speech. 

Government measures include: shutting down mobile internet use in Moscow; blocking the country’s most popular messaging service, Telegram; and making it more challenging to use virtual private networks (VPNs), which provide anonymity online.  

Meanwhile, as the US-Iran ceasefire staggers along, it’s clear that you couldn’t have two less trustworthy negotiating partners. Neither Trump nor the Iranian leadership (nor, really, the Israeli leadership) has any track record of telling the truth or sticking to commitments, and all play to extreme domestic audiences, which, at least in Trump’s case, includes a political base that violently disagree with each other about a desirable outcome. 

To make matters worse, Trump relies on negotiators like Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, who have no deep Iran knowledge or diplomatic track record, and now Vice President JD Vance, who doesn’t either. He was a skeptic of the war in the first place, which complicates things further. His just-concluded marathon face-to-face with Iran didn’t yield anything promising. 

If you’re not liking reality — and who could blame you? — you can simply teleport yourself to somewhere else, as a top Trump FEMA official claims he did. This guy is one of the administrators charged with handling emergencies for the American public, so the claim that he teleported himself to a Waffle House sounds a little worrisome. 

A reporter has actually gone to that Waffle House in Rome, GA, and established that no one remembers the man paying a teleport visit. To be fair, he has now said that at the time of the incident, which he swears is true and a miracle of God, he was in fact heavily medicated while undergoing cancer treatment. In any case, if we all want to get out of here, we might try teleporting. It beats Uber! 

Another reason to check out: top Justice Department official Harmeet Dhillon attending the wedding of the organizer of the January 6 “Save Democracy” rally that dovetailed with the attack on the Capitol. 

Dhillon, chief of the DOJ’s civil rights division, who could be elevated to replace Pam Bondi, responded to criticism for partying with election deniers and violent lawbreakers by saying she “had a great time.” She enjoyed herself, so stop complaining! 

More MAGA malpractice: It’s not bad enough that employers are gambling employees’ retirement savings on a range of alternative, risky investments. Now, the Trump administration wants to make it hard for those employees to sue when their dollars disappear. 

As part of Trump’s determination to enable rotten people to make out like bandits, there are also growing questions about Kristi Noem’s recently ended tenure at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including bringing in an unqualified outside contractor and turning over major responsibilities to the contractor that should be handled by staff. At least someone at DHS is investigating.

Personal Favorites and Musings

Love the comment from the federal judge who for now has blocked Trump from moving ahead with any further work on his massive new ballroom. “The President of the United States is the steward of the White House for future generations of First Families. He is not, however, the owner!” Judge Richard Leon, a Republican appointee, wrote. He also said, 

While I take seriously the government’s concerns regarding the safety and security of the White House grounds and the president himself, the existence of a ‘large hole’ beside the White House is, of course, a problem of the president’s own making!

And in a court filing on April 8, the preservationists said a judge’s order blocking further progress on the ballroom without Congress’s approval “plainly does not” present a national security emergency.

Update: A federal appeals court has just allowed construction to continue — until April 17. And it ordered Leon’s lower court to clarify how its order blocking construction reconciles with recent claims that the project’s main purpose is to add a military compound. This extension gives Trump time to ask the Supreme Court to intervene.

***

Since so many people these days get referred to as “rats,” I’d like to point out how very unfair that is to actual rats, who, though reviled, can do a lot of good as well. One example is rats trained to sniff out deadly landmines — millions of which remain a scourge to farmers and other unsuspecting local people, including children, worldwide. These long-lasting threats to life and limb are constantly being laid as conflict wracks the planet. 

One especially adept mine-sniffer, an African giant pouched rat, was so successful — unearthing more than a hundred mines during a five-year career — that a 7-foot statue in his honor has been erected in Cambodia.  

No More Politics, I promise! Note From New York 

Writing this, I worked up an appetite. Went outside, and picked up a highly touted, crispy baguette bánh mi at a Vietnamese place that always has a really long line of young kids waiting to eat there. I’d never been before, but someone had mentioned you could order ahead for pickup and avoid the line. I did. And I ate. 

It was fine — especially liked the crispy bread — but, and no offense intended, nothing special. No better than any of the many other places on the block with decent takeout food. 

I decided to survey the line, to ask why they were all standing there, prepared to wait in some cases for hours. Same answer from every one of them, looking a bit sheepish: “Social media.” 

I told them about all the other choices available a few steps away, and they seemed, on some level, to be aware that maybe, somehow, they had been conned into acting on an impulse that brought them a lot of discomfort and no real reward. Yet they remained in that long queue, awaiting whatever deliverance some influencer had promised. 

I wish them well — this fragile, awkward generation that, trodding uncertainly in the footsteps of the previous generation, often manifests little awareness of or interest in the parlous state of affairs they must, in time, assume responsibility for. One can hope they eventually learn to pay attention to something other than Instagram posts.

Anyway, immediately after my dispiriting survey, as I was heading into my building, keys in hand, I encountered another of their generation, a young fellow who was trying unsuccessfully to navigate the outside intercom system. He was carrying a small dog, and I asked him if I could help. He explained that he was trying to bring back his friend’s pet.  

I let him in, and we climbed the stairs together. As I turned onto my landing and he continued his ascent, I wished him a good night. 

He smiled and, ever pleasant, asked, “Live around here?”