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00:00In her new book, The Valley of Death, Sharon Weinberger explores how these tech titans are rapidly becoming some of
00:05the most powerful figures in the realm of national security.
00:09Sharon, I know as journalists we deal with not cheerful topics, but you really just came right out there. Valley
00:14of death. You're not really pulling any of these punches.
00:16Yeah, exactly.
00:19Why did you want to write about this and how did this start?
00:21So I've been writing for most of my career, the past 25 years, on the intersection of national security, science,
00:27and technology.
00:28And about 10 years ago, I was finishing up my last book, which was a history of DARPA, the Pentagon
00:33Agency, Behind the Internet, Stealth Aircraft, Agent Orange, a lot of fun stuff.
00:38And one of the former directors of the agency stopped by my office and was talking a little bit about
00:45Silicon Valley.
00:46And he's like, you know, I saved Steve Jobs. I saved Apple.
00:50And I'm like, what? And he starts telling me this wild story about he is the director of DARPA, and
00:55the National Security Agency had bought a bunch of Next workstations.
01:00These were the computer company that Steve Jobs founded when he first got exiled from Apple.
01:06OK.
01:06And it was just this wild story about Silicon Valley and the Pentagon.
01:10And that kind of really got me thinking, like, what is the relationship between these two entities and what's going
01:17on right now?
01:18And that kind of got me started on it.
01:19So what is going on right now?
01:20I mean, because I've covered Washington for a long time as well, and I don't remember hearing Silicon Valley and
01:26defense contracting in the same sentence quite to the extent that we are now.
01:31And it was something that when you talk to tech startups, whether they were or not involved in it, they
01:36didn't want to talk about it.
01:37It was not something public-facing that they wanted to embrace.
01:40And now it seems like they are going full force into this.
01:43I think about Palantir.
01:43You know, I think about all these of the AI companies.
01:46How has that gotten so revved up?
01:47It's a whole different world.
01:48So when I first started on this about 10 years ago, what I started to notice was at the defense
01:54conferences I was going to, arm shows, you know, you would see the banners for Lockheed Martin, Northrop, General Dynamics.
01:59And I suddenly started seeing banners for Amazon Web Services, for Google, and for this somewhat new company, Palantir, which
02:07had been founded in Silicon Valley and had been one of the first Silicon Valley companies to get into defense.
02:13And it's like something is going on here that that's weird because for so long, defense had been dominated by
02:19what are called the big five primes, the prime defense companies.
02:22And suddenly, you know, you were seeing hints of Silicon Valley.
02:26And yet at the same time, I think most people in Silicon Valley still thought it was anathema to work
02:32on defense.
02:32It just wasn't part of their culture.
02:35So why has that changed?
02:37And does it compromise some national security when so much of this, it seems, is not only out of the
02:43hands of a lot of the people making decisions, but it's out of their comprehension?
02:46We've asked several lawmakers over the last couple of weeks if they think Congress legislators understand AI enough to regulate
02:52it.
02:52And they have all said no.
02:53So the two are linked.
02:55The first part, why did it change?
02:57It's not one factor, but there were a few big ones.
03:00So going back to 2016, 2017 was sort of the closing of the China commercial market.
03:06This is when you had companies like Facebook, Airbnb, and others.
03:10They had been hopeful of making breakthroughs, you know, billion people in China, huge market, and it just wasn't working
03:17out for them.
03:18At the same time, you had the Pentagon and the White House talking about China as a strategic threat.
03:24And so suddenly Silicon Valley is like, well, if you can't make money out of doing business in China, maybe
03:30you can make money off of supplying weapons to deter or fight China.
03:34That was one factor.
03:36There were others as well.
03:37The other big one is the government was becoming a huge potential market, a recession-proof market in defense.
03:43And that sort of slowly, slowly in 2016 started to open the door.
03:48It does seem to me this happened as people were losing confidence in other sectors of the market and looking
03:55for something more stable.
03:56But there's also the shareholder aspect of this.
03:59And I feel like shareholders really came around on this idea as well.
04:01It went from something that was a potential liability with investors to something that was a potential attraction.
04:06Yeah, I mean, there's a couple aspects to that.
04:08So still in 2016, 2017, most of the big venture capital funds, they have vice clauses.
04:14You can't invest in this.
04:16You can't invest in that.
04:16And most of them, to include Peter Thiel's founders fund around 2016, had red lines for investing in weapons companies
04:25and defense companies.
04:26And that also started to change.
04:29Some of the companies began to take those out of their vice clauses as they moved into defense.
04:34And, you know, once a couple of venture capital companies do it, then others did.
04:38The other interesting aspect in the stock market, and this came a little bit later, is once Palantir went public,
04:44it also showed for, you know, both institutional and particularly retail individual investors that this could be a big moneymaker.
04:54Interesting.
04:55I want to ask you, of course, it's UN week has been here, and AI has been a very big
05:02topic here.
05:03I want to play you some sound.
05:05President Trump talking about whether he does or does not think regulating AI is a good idea.
05:11I'm not going to stifle growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution.
05:17But we will only encourage superintelligence.
05:20We're going to encourage it, not rein it in.
05:23We're going to watch it closely through the Department of Justice.
05:27So who is going to regulate this?
05:29We've seen the big AI companies come out and say, we agree to a slowdown.
05:34We want to reevaluate this.
05:35We're going to invite regulators in.
05:37But who are these people?
05:39Who would they be?
05:40And what is their level of oversight?
05:42Because to your earlier point, aren't they just going to go work for one of these companies later or after?
05:47Or can you even trust them to know what they're doing?
05:49I think the U.S. government is really struggling with this.
05:53And I don't think this is going to be unique to the Trump administration.
05:56Whatever administration is going to come in next is going to have the same problem.
05:59So there's two different aspects of this.
06:01There's the regulation.
06:02So, of course, the companies would love to self-regulate.
06:05They would like to set the guardrails.
06:07And their argument is like, well, we understand what's going on.
06:09And they're not wrong.
06:10We have a real lack of expertise inside government, a lack of people who understand the models, understand how to
06:16regulate them.
06:18There's implicit—
06:19Why is that?
06:19Is that because this technology is kind of in this incubator and it's within itself?
06:24Or is it just the government doesn't pay well enough to get the people who really understand it?
06:27I think the companies are paying huge salaries.
06:30They're hiring up.
06:31And this goes beyond the AI companies.
06:33This also goes to the defense tech startups as well.
06:35They are just—what was once the revolving door that people talked about with defense is now the revolving door for
06:41Silicon Valley.
06:42That is a real problem.
06:43And anyone inside government who might have the expertise and might be involved in regulation, it's going to be in
06:49the back of their mind.
06:50Like, well, where do I go work after?
06:52Right.
06:52The companies are a big thing.
06:54The second part of it that I think is really hard—and this is where the Pentagon is trying to grapple
06:59with something new.
06:59During the Cold War, yeah, you had defense industry.
07:02You still have defense industry.
07:03But no one is calling the CEO of Lockheed Martin saying, are you all right if we use your F
07:08-22 in the current conflict?
07:09Government owns the underlying technology.
07:12What government is struggling with now is the AI companies, yes, government can regulate them, but the underlying technology belongs
07:18to the companies.
07:19They have a high degree of control over that.
07:22And you saw that in the blowout between Anthropic and the Pentagon, where the Pentagon was like, well, how dare
07:28you tell us how to use their models?
07:30And I don't necessarily agree with the direction the Pentagon went of designating Anthropic supply chain risk, but I'm sympathetic
07:37to government, where they're struggling.
07:39Like, these companies have so much power.
07:42How do we do it?
07:44Regulation and oversight is probably going to be the way, but all of the problems in trying to do that.
07:50The Anthropic blowout with the Pentagon and, you know, having the government say, well, fine, we're going to switch all
07:56these to OpenAI, your competitor, does kind of parallel, in my mind.
08:00The argument with China right now, right, where if we don't do it, someone else is going to do it,
08:05right?
08:05You have a company who tried to set guardrails how their technology was used, then they were at risk of
08:09losing the contract.
08:10I feel like that's the same argument the industry is making or some industry advocates are making about regulation versus
08:15not regulation when it comes to China.
08:17If we don't let this develop at this pace, China will beat us and they will win out.
08:22Is that ending every one of these regulatory arguments?
08:24Is that going to be the be-all, end-all argument?
08:26I think that might be the way some of the companies would like to go or at least to argue
08:30for self-regulation or when they argue for slowdowns.
08:33It's slowdowns that help the big companies.
08:35I don't find the China argument particularly compelling.
08:38We have proved as a country that we can invest in science and technology.
08:41We can develop quickly but also have oversight and safeguards and regulations.
08:46We did this with nuclear weapons.
08:47We've done this in other areas of technology.
08:49The two are not incompatible.
08:52With nuclear weapons, I think most people, myself included, didn't understand how it worked on an atomic level, but we
08:59understood how it works.
09:00You drop the thing and it blows up.
09:02This seems like such a more insidious technology because it's in our lives in some ways, but that's not where
09:08the risk threshold is.
09:09The risk threshold is in other parts of this technology and how it's going to grow.
09:12So how do you get people on board to regulate something that, again, they don't really understand?
09:18And what is the public opinion on regulating this?
09:21Well, I think it's a difficult thing and I think it's not helped when you have companies or employees of
09:27companies coming out and saying there's a 10% risk of human extinction.
09:30I can tell you what the scenario is for a nuclear weapon or nuclear war ending civilization.
09:37I think if you try to do that with AI, you get into the realm of sort of like the
09:41fantasy facts and science fiction.
09:43You can get there, but it's not a very convincing scientific argument.
09:47So that has to be the basis of it.
09:48We somehow have to get people into government.
09:50I mean, I think it's doable.
09:52You can have restrictions on the revolving door, but you have to get people in government who are able to
09:58understand and regulate this technology.
10:00We've done it before for other things.
10:02It's going to take effort from government.
10:04I don't know what other option there is.
10:05Do you use AI in your life?
10:07Do you use it in your writing?
10:08Do you use chat GPT for recipes, workouts, any of you about it?
10:11That's very fraught.
10:12I use AI all the time for tasks, for fixing my printer, recipes.
10:17I use it for looking at legal documents.
10:20I use it for understanding, you know, medical results.
10:23I use it for all sorts of things.
10:25I will use it in a limited capacity for, you know, how is this sentence?
10:30I don't like it.
10:31Can you suggest alternatives?
10:32I do not use it for writing.
10:34I think that AI has to be a tool for writers.
10:38I don't think it's going to be a good replacement for writers.
10:42It's going to produce a lot of bad writing.
10:43I think that is also the case.
10:45All right.
10:45Well, this is not bad writing.
10:46This is great writing.
10:47Sharon Weiberger, it is Valley of Death.
10:49Maybe not the most cheerful title, but certainly worth your time and something we're all grappling with right now.
10:53Thank you so much for coming on.
10:54Thanks for having me.
10:55Thanks for having me.
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