I.
A little more than a decade ago, I sat with my father and watched him die. Six months prior, he had been a vigorous man, stronger than I am today, faster and more resilient on a bike than most 20-somethings. Then one day he got heart surgery and he was never the same. His soul had been sucked out of him, the life gone from his eyes. He had moments of vivacity, when my father came back into his aging body, but these became rarer with time. His coherence faded, his voice grew quieter.
He spent those six months in and out of the hospital. And then on his last day he went into hospice. That day he barely uttered any words at all. In the final hours of his life, my father was practically already dead. He laid on the hospital bed. His breathing gradually slowed and became less audible. Eventually you could barely hear him at all, save for the eerie death rattle, a product of a body no longer able even to swallow. A body that cannot swallow also cannot eat or drink, and in that sense it has already thrown in the towel.
My mother and I exchanged knowing glances, but we never said the obvious nor asked any questions on both of our minds. We knew there would not be much longer. There was nothing to say or ask that would furnish any useful information; inquiry, at that stage, can only inflict pain.
I spoke with him, more than once, in private. I held his hand and tried to say goodbye. My mother came back into the room, and all three of us held hands. Eventually a machine declared with a long beep that he had crossed some line, though it was an invisible one for the humans in the room. My father died in the late afternoon of December 26, 2014.
A few days and eleven years later, on December 30, 2025, my son was born. I have watched death as it happens, and I have watched birth. What I learned is that neither are discrete events. They are both processes, things that unfold. Birth is a series of awakenings, and death is a series of sleepenings. My son will take years to be born, and my father took six months to die. Some people spend decades dying.
II.
At some point during my lifetime—I am not sure when—the American republic as we know it began to die. Like most natural deaths, the causes are numerous and interwoven. No one incident, emergency, attack, president, political party, law, idea, person, corporation, technology, mistake, betrayal, failure, misconception, or foreign adversary “caused” death to begin, though all those things and more contributed. I don’t know where we are in the death process, but I know we are in the hospice room. I’ve known it for a while, though I have sometimes been in denial, as all mourners are wont to do. I don’t like to talk about it; I am at the stage where talking about it usually only inflicts pain.
Unfortunately, however, I cannot carry out my job as a writer today with the level of analytic rigor you expect from me without acknowledging that we are sitting in hospice. It is increasingly difficult to honestly discuss the developments of frontier AI, and what kind of futures we should aim to build, without acknowledging our place at the deathbed of the republic as we know it. Except there is no convenient machine to decide for us that the patient has died. We just have to sit and watch.
Our republic has died and been reborn again more than once in America’s history. America has had multiple “foundings.” Perhaps we are on the verge of another rebirth of the American republic, another chapter in America’s continual reinvention of itself. I hope so. But it may be that we have no more virtue or wisdom to fuel such a founding, and that it is better to think of ourselves as transitioning gradually into an era of post-republic American statecraft and policymaking. I do not pretend to know.
I am now going to write about a skirmish between an AI company and the U.S. government. I don’t want to sound hyperbolic about it. The death I am describing has been going on for most of my life. The incident I am going to write about now took place last week, and it may even be halfway satisfyingly resolved within a day.
I am not saying this incident “caused” any sort of republican death, nor am I saying it “ushered in a new era.” If this event contributed anything, it simply made the ongoing death more obvious and less deniable for me personally. I consider the events of the last week a kind of death rattle of the old republic, the outward expression of a body that has thrown in the towel.
A little more than a decade ago, I sat with my father and watched him die. Six months prior, he had been a vigorous man, stronger than I am today, faster and more resilient on a bike than most 20-somethings. Then one day he got heart surgery and he was never the same. His soul had been sucked out of him, the life gone from his eyes. He had moments of vivacity, when my father came back into his aging body, but these became rarer with time. His coherence faded, his voice grew quieter.
He spent those six months in and out of the hospital. And then on his last day he went into hospice. That day he barely uttered any words at all. In the final hours of his life, my father was practically already dead. He laid on the hospital bed. His breathing gradually slowed and became less audible. Eventually you could barely hear him at all, save for the eerie death rattle, a product of a body no longer able even to swallow. A body that cannot swallow also cannot eat or drink, and in that sense it has already thrown in the towel.
I spoke with him, more than once, in private. I held his hand and tried to say goodbye. My mother came back into the room, and all three of us held hands. Eventually a machine declared with a long beep that he had crossed some line, though it was an invisible one for the humans in the room. My father died in the late afternoon of December 26, 2014.
A few days and eleven years later, on December 30, 2025, my son was born. I have watched death as it happens, and I have watched birth. What I learned is that neither are discrete events. They are both processes, things that unfold. Birth is a series of awakenings, and death is a series of sleepenings. My son will take years to be born, and my father took six months to die. Some people spend decades dying.
II.
At some point during my lifetime—I am not sure when—the American republic as we know it began to die. Like most natural deaths, the causes are numerous and interwoven. No one incident, emergency, attack, president, political party, law, idea, person, corporation, technology, mistake, betrayal, failure, misconception, or foreign adversary “caused” death to begin, though all those things and more contributed. I don’t know where we are in the death process, but I know we are in the hospice room. I’ve known it for a while, though I have sometimes been in denial, as all mourners are wont to do. I don’t like to talk about it; I am at the stage where talking about it usually only inflicts pain.
Unfortunately, however, I cannot carry out my job as a writer today with the level of analytic rigor you expect from me without acknowledging that we are sitting in hospice. It is increasingly difficult to honestly discuss the developments of frontier AI, and what kind of futures we should aim to build, without acknowledging our place at the deathbed of the republic as we know it. Except there is no convenient machine to decide for us that the patient has died. We just have to sit and watch.
Our republic has died and been reborn again more than once in America’s history. America has had multiple “foundings.” Perhaps we are on the verge of another rebirth of the American republic, another chapter in America’s continual reinvention of itself. I hope so. But it may be that we have no more virtue or wisdom to fuel such a founding, and that it is better to think of ourselves as transitioning gradually into an era of post-republic American statecraft and policymaking. I do not pretend to know.
I am now going to write about a skirmish between an AI company and the U.S. government. I don’t want to sound hyperbolic about it. The death I am describing has been going on for most of my life. The incident I am going to write about now took place last week, and it may even be halfway satisfyingly resolved within a day.
I am not saying this incident “caused” any sort of republican death, nor am I saying it “ushered in a new era.” If this event contributed anything, it simply made the ongoing death more obvious and less deniable for me personally. I consider the events of the last week a kind of death rattle of the old republic, the outward expression of a body that has thrown in the towel.
by Dean Ball, Hyperdimensional | Read more:
Image: via
[ed. More excerpts below. See also: Why the Pentagon Wants to Destroy Anthropic (NYT), Ezra Klein interviews Dean Ball (with a follow-up essay: The Future We Feared is Already Here). And, for a more comprehensive assessment of what the AI community thinks: Anthropic Officially, Arbitrarily and Capriciously Designated a Supply Chain Risk (DWAtV).]***
"... Except the notion of “passing a law” is increasingly a joke in contemporary America. If you are serious about the outcome in question, “passing a law” is no longer Plan A; the dynamic is more like “well of course, one day, we’ll get a law passed, but since we actually care about doing this sometime soon, as opposed to in 15 years, we’ll accomplish our objective through [some other procedure or legal vehicle].” With this, governance has become more and more informal and ad hoc, power more dependent on the executive (whose incentive is to jam every goal he has through his existing power in as little time as possible, since he only has the length of his term guaranteed to him), and the policy vehicles in question more and more unsuited to the circumstances of their deployment, or the objectives they are being deployed to accomplish." [...]... DoW insisted that the only reasonable path forward is for contracts to permit “all lawful use” (a simplistic notion not consistent with the common contractual restrictions discussed above), and has further threatened to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk. This is a power reserved exclusively for firms controlled by foreign adversary interests, such as Huawei, and usually means that the designated firm cannot be used by any military contractor in their fulfillment of any military contract.
War Secretary Pete Hegseth has gone even further, saying he would prevent all military contractors from having “any commercial relations” with Anthropic. He almost surely lacks this power, but a plain reading of this would suggest that Anthropic would not be able to use any cloud computing nor purchase chips of its own (since all relevant companies do business with the military), and that several of Anthropic’s largest investors (Nvidia, Google, and Amazon) would be forced to divest. Essentially, the United States Secretary of War announced his intention to commit corporate murder. The fact that his shot is unlikely to be lethal (only very bloody) does not change the message sent to every investor and corporation in America: do business on our terms, or we will end your business.
This strikes at a core principle of the American republic, one that has traditionally been especially dear to conservatives: private property. Suppose, for example, that the military approached Google and said “we would like to purchase individualized worldwide Google search data to do with whatever we want, and if you object, we will designate you a supply chain risk.” I don’t think they are going to do that, but there is no difference in principle between this and the message DoW is sending. There is no such thing as private property. If we need to use it for national security, we simply will. The government won’t quite “steal” it from you—they’ll compensate you—but you cannot set the terms, and you cannot simply exit from the transaction, lest you be deemed a “supply chain risk,” not to mention have the other litany of policy obstacles the government can throw at you.
This threat will now hover over anyone who does business with the government, not just in the sense that you may be deemed a supply chain risk but also in the sense that any piece of technology you use could be as well. Though Chinese AI providers like DeepSeek have not been labeled supply chain risks (yes, really; this government says Anthropic, an American company whose services it used in military strikes as recently as this past weekend, is more of a threat than a Chinese firm linked to the Chinese military), that implicit threat was always there.
War Secretary Pete Hegseth has gone even further, saying he would prevent all military contractors from having “any commercial relations” with Anthropic. He almost surely lacks this power, but a plain reading of this would suggest that Anthropic would not be able to use any cloud computing nor purchase chips of its own (since all relevant companies do business with the military), and that several of Anthropic’s largest investors (Nvidia, Google, and Amazon) would be forced to divest. Essentially, the United States Secretary of War announced his intention to commit corporate murder. The fact that his shot is unlikely to be lethal (only very bloody) does not change the message sent to every investor and corporation in America: do business on our terms, or we will end your business.
This strikes at a core principle of the American republic, one that has traditionally been especially dear to conservatives: private property. Suppose, for example, that the military approached Google and said “we would like to purchase individualized worldwide Google search data to do with whatever we want, and if you object, we will designate you a supply chain risk.” I don’t think they are going to do that, but there is no difference in principle between this and the message DoW is sending. There is no such thing as private property. If we need to use it for national security, we simply will. The government won’t quite “steal” it from you—they’ll compensate you—but you cannot set the terms, and you cannot simply exit from the transaction, lest you be deemed a “supply chain risk,” not to mention have the other litany of policy obstacles the government can throw at you.
This threat will now hover over anyone who does business with the government, not just in the sense that you may be deemed a supply chain risk but also in the sense that any piece of technology you use could be as well. Though Chinese AI providers like DeepSeek have not been labeled supply chain risks (yes, really; this government says Anthropic, an American company whose services it used in military strikes as recently as this past weekend, is more of a threat than a Chinese firm linked to the Chinese military), that implicit threat was always there.
***
[ed. One more thing. The guy who created this whole stupid dispute? Not Hegseth, he doesn't know shit about shit. It's former disgraced Uber manager: Emil Michael. A real piece of work (so of course, he fits right in.]
