AI Regulation

0:00Adam Tooze: To get insights on the latest global events, we recommend the GZERO World podcast. Renowned political scientist Ian Bremmer interviews the world leaders, experts, and newsmakers shaping today's international politics. The days of coalitions like the G7 or G20 dictating the global agenda are behind us. We're living in the GZERO world, where geopolitical power is dispersed and dynamic. Between shifting alliances, sudden tariffs, AI deployed in warfare, and dozens of conflicts raging simultaneously across the globe, GZERO provides the context you'll need to understand a world in flux. Find some new perspective on today's biggest headlines, or learn more about the underreported issues you don't see anywhere else.

0:44Adam Tooze: Check out GZERO World with Ian Bremmer on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Or find them all online at gzeromedia.com.

1:02Adam Tooze: Hi, and welcome to Ones and Twos' FP's economics podcast. Every week we take a couple of data points, use them to try to explain the world. I'm Cameron Abadi, FP's deputy editor with you in Berlin, Germany. Joining us as always, FP's economics columnist and Columbia University professor Adam Tews this week in New York. Hi, Adam. Hi, Cam. So we have one data point for you all this week, but first a preview of our episode that's coming next week. So in one week from today, our podcast will be dropping as usual at the usual time. But we thought we'd let you know already that we'll be discussing a specific book.

1:39Adam Tooze: It's already out. It is Francis Fukuyama's memoir. It's called In the Realm of the Last Man. We'll use it as an occasion to talk about Fukuyama as a thinker, his life, but we'll be placing it in the context of the book itself. So if you're interested, it could be useful, interesting to pick up that book and read it ahead of time. It's called In the Realm of the Last Man. You can probably find it at your local bookstore. If you don't happen to read the book, I think the episode will be interesting in either case. So don't fret. But again, if you're interested, you can look it up. Otherwise, back to our data point.

2:15Adam Tooze: That is 109. that is the number of separate artificial intelligence laws that the United States in its various individual states has passed just this year as of July 1st, give or take. And if you extend that to the past 18 months, you'd actually apparently get some 250 laws aimed at regulating AI. But again, that's all been happening in the states. and more recently these past couple weeks momentum has been building for the federal government to join the fray to ostensibly stop a potential apocalypse as some AI industry players themselves have been warning about. Jacob Coxon has left Anthropics sounding the alarm about the dangers of artificial intelligence on his way out the door.

3:04Adam Tooze: The 27 year old outlined his concerns in a series of social media posts when he quit writing in part the people building AI earnestly believe that AI could kill us all in less than a decade? Yes, I do. And it's not just me. Many people working in the industry, including people, executives, senior researchers, all genuinely believe that there is a... Use our entire existing policy arsenal, things like making companies responsible when their agents act in ways that cause damages, making sure that there is enough transparency from what these companies are doing for the external but making sure that President Trump still seems intent on standing in the way of regulation.

3:45Adam Tooze: And all of this is really a symptom of a bigger set of questions because there are a lot of deep tensions underneath this entire concept of AI regulation. It puts a spotlight on questions of the structure of the AI marketplace, the efficacy of existing liability laws, and the relationship of apocalyptic scenarios to capitalism more generally. So Adam, we thought we'd unpack some of this and to start off with, in what ways could we expect or not expect liability law and criminal law to mitigate the dangers of AI, as we do, say, with many other hazardous technological developments that we've seen, you know, essentially, you know, regulated under common law?

4:28Cameron Abadi: Yeah, this is a great way into this, I think, because I like it because it's somewhat deflationary, right? We're saying, because there's one view on AI, which says it's going to change the world completely. And so we need a radically new regulatory regime. That can also be a kind of holding action move, because basically, that's going to take ages to put in place. Whereas if you say, well, look, there's already taught law there. Why can't we just use that? We're pushing the immediacy of action as a possibility. Broadly speaking, this could be done probably under negligence, where an actor fails to anticipate foreseeable risk.

5:07Cameron Abadi: Product liability could do this, or maybe nuisance, professional malpractice, contact and consumer protection law. There's lots of different angles you could go down. And the full ambiguity of this is brought out by the fact that, you know, after the top guys at OpenAI and Anthropoc came out with these apocalyptic warnings and now they want to pace the frontier, not only did the Trump administration dissent, but Jason Huang of NVIDIA and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta also dissented from this position. And they argued for saying, well, look, Jensen Huang put it very, very clearly, right? The market forces are already there.

5:46Cameron Abadi: We don't need any new laws. We don't need new regulations. If you build a product or a service and you're not confident in its functionality, capability or safety, then don't release it, you know, Jensen Huang says. and Zuckerberg, like Wes said, right? Every lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely and the ability to take its own actions to ensure that happens. Labs face significant liability if their models cause harm. So they have a strong incentive to prevent this as well. This is Mark Zuckerberg. And Zuckerberg, after all, has reason to say this because over the course of this year, we didn't do an episode about it, but it's really dramatic.

6:24Cameron Abadi: Meta has come to a$16.7 billion settlement with 29 states over issues to do with algorithmic manipulation of underage, of teenage consumers of its social media platforms, right? So that's an acknowledgement by Zuckerberg, no less, that this law, the existing legal framework can actually do a lot of the work and his company has felt the force of this. And in legal theory circles, Negligence is the way that people are going. So there's articles in the Yale Law Review. This is a high-status frontier of legal thinking. And though AI advocates will say things like, well, you know, the thing about algorithms is they're not deterministic.

7:07Cameron Abadi: So it's not true that if you put certain inputs in, you're always going to say the same outputs. And does this pose questions for negligence? the broader position I think is clearly going to dominate, which is if you build a machine as unpredictable as that and put it out in the market with the potential for really dramatic consequences, you're clearly negligent in doing so. So a short answer to your question is, yes, it's already been done with regard to meta, with regard to base AI stuff, with regard to social media. Algo's Jensen Huang is on board with this view as well. I wouldn't release hardware that potentially could blow the world up because that clearly would be a product liability issue.

7:47Cameron Abadi: The question is, is it going to work on the large scale with regards to AI? I think that's the questions. Is it really going to be an effective way of dealing with, are you really going to be able to pinpoint causation? In the case of AI models, it's rather different from the mass effects of social media. How are you going to cope with the fact that the harms are probabilistic and they're tiny probabilities, right? This isn't like cancer causing cigarettes or something like that. It's, you know, a one in, well, they don't really know, but it's small percentages chance of blowing up the world. How does one really deal with that consequence?

8:28Cameron Abadi: A, furthermore, if you really do blow up civilization, will there be law courts to deal with the cases in the aftermath? Furthermore, the liabilities potentially are so huge that how would you right size them for corporate balance sheets, one of the thoughts here is that this is actually a play to get the corporate balance sheets de facto put on the balance sheets of the US government. So by pushing this kind of liability too far, you'd end up in that direction. And furthermore, the events that we're talking about are ones which have irreversibility and which can't really be properly compensated for.

9:04Cameron Abadi: If we really are talking about extinction level events, or even just really dramatic, you know, I don't know, security policy implications, then retrospective financial compensation isn't really going to do the job. And then there's the question of us even knowing whether anything's happened, right? Because the basis for really effective use of conventional law would be a robust reporting system that actually allowed us to establish what had happened. And right now, there isn't really a really binding regime in place that requires the frontier labs to report every single instance of malfeasance, every single instance of breakout alarming behavior on the part of their agents.

9:46They do it essentially, you know, as a choice.

9:50Cameron Abadi: If you create legal liability, what does that do to their incentives to actually accurately report incidents when they happen, because every time they do that, it establishes liability. And if you don't have then the cooperation, then you're going to need an enforcement mechanism, and you're in the world of asymmetric information, how do you get in? So on the face of it, this looks like a way to go. As Meta has experienced, it can already bite. But when you keep pushing it down the line, and you go to the risks associated with the frontier models, is it really going to work i think is the question and then at that point the question of a new

10:29Adam Tooze: regulatory regime really becomes urgent yeah it does seem like several questions arise from this entire set of problems i mean like among them is yeah how do they calculate the likelihood of an extinction level event i mean i yeah i often come across this statistics that cited as a 10 chance chance, but who knows how exactly that is calculated. But then more broadly, I think there's an interesting question about how this apocalyptic potential that has always been part of this industry relates to the outsized value of the industry that everyone can see now at this point and can kind of trace in the stock markets.

11:14Adam Tooze: And it strikes me that, you know, this alleged apocalyptic potential seems perversely to actually be fueling the value of these companies. I mean, even though there's the chance of a 10 % chance of all value being eliminated entirely, that very potential seems to be an advertisement of the power behind this and thus the potential economic value. So I'm curious, how do those facts relate to one another?

11:47Cameron Abadi: I mean, I think this is absolutely on point. I mean, I think we can take credit on the show over the last 18 months for having formulated this dilemma in various ways in our efforts to keep up with this story, which obviously for non-specialists like ourselves is a kind of continuous struggle. But it has seemed to me for a while that we're on a kind of knife edge type problem here where scenario A is the technology delivers on its promises and dramatically transforms the world, whether that's a catastrophic extinction level bioweapon type development or simply the promise to automate all white collar work, including the making of podcasts, which puts us all out of labor, but of course, creates huge value for the labs and whoever else in the value chain.

12:39Cameron Abadi: Maybe it's NVIDIA that really gets the money or the data centers. In any case, someone in the AI value chain gets really rich. And the condition of that, however, is spectacular, not to say apocalyptic change in wider society. Or on the other hand, it turns out that AI functionally is a bust. In fact, it's a much less modest level of innovation and transformation than the labs will have us believe, including the alarmists, for better and for worse, less dramatic, in which case there needs to be a market reset because there's a massive overvaluation of the entire AI chain in the stock markets. And right now it's driving 36 % of all business investment in the United States.

13:23Cameron Abadi: Spending is running at between$150 and$200 billion a quarter in the hyperscalers. So were it to turn out that all of this in the end is not generating real value. It doesn't really need to do anything trans-always. It's just not a business proposition. We're in deep water as well, with potentially implications for financial stability increasingly as the big players get networked with private finance and, in some cases, even with big players on Wall Street with big banks. So we're in that kind of dilemma, and this point that you're making speaks directly to this, and you see it played out, right?

14:03Cameron Abadi: So as OpenAI and Anthropic bosses say, we need to pace the frontier, soft banks' shares sell off. They're a big stakeholder in OpenAI. Chip produces stock, sells off. And then the next day, on Monday or Tuesday, you see Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, which is at the core of this entire thing. I mean, it's the bank of AI and also the hardware provider, if you like, the kind of gold standard provider of the AI ecosystem, because it's both a physical commodity and essentially a huge financial power leveraged on top of that. He comes out and says, oh, no, no, no, no. What are we talking about? Why are we even trying to slow this down?

14:45Cameron Abadi: That doesn't make any sense. And, you know, on the one hand, you could say, well, well, he's maybe he's maybe right. Maybe there's an exaggeration. Maybe this can just be handled by conventional talk, conventional product liability type rules. And on the other hand, of course, he's talking his own book because talk of regulating AI expansion is not good for NVIDIA's business prospects. So whichever way you turn on this, we're really in a hall of mirrors.

15:11Adam Tooze: Yeah. And on one hand, this discourse has always been internal to the AI industry. I mean, from its very beginnings, there's been people concerned about its potential for, you know, terrible adverse effects on society. But now it seems like there are new players involved as this industry is expanded. Predictably, you have other people coming in and getting involved in it. And yeah, obviously, as these valuations have increased, there are all sorts of new investors. And it strikes me that these kind of new players are now trying to dismiss the apocalyptic speculations that are surrounding the industry, in part because they're concerned about regulation clamping down on the industry.

15:59And yeah, you know, you see people dismissing this rhetoric as doomerism, even though the AI industry previously would have said this is all the product of kind of rationalistic, probabilistic analysis.

16:13Adam Tooze: And I'm curious if this kind of itself puts a spotlight on a gap between, yeah, some rational analysis and capitalist logic, on the other hand, that these investors are representing. I mean, is apocalypticism, so to speak, capable of being fully integrated into normal capitalistic calculations? I mean, do AI companies list the potential for apocalypse on their financial report, for example? I mean, how does this all get integrated ultimately?

16:43Cameron Abadi: Yeah, I mean, there's so many different notions of rationality and reason involved here that it's, I mean, it's a fascinating thing to talk about. In German philosophy, or at least in the English translation of German philosophy, there's often a distinction made between Vernunft, reason, and rationality, which would be something closer to maybe logic in German, logik or ratio. and you could say that the reasonable proposition faced with the possibility of serious people from inside players like OpenAI saying, yes, we fully acknowledge there is a 10 % probability of an extinction event, the reasonable response to that would be to say, what the hell are you doing?

17:21Cameron Abadi: Stop. Stop right now. Stop everything you're doing here and right now. That is mad that you could say this, right? And then the question you're asking is, as it were, does the rationality of the market, Regardless of the reasonableness of the decision of saying, stop, stop, stop, the rationality of the market, does it have a math formula? Does it have a logical procedure for dealing with this? And the answer is clearly yes. There's some way in which you can form an assessment of the value of an asset class, which has a 10 percent non-trivial probability of total disaster, as opposed to the upside, which in some of these models, we talked about these way back now, it seems like a very long time ago.

18:02Cameron Abadi: So, you know, which shows exponentially exploding upward growth and capital accumulating the vast majority of GDP. And everyone makes out like bandits who even those who remain employed make out well. And the rest of the population is put on some sort of universal basic income type model. You know, there are ways of pricing that. You just kind of wouldn't want that to actually be the way it's going. And what we're seeing are these absurd, really surreal halfway houses where the big labs are now, as we know, they're going to do IPOs. And in IPOs, in the share issuance documents, you are legally required to issue statements about catastrophic risk.

18:42Cameron Abadi: So lo and behold, they're writing, you know, a 10 percent probability of the end of the world must be part of this share issue into these documents. and yeah it's really it's an exercise in the utterly grotesque and at that point you have to say that a capitalist rationality tips over into a truly grotesque scenario of unreasonableness of profoundly screwy basically this should be stopped immediately clearly it have a 10 % chance of ending the world If we thought there was a meteoroid coming towards us with the 10 % chance, we will be taking this extremely seriously. And this isn't like a physical event.

19:27Cameron Abadi: This is, after all, the product of technology and capital and business that's happening within society. And that, as even any dispute, is remarkable, right? That you have both Jensen Huang and Zuckerberg and the President of the United States coming out and saying, no, no, no, we should push on further in the face of the big guys at OpenAI and Anthropics saying, well no actually we kind of think this might be serious is a yeah i mean it's been on the cards in the for the last two years this has been the logic for the last two years right there's this malign coincidence this malign convergence of the of the unhinged logic of MAGA and the you know breakneck and what's happening now it goes to your point is that wall street becomes an independent driving force separate from the more internal kind of logic of you know articulated by people at Anthropic and OpenAI, who themselves, of course, are deeply in-hoc to Wall Street, but following perhaps a different logic.

20:25Adam Tooze: Okay, we're going to take a quick break right here, but we'll be back in a second to continue talking about AI regulation.

20:48Adam Tooze: Michael Lewis here to tell you about my new book, Blockers, which gives you an inside look at the Trump administration and the public servants who stood in its way. These were people who were securing our most sensitive data, keeping the public safe from all sorts of threats, and engaged in life-saving scientific research

21:05Cameron Abadi: until they were told they no longer belonged. And the question to me is, if they can't survive in our government, then what does it say about us? Get Blockers only at blockers.fm.

21:18Adam Tooze: I know that my son is somewhere alive. This is Deborah Tice. Her son, Austin, is one of the biggest missing person cases in the world. And for years, I've been searching for him. It's a case like I never imagined. And there are people who don't want the truth to come out. From the BBC, this is I'm Not a Monster Presents. Where is Austin Tice? Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. There's another strain of criticism that's been arising around this discourse, and that's the accusation of regulatory capture, by which I mean that, you know, it is conspicuous that it is the biggest AI companies that are calling for regulation at this point.

22:08Adam Tooze: It is open AI, it is anthropic as the major players. And this has gotten some wondering whether they are trying to use government regulation to stifle their competition in the form of other smaller AI companies. I'm curious, how would that regulatory capture actually work? And might this, in fact, be why these big AI players are calling for regulation right now?

22:35Cameron Abadi: Yeah, I think there are different versions of this argument. You know, the most banal, the most kind of classic regulatory capture story is simply that if you're an oligopolist with substantial sunk costs, then it can be very much in your interest to have a regulatory regime which creates a lump sum cost for any new entrant. because what it does is to kind of reinforce what it used to be called, the death zone or something like that, right? The gap between the smaller players in the Silicon Valley space and the really big boys. And crossing that was always the problem because the bigger firms would swoop in and buy up, take out the interests of the venture capitalists.

23:13Cameron Abadi: And we did that whole episode with Marc Andreessen and all these kind of people that was about that phenomenon. And having regulation that imposes a substantial hurdle on all players reinforces that kind of logic. And you'd expect any oligopoly to be interested in that kind of move. There's a more specific logic that's being invoked with regard to AI, which pinges off this idea of pacing the frontier, and also attaches significance to the specific business logic of open AI and Anthropic, which is what do we know about them? We know they're engaged in hugely expensive scale up. And the other thing we know about them is that they are closed models.

23:57Cameron Abadi: So closed weight models, you basically take it or leave it, you take their model, these are not open access models. And it's not without significance, perhaps that Zuckerberg and Nvidia who have come out against regulation, favor open models, because Nvidia in particular favors open models because it wants more people around the world to build more models because they need more compute. So they'll sell more chips. So they're heavily backing AI sovereignty. And so against that backdrop, especially if you add in the fact that the Chinese labs are able to produce not quite the performance of the frontier closed American models, but 95 % of its performance for a fraction of the price that will be necessary to charge to make the OpenAI and Anthropic models really commercially viable, you can begin to see the logic of OpenAI and Anthropic working together to push for federal government intervention, A, to acknowledge federal government interest in their businesses.

25:03Cameron Abadi: So in other words, to establish a kind of too-big-to-fail-key national champion kind of logic. and on the other hand also to slow down the pace of competition such that they're not exposed to the incredibly serious competitive risks and commercial risks of just going hell for leather down their own closed model optimization kind of route. And this is a fairly extended hypothesis. It requires you to join up an awful lot of the dots. So I think the thing to do is to ask going forward what kind of regulatory environment do these players actually want. So it's not the question of regulation or no regulation, but what kind of regulation are they advocating for?

25:46And the

25:47Cameron Abadi: neuralgic thing that's being discussed at this point seems to be the question of open be closed. In other words, how serious are OpenAI and Anthropic about allowing external assessors, external inspectors to see the inner working of their models, the closure of which is really their only hope to get to the sort of profitability that would be necessary to warrant the kind of investments which they're calling for. And that's really the kind of crucial dimension here. We can see how far this is really a commercially motivated push for regulation, a cynical play to consolidate oligopolistic position if that really is ineffective, doesn't really produce any public insight into what's going on inside the models, if it doesn't begin to blur the boundary to the sort of open models which Zuckerberg and Huang and the Chinese have all been pushing so far.

26:46Cameron Abadi: So I think that might be a way of trying to arbitrate this because it's, I think, an open question right now. There's a huge amount of speculation. Anyone who's been on Twitter recently knows. Everyone has a pet theory about why they're doing it. The cynical theories don't seem implausible. But since we can't have access to their minds, and even if we did have access to our minds, we might not really find the smoking gun. What we really should be looking for is the signs of what kind of regulation they're willing to actually tolerate. And the deeper it is, the more it actually moves towards genuinely opening the IP up for inspection, the more we should take this seriously as a security concern and less as a cynical tactical move to try and shore up their, as yet, essentially untested business model.

27:33Adam Tooze: Yeah, that will be something definitely to keep an eye on. And yeah, obviously there are open source competitors out there. And yeah, one could invite OpenAI and Anthropic to also sort of join them in opening up their software. But all of this raises another question, I think, and that is whether AI regulation also ultimately becomes a question of state capacity. In other words, for all that these companies are inviting the United States government to get involved in regulation or trying to prevent the United States government from regulating the industry, does the United States government even have the capacity for this type of regulation?

28:18Adam Tooze: I mean, it struck me that when the Biden administration passed the first version of AI regulation of some sort, I forget embedded in which law exactly that was, but they placed it in a bureaucracy called NIST, which is a pretty anonymous bureaucracy. And I think it was basically just one person or one office in the National Institute of Standards and Technology responsible for this. And I think it's fair to wonder whether that capacity exists adequately and then whether there are other states that would actually be better at this. I mean, China comes to mind. We've talked about China a lot on this podcast, obviously.

28:59Adam Tooze: And, you know, they seem to be a more technocratically proficient state. So, I mean, is the United States even capable of this in comparison?

29:06Cameron Abadi: Yeah, it's really fascinating. I mean, because the problem of regulating this because of the asymmetry of information is absolutely daunting. And if you think about what it would take to effectively regulate the sorts of risks that really would warrant intervention, just setting aside issues of financial stability and so on, you'd have to really understand the processes of machine learning. You'd really have to understand the hardware, the cloud logic, cybersecurity, biological risk. I mean, competition policy, national security. It's like it's it's I don't know, like the missile gap discourse and trying to decode that.

29:43Cameron Abadi: But but at a whole nother level of technological sophistication. And as you say, the American government apparatus, the state apparatus does have pockets of expertise all over the place. So you mentioned the NIST cluster, then there's national laboratories of different types, the intelligence agencies, you've got to figure that the NSA and people like that have huge expertise, DARPA, bits of commerce, other institutions. so when places like the government accountability office have gone in and asked like who in the federal government actually has expertise they find lots but the problem of course is how do you keep that current and how on earth do you compete with you know AI labs and AI businesses which will offer individual technicians millions of dollars in salary like it's a version of the financial regulation problem I'm not sure it's on steroids but it's at least as bad as the financial regulation problem, where the big investment bankers and private equity and so on will pay, you know, salaries which are unthinkable in the public sector.

30:47Cameron Abadi: So that's a fundamental issue. Another issue in the US is just the fragmentation of this bureaucracy. So it's, it's all over the place. And then I think there's the issue of, you know, how is strategy formulated? And unfortunately, we're dealing with the Trump administration, which, which even, you know, even if one was my, Even if one was fair-mindedly determined to just figure out what they were planning to do, which is the most reasonable approach to the Trump administration, the problem is even if you take that view, open-minded, setting aside one's own liberal prejudices, it's incredibly difficult, even from insiders inside the administration, to get a clear idea of what's going on, because who knows?

31:23Cameron Abadi: And then we have the problem that the big firms are clearly determined to exploit this blank sheet quality of American government in the current moment to follow whatever their strategy is, hyperscaling, open or closed model, you know, AI sovereignty for everyone or Anthropix vision of democracies versus autocracy. autocracy. It's a free for all. So it is possible that this could be done, but these are just about the worst possible conditions under which to try to do it. And when we start talking about the difference with China, this is also really striking because America has the biggest regulatory challenge because at least two or three of its firms are operating at the absolutely outer edge of what's possible.

32:10Cameron Abadi: And so the risks have this speculative radical uncertainty kind of quality. What do we do with a company which openly in its share perspective says that what we do could reasonably entail a 10 percent probability of ending humanity as we know it? I always say to people it's as though we were running the thermonuclear stage of the early Manhattan Project arms race with private companies calling the shots in the rival development of hydrogen bombs. That's the kind of scenario we're in. And China has, you know, A, a radically different political structure, obviously. B, a party apparatus, the National Security Administration, National Security Ministry came out over the weekend saying, here are our red lines.

32:55Cameron Abadi: And that, as you would expect in the Chinese case, basically entails any substantial risks to the monopoly of the party and its control over the amount of the Chinese media system. And when I said a year or two ago that it didn't seem possible to me to be uncertain about the fact that if the CPC felt that kind of challenge, it would have people pooh-poohed it coming out of the Chinese AI community, whereas it seems to be that that's really what the ministry is saying, that don't misunderstand us. You can do this business thing you're doing. But if this at any point begins to seriously mess with our control over the social media system in China, all bets are off as to what we're going to do.

33:34Cameron Abadi: So on the one end, there is a radical difference in the objective, which in the Chinese case remains maintaining the control of the Communist Party. There's a hugely expanded range of means they can use. It's more centralized. And then furthermore, they're managing a sector, an ecosystem in China, which is much less at the frontier. so unsurprisingly the Chinese regulatory discourse tends to be more about immediate risks and quite aggressive on some of those immediate risks but much less concerned with the pacing frontier question because they're not at the frontier so America really is the US is facing the radical challenges of regulating you know this isn't just a story about American state capacity It's also a story about the failure to actually formulate national politics, which is a Trump administration story.

34:31Cameron Abadi: But it's also, thirdly, a story about the fact that the U.S., what it's trying to regulate is the outer edge of one of the most rapidly developing technologies we've ever seen.

34:41Adam Tooze: Yes, that is, I think, a stark but useful way of putting it. I do think we have to wrap up this conversation right now. It won't be the last time we're talking about AI, of course. It's not the first time. But we will be back in a week to talk about Francis Fukuyama's memoir. So check that out if you'd like in the meantime. And we will be back next week.

35:07Adam Tooze: Ones and Twos is written and edited by Adam and me and produced by Claudia Tatey. The show is made possible through the support of foreign policy readers and Ones and Twos listeners. As always, we love getting listener feedback. you can leave voice messages on the Ones and Twos homepage on foreignpolicy.com or email us. That's podcasts at foreignpolicy.com. Or you can tweet us. That's at Onesandtwospod. I'm Cameron Abadi. Thank you very much for listening. And we'll be back in your feed next week.

35:53Adam Tooze: The world at this moment is more fractured than it's been in decades. More wars.

35:58Cameron Abadi: Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.

36:01Adam Tooze: More extremism. Germany could soon have a far-right political party running one of its regional... And deeper disagreements on a range of issues. On season three of Counterpoint, we get to the heart of those disagreements with a series of debates. On each episode, two of the smartest people in their field face off over one question. CounterPoint is a production of Forum Policy Magazine in partnership with the Doha Forum.