LIMIT GOVERNMENT

“And unfortunately, it's for this reason that I don't think that individual acts of corporate courage solve the problem. And the problem is this, that structurally, AI favors many authoritarian applications, mass surveillance being one of them. Even if Anthropic refused to sell its models to the government to enable mass surveillance, and even if the next two companies after Anthropic did the same, in twelve months, everybody and their mother will be able to train a model as good as the current frontier. And at that point, there will be some vendor who is willing and able to help the government enforce mass surveillance.”

“They started financing companies that could never get financing before. This is sort of where the term democratization of capital came from. So the market grew tremendously because you now had a firm in the market that was doing original issues of bonds for companies and companies such as Ted Turner, Steve Wynn, MCI Communications, Pulte Homes, all these companies that could never have gotten financing before were now able to get financing and grow.”

“Not only did President Trump grant him a pardon, but when he called Mike to tell him that he was getting a pardon, he said, you know, and this is a real pardon, you've never done anything for me. Okay, you know, there's no quo here, it's a pardon. And then the White House issued a press release that went in great detail on the fact of what Mike has done in his life, in the world of finance, for companies to get capital that couldn't get capital, what Mike had done in philanthropy, in cancer research to save lives.”

“Not only did President Trump grant him a pardon, but when he called Mike to tell him that he was getting a pardon, he said, you know, and this is a real pardon, you've never done anything for me. Okay, you know, there's no quo here, it's a pardon. And then the White House issued a press release that went in great detail on the fact of what Mike has done in his life, in the world of finance, for companies to get capital that couldn't get capital, what Mike had done in philanthropy, in cancer research to save lives.”

“Lowell had almost no contact with Mr. Bowsky or the Trans Act, can say we're looking at. But he was Mike's brother. And it was interesting in that as I talk about in the book, years later when I taught a class at Stanford Law School about this case and what happened, I brought in the young prosecutor who worked with Mr. Giuliani at the time to talk about his perspective years later on the case and upon the process. And when we asked him specifically about the dive in Lowell Milken, he acknowledged the fact that Lowell would not have been indicted if it wasn't to bring pressure on his brother.”

“Here they were basically taking market share. They were a disruptor. If you use today's term, they were a disruptor... People didn't like Bill Gates and Microsoft because they're a disruptor. Number one, he was taking market share. Number two, because he developed a market and people believe in what he was doing, he was able to finance people who wanted to acquire other companies that they thought were undervalued in the market.”

“The media has tremendous power. Get out there and tell your story. Let people hear from you, who you are and what you're doing. My true was he was considered reclusive. He did not want not want to talk to the media. So people wanted to interview him because they were getting more and more successful. He let people at Drexel do it. He did not want to be part of the media out there. So I think that pertained a lot in that who Mike was was defined by the government through this process.”

“Here they were basically taking market share. They were a disruptor. If you use today's term, they were a disruptor... People didn't like Bill Gates and Microsoft because they're a disruptor. Number one, he was taking market share. Number two, because he developed a market and people believe in what he was doing, he was able to finance people who wanted to acquire other companies that they thought were undervalued in the market.”

“RICO stands for Rocket Carrying Influence Corruption Organization. It was a statute, it was passed by Congress, it's a federal law, to give prosecutors extra powers and to be able to impose very severe penalties on people in organized crime. And under the RICO statute, if you have two, what they call predicate acts within a certain period of time, you could be deemed a racketeering enterprise. And those two acts could be anything from two mail frauds.”

“Maybe the best example of this is Stanislav Petrov, who was a Soviet lieutenant colonel stationed on duty at a nuclear early warning system. And his sensors said that The United States had launched five intercontinental ballistic missiles at the Soviet Union. But he judged it to be a false alarm, and so he refused to alert his higher ups and broke protocol. If he hadn't, Soviet high command would probably have retaliated, and hundreds of millions of people would have died. Of course, the problem is that one person's virtue is another person's misalignment.”

“And we actually found things that they would accept that Mike could plead to, none of which, and this is why I go in great detail in the book so people understand how in many ways ridiculous it is, none of which had ever been the subject of a criminal prosecution before or since. I mean, if you want me to drive you an example... technically, I guess you could make an argument since the 13D is supposed to disclose everybody who has an interest in the stock that you own, that when Mike said, I would make it up to you, Boeske theoretically should have amended this 13D to indicate that Mike had made this promise.”

“Rather, it is more like the process of industrialization itself, which is a general purpose transformation of the whole economy with thousands of applications across every single sector. If you applied Ben Thompson or Leopold Lash and Bender's logic to the industrial revolution, which is also world historically important, it would imply the government had the right to requisition any factory it wanted or destroy any business it wanted, and punish and coerce anybody who refused to comply. But this is just not how free societies handle the process of industrialization, and it's also not how they should handle AI.”

“But that's not what the government did. Instead, the government has threatened to destroy Anthropic as a private business, because Anthropic refuses to sell to the government on terms that the government commands. Now if upheld, the supply chain restriction would mean that companies like Amazon and NVIDIA and Google and Palantir would need to ensure that Anthropic is not touching any of their Pentagon work.”

“Now I cannot imagine how a regulatory framework built around the kinds of concepts that are used in the AI risk discourse will not be used and abused by a wannabe despot. The underlying terms here, like catastrophic risk or threats to national security or autonomy risk, are so vague and so open to interpretation that you're just handing a fully loaded bazooka to a future power hungry leader. These terms can mean whatever the government wants them to mean. Have you built a model that will tell users that the government's policy on tariffs is misguided? Well, that's a deceptive model. It's a manipulative model. You can't deploy it.”

“And the question is, to what or to whom should the AIs be aligned? In what situation should the AI defer to the model company versus the end user versus the law versus to its own sense of morality. This is maybe the most important question about what happens in the future with powerful AI systems, and we barely talk about it. And it's understandable why, because if you're a model company, you don't really wanna be advertising the fact that you have complete control over the preferences and the character of the entire future labor force.”

“They started financing companies that could never get financing before. This is sort of where the term democratization of capital came from. So the market grew tremendously because you now had a firm in the market that was doing original issues of bonds for companies and companies such as Ted Turner, Steve Wynn, MCI Communications, Pulte Homes, all these companies that could never have gotten financing before were now able to get financing and grow.”

“And we actually found things that they would accept that Mike could plead to, none of which, and this is why I go in great detail in the book so people understand how in many ways ridiculous it is, none of which had ever been the subject of a criminal prosecution before or since. I mean, if you want me to drive you an example... technically, I guess you could make an argument since the 13D is supposed to disclose everybody who has an interest in the stock that you own, that when Mike said, I would make it up to you, Boeske theoretically should have amended this 13D to indicate that Mike had made this promise.”

“There are a 100,000,000 CCTV cameras in America, and you can get pretty good open source multimodal models for 10¢ per million input tokens. So if you process a frame every ten seconds, and if each frame is, say, a thousand tokens, then for $30,000,000,000, you can process every single camera in America. And remember that a given level of AI capability gets 10 x cheaper every single year. So while this year might cost $30,000,000,000, next year it'll cost $3,000,000,000, the year after that, $300,000,000. And by 2030, it'll be less expensive to monitor every single nook and cranny in this country than it is to remodel the White House.”

“RICO stands for Rocket Carrying Influence Corruption Organization. It was a statute, it was passed by Congress, it's a federal law, to give prosecutors extra powers and to be able to impose very severe penalties on people in organized crime. And under the RICO statute, if you have two, what they call predicate acts within a certain period of time, you could be deemed a racketeering enterprise. And those two acts could be anything from two mail frauds.”

“The media has tremendous power. Get out there and tell your story. Let people hear from you, who you are and what you're doing. My true was he was considered reclusive. He did not want not want to talk to the media. So people wanted to interview him because they were getting more and more successful. He let people at Drexel do it. He did not want to be part of the media out there. So I think that pertained a lot in that who Mike was was defined by the government through this process.”

“Lowell had almost no contact with Mr. Bowsky or the Trans Act, can say we're looking at. But he was Mike's brother. And it was interesting in that as I talk about in the book, years later when I taught a class at Stanford Law School about this case and what happened, I brought in the young prosecutor who worked with Mr. Giuliani at the time to talk about his perspective years later on the case and upon the process. And when we asked him specifically about the dive in Lowell Milken, he acknowledged the fact that Lowell would not have been indicted if it wasn't to bring pressure on his brother.”