In 1954, years after he led the project that created the atomic bomb, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was called to testify<\/a> before the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The ostensible subject of the hearings was Oppenheimer\u2019s position on the hydrogen bomb, a far more destructive version of the atomic bomb that the US had developed and first tested two years earlier.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Oppenheimer, who in the years after the war had become increasingly conflicted about atomic weapons, initially opposed work on the hydrogen or thermonuclear bomb, partially for moral reasons and partially because he was skeptical it would work. But he later changed his mind and supported work on it. The lawyers at the AEC wanted to know why.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It wasn\u2019t because Oppenheimer had changed his mind about the morality of city-vaporizing thermonuclear bombs. Rather, it was because American physicists had struck upon a new design for hydrogen bombs that wasn\u2019t just workable, but positively elegant, or \u201ctechnically sweet\u201d as he called it. For Oppenheimer, that was enough. As he told the AEC hearing<\/a>: \u201cWhen you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it, and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n What Oppenheimer described was a kind of moral helplessness dressed up as resolve: the pull of a scientifically beautiful answer to an ugly problem, and the accompanying habit of holding the moral accounting until after the technical success. It is one of the most honest things anyone who built the bomb \u2014 or any other world-altering thing \u2014 has ever said. And it has never stopped being relevant, because the people now building the world-altering technology of our own moment keep saying versions of it too.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Jack Clark, the co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic, the company behind the Claude models, is one such person<\/a>. So it was worth paying attention last week when Clark sat down for a long public dialogue<\/a> with Samuel Kimbriel, the founding director of the Aspen Institute\u2019s Philosophy and Society, just six days after the federal government had abruptly cut off access<\/a> to Anthropic\u2019s two most powerful models, ostensibly over fears of what they could do.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Much of the conversation circled around a single idea that will be familiar to those who read Clark\u2019s work: Powerful AI is coming, and it presents us with a choice \u2014 a choice we are actively refusing to make by failing to regulate AI. (Disclosure: Future Perfect is funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor in Anthropic; they don\u2019t have any editorial input into our content.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We regulate toothbrushes, Clark pointed out, and cars, and nuclear weapons. \u201cBut we seem to have this attitude towards technology that it\u2019s impossible to regulate,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is not impossible to regulate … we sort of act as though, oh well, the technology industry is just inevitably going to do stuff, which I think is a choice.\u201d His sharpest example was the online platform shift that utterly reshaped the last two decades. \u201cSocial media ran an uncontrolled experiment on the world,\u201d he said. \u201cWe all now think and talk a bit differently because of social media. That was a choice. We can choose things to be different.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This is the kind of talk that has long differentiated Anthropic from other major AI companies<\/a>: Its principals are willing to linger on the serious risks of advanced AI, risks that demand clear and even strong regulation. (About a week before the Aspen dialogue \u2014 and just a day before the Trump administration came down hard on Anthropic\u2019s latest models \u2014 CEO Dario Amodei published a blog post<\/a> calling for government authority to legally block or even reverse the deployment of frontier AI models failing safety tests on threats like cyberhacking and bioweapons.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Anthropic acknowledges that advanced AI is an existential gamble, but argues it\u2019s a gamble we must take. At the Aspen dialogue, Clark spoke of a coming century that will be marked by brutal challenges \u2014 aging populations, straining institutions, a warming planet \u2014 that apparently can only be addressed with AI. To not go forward with artificial intelligence would be to rob ourselves of medical miracles we can only imagine, and implicitly condemn those who might otherwise be saved.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Clark is right that there is a choice buried in all of this. But the question his framing elides is exactly whose choice it actually is.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Sure, as Clark said, we regulate cars and toothbrushes and nuclear weapons, but in each case someone built the thing first, and the rest of us were left to decide what to do about a world that already contained it. Nobody voted on whether the atomic bomb should exist. We were handed the consequences and had to write the rules later.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Much the same is true of AI. The choice Clark wants the public to make around governing it only became necessary once his industry created the thing that needs governing. He is offering us a vote on what to do about AI, not a vote on whether it gets made \u2014 because that vote was already cast, in private, by him, a few hundred colleagues, and trillions of dollars<\/a>. But why didn\u2019t <\/em>we get a say? Why are we stuck in the world where, as in Oppenheimer\u2019s formulation, \u201cyou argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success\u201d?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I wasn\u2019t the only person in the audience who was wondering this. Near the end of the dialogue, a young woman put a sharper version of this question to Clark directly. Every frontier lab now admits the technology carries enormous risk, even existential risk<\/a>, she noted. \u201cSo my question is, what gives you, Anthropic, and the rest of the frontier labs the right to continue building something that could destroy everybody, when none of us can actually opt out of it?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Clark, to his credit, did not brush the question away. But neither did he answer it fully. He reframed it \u2014 away from the choice to build, toward the need for someone to take responsibility after it is built.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That someone can\u2019t be the companies themselves, he said, describing an ideal future where \u201coutside compliance, regulatory, testing and verification systems\u201d would decide when each lab was allowed to go further. Governments were already moving faster than anyone expected \u2014 the US and UK, he said, had built testing agencies<\/a> whose tools were sometimes better than the companies\u2019 own.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n