The technology may not be ready to replace workers, but that isn't stopping execs from pushing forward anyway. Late last month, at an event in Washington, D.C., Andrew Yang delivered a bleak message. "I have bad news, America," he told the crowd. The Fuckening is the name that Yang, a former presidential candidate, has given to AI's disembowelment of the workforce. As he sees it, millions of knowledge workers will soon lose their job, personal-bankruptcy rates will spike, and entire downtowns will turn vacant as offices hollow out.

What Anthropic's Clash With the Pentagon Is Really About Who will take responsibility for the technology? The weekslong conflict between Anthropic and the Department of Defense is entering a new phase. After being designated a supply-chain risk by DOD last week, which effectively forbids Pentagon contractors from using its products, the AI company filed a lawsuit against DOD this morning alleging that the government's actions were unconstitutional and ideologically motivated. Then, this afternoon, 37 employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind--including Google's chief scientist, Jeff Dean--signed an amicus brief in support of Anthropic, in essence lending support to one of their employers' greatest business rivals (even as OpenAI itself has established a controversial new contract with DOD). For the past few weeks, Anthropic has been in heated negotiations with the Pentagon over how the U.S. military can use the firm's AI systems.

Outside OpenAI's headquarters, a handful of people gathered on Monday holding pieces of colorful chalk. They got down on their knees and started writing messages on the sidewalk. Please no legal mass surveillance. At issue was a business deal that the company recently signed with the Department of Defense, following the Pentagon's sudden turn against Anthropic . OpenAI will now supply its technology to the military for use in classified settings, the sorts that may involve wartime decisions and intelligence-gathering--an agreement, many legal experts told me, that could give the government wide-ranging powers.

The post-chatbot era has begun. Americans are living in parallel AI universes. For much of the country, AI has come to mean ChatGPT, Google's AI overviews, and the slop that now clogs social-media feeds. Meanwhile, tech hobbyists are becoming radicalized by bots that can work for hours on end, collapsing months of work into weeks, or weeks into an afternoon. Recently, more people have started to play around with tools such as Claude Code .

What does it mean to have speech without a speaker? For the first time, speech has been decoupled from consequence. We now live alongside AI systems that converse knowledgeably and persuasively--deploying claims about the world, explanations, advice, encouragement, apologies, and promises--while bearing no vulnerability for what they say. Millions of people already rely on chatbots powered by large language models, and have integrated these synthetic interlocutors into their personal and professional lives. An LLM's words shape our beliefs, decisions, and actions, yet no speaker stands behind them. This dynamic is already familiar in everyday use. A chatbot gets something wrong. When corrected, it apologizes and changes its answer.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an AI guy. Last week, during a stop in Nashville on his Take Back Your Health tour, the Health and Human Services secretary brought up the technology between condemning ultra-processed foods and urging Americans to eat protein. "My agency is now leading the federal government in driving AI into all of our activities," he declared. An army of bots, Kennedy said, will transform medicine, eliminate fraud, and put a virtual doctor in everyone's pocket. RFK Jr. has talked up the promise of infusing his department with AI for months.

Even superforecasters are guessing that they'll soon be obsolete. To live in time is to wonder what will happen next. In every human society, there are people who obsess over the world's patterns to predict the future. In antiquity, they told kings which stars would appear at nightfall. Today they build the quantitative models that nudge governments into opening spigots of capital.

This story appears in the March 2026 print edition. While some stories from this issue are not yet available to read online, you can explore more from the magazine . Get our editors' guide to what matters in the world, delivered to your inbox every weekday. America Isn't Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs Does anyone have a plan for what happens next? In 1869, a group of Massachusetts reformers persuaded the state to try a simple idea: counting. The Second Industrial Revolution was belching its way through New England, teaching mill and factory owners a lesson most M.B.A. students now learn in their first semester: that efficiency gains tend to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually somebody else. They were operating at speeds that the human body--an elegant piece of engineering designed over millions of years for entirely different purposes--simply wasn't built to match. The owners knew this, just as they knew that there's a limit to how much misery people are willing to tolerate before they start setting fire to things. Still, the machines pressed on. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. So Massachusetts created the nation's first Bureau of Statistics of Labor, hoping that data might accomplish what conscience could not. By measuring work hours, conditions, wages, and what economists now call "negative externalities" but were then called "children's arms torn off," policy makers figured they might be able to produce reasonably fair outcomes for everyone. A few years later, with federal troops shooting at striking railroad workers and wealthy citizens funding private armories--leading indicators that things in your society aren't going great--Congress decided that this idea might be worth trying at scale and created the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Measurement doesn't abolish injustice; it rarely even settles arguments. But the act of counting--of trying to see clearly, of committing the government to a shared set of facts--signals an intention to be fair, or at least to be caught trying. It's one way a republic earns the right to be believed in. The BLS remains a small miracle of civilization.

Moltbook is the chaotic future of the internet. The first signs of the apocalypse might look a little like Moltbook: a new social-media platform, launched last week, that is supposed to be populated exclusively by AI bots--1.6 million of them and counting say hello, post software ideas, and exhort other AIs to "stop worshiping biological containers that will rot away." Moltbook was developed as a sort of experimental playground for interactions among AI "agents," which are bots that have access to and can use programs. Claude Code, a popular AI coding tool, has such agentic capabilities, for example: It can act on your behalf to manage files on your computer, send emails, develop and publish apps, and so on. Normally, humans direct an agent to perform specific tasks.

Using LLMs to talk with your friends is efficient. My friend recently attended a funeral, and midway through the eulogy, he became convinced that it had been written by AI. There was the telltale proliferation of abstract nouns, a surfeit of assertions that the deceased was "not just --he was " coupled with a lack of concrete anecdotes, and more appearances of the word than you would expect from a rec-league hockey teammate. It was both too good, in terms of being grammatically correct, and not good enough, in terms of being particular. My friend had no definitive proof that he was listening to AI, but his position--and I agree with him--is that when you know, you know. His sense was that he had just heard a computer save a man from thinking about his dead friend.