Why can't language models write well? I n a certain, strange way, generative AI peaked with OpenAI's GPT-2 seven years ago. Little known to anyone outside of tech circles, GPT-2 excelled at producing unexpected answers. "You could be like, 'Continue this story:,' and GPT-2 would be like, ','" Katy Gero, a poet and computer scientist who has been experimenting with language models since 2017, told me. "The models won't do that anymore." AI leaders boast about their models' superhuman technical abilities.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. T he smell was strange . The concrete wall was too close. One of my kids was standing on the sidewalk next to our car--not crying, just confused. The seat belt had held. The crumple zone had crumpled.

A short-lived AI tool promised to help users write like the greats--and a bunch of other random people, including me. T o me, the best first sentence of any piece of journalism is the one in Joan Didion's 1987 book,, which begins like this: "Havana vanities come to dust in Miami." I love that sentence and that propulsive first chapter so much that I once sat down to try to figure out how she did it. I looked at the sentences one at a time to assess what purpose each one was serving, and I counted how many of them Didion had needed to accomplish each thing she wanted to accomplish. Then I thought about how she figured out what order to put them in to have maximum page-turning impact.

An AI crash could bring down the economy. Some in the tech world think that's the price of progress. The tech billionaire Hemant Taneja admits that AI is a bubble. In fact, he welcomes it: "Bubbles are good," Taneja, the CEO of General Catalyst, a venture-capital firm, told me in an email. If AI comes crashing down, it will lead to "some spectacular failures," he said--companies will go under and people will lose their jobs--but that's a price worth paying for "enduring companies that change the world forever."

It came earlier than expected. More than a year before his recent standoff with the Pentagon, Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, published a 15,000-word manifesto describing a glorious AI future. Its title, "Machines of Loving Grace," is borrowed from a Richard Brautigan poem, but as Amodei acknowledged, with some embarrassment, its utopian vision bears some resemblance to science fiction. According to Amodei, we will soon create the first polymath AIs with abilities that surpass those of Nobel Prize winners in "most relevant fields," and we'll have millions of them, a "country of geniuses," all packed into the glowing server racks of a data center, working together. With access to tools that operate directly on our physical world, these AIs would be able to get up to a great deal of dangerous mischief, but according to Amodei, if they're developed--or "grown," as staffers at Anthropic are fond of saying--in the correct way, they will decide to greatly improve our lives. Amodei does not explain precisely how the AIs will accomplish this.

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.

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.