Unfortunately, however, I cannot carry out my job as a writer today with the level of analytic rigor you expect from me without acknowledging that we are sitting in hospice. It is increasingly difficult to honestly discuss the developments of frontier AI, and what kind of futures we should aim to build, without acknowledging our place at the deathbed of the republic as we know it. Except there is no convenient machine to decide for us that the patient has died. We just have to sit and watch.

Our republic has died and been reborn again more than once in America’s history. America has had multiple “foundings.” Perhaps we are on the verge of another rebirth of the American republic, another chapter in America’s continual reinvention of itself. I hope so. But it may be that we have no more virtue or wisdom to fuel such a founding, and that it is better to think of ourselves as transitioning gradually into an era of post-republic American statecraft and policymaking. I do not pretend to know.

I am now going to write about a skirmish between an AI company and the U.S. government. I don’t want to sound hyperbolic about it. The death I am describing has been going on for most of my life. The incident I am going to write about now took place last week, and it may even be halfway satisfyingly resolved within a day.