AI Labor economist Kathryn Anne Edwards isn't worried AI will create a new class of permanently idle Americans — but argues it's still time for the government to fix the social safety net
This is an interview about AI. My fiancé works at Anthropic. See my full ethics disclosure here.
In the first three episodes of Platformer's miniseries on AI and jobs, we heard from tech leaders who are building and implementing the agents that may one day result in significant job loss. For the most part, though, they have steered away from alarmism. Box CEO Aaron Levie argued that the "last mile" of human labor will resist efforts to automate it. Google's James Manyika
why it’s much easier to automate a task than a job. Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code,
__did say__And so as we move into the second half of the series, we're shifting to include some perspectives outside tech. In particular, I wanted to talk with people who study the economy. I want to know what they're seeing in the data now, and to understand what will happen if our first three guests are soft-selling the disruption to come. If AI does start taking jobs in large numbers, what then?
For these and other questions, I turned this week to [ Kathryn Anne Edwards](https://www.kathrynanneedwards.com/?ref=platformer.news). Edwards is a labor economist and independent policy consultant who writes a column for
[and co-hosts a podcast of her own,](https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/AVkWV6s9sno/kathryn-edwards?ref=platformer.news)
__Bloomberg Opinion__[. (She is also a compelling presence](https://optimisteconomy.com/?ref=platformer.news)
__Optimist Economy__[and other social platforms.)](https://www.instagram.com/keds_economist/?ref=platformer.news)
__on Instagram__Like our previous guests, Edwards thinks that much of the AI jobs panic is overblown, and she flatly rejects the Silicon Valley vision that AI will result in (to quote Sam Altman) a permanently unemployed " idle class." She told me that idea feels more than a little classist in how readily it writes off the ingenuity and resilience of the American workforce.
"I am very firmly of the belief that the US worker is an incredible being, and they don't deserve to be written off by their former employer as never being able to work again," Edwards told me. "You don't talk about American workers that way in front of me, and you don't really have a place to."
At the same time, Edwards argues that the United States is woefully unprepared for mass unemployment — and that should be reason enough to start planning for AI job loss scenarios. We already have plenty of people out of work whom we've simply chosen not to help, Edwards reminded me.
We already know what tools would work, she argues: overhauling our unemployment insurance and healthcare systems; government subsidies to help out-of-work people move in search of new opportunities; and raising the estate tax, among other things. Whether any of it happens is a question of political will.
Which is why, despite her worries, Edwards insists she's an optimist — albeit a cynical one. "The lowest bar is the greatest source of optimism," she told me, "because I'd feel very differently if we had tried anything."
Highlights of our conversation are below, edited for clarity and length. Listen to the entire conversation wherever you get your podcasts — just search for Platformer — or watch it on YouTube at youtube.com/caseynewton.
And let us know what you think — we're new to podcast production, and welcome your feedback at casey@platformer.news.
**Casey Newton: Your podcast is called Optimist Economy, and its central question is what it would take for the US to have nice things. But your recent **
columnshave been pretty candid about how broken our safety net is. So what is making you an optimist these days?
**Kathryn Anne Edwards: **It's a very practical optimism — not being a naive Pollyanna, but having such a good handle on the economic evidence of how good policies can be when we do in fact try to make them good, as opposed to leaving them to rot for decades.
Newton: On our first episode, Box CEO Aaron Levie told me jobs aren't going anywhere — that AI has the net effect of giving engineers more to do. Last week, Boris Cherny, who built Claude Code, told me jobs might transform so they become unrecognizable, but there will still be a good job in there somewhere. Some call this the "AI as normal technology" view — that there are laws of gravity that slow the diffusion of new tech. Is that your view, that this is not a case of "it's different this time"?
**Edwards: **I'm a labor economist, so we all have the prison of our own point of view. Technology in the workplace changes the nature of labor, but throughout the history of technological adoption, it is very hard to see in real time either the addition or deletion of workers, and even after the fact it's very hard to attribute job loss to technology. AI comes out with a splash, but it takes a while for firms to really adjust. It will cause some people to get a new job, some a job change, and some to lose their job — and knowing any of that in detail will be very hard, if not impossible.
And of course it's different. Every technology is different. But I think some of the conversation around AI is deeply, deeply classist ….
It feels like some of that comes from being a little high on your own supply of how amazing your technology is when you hawk it. And it comes from this idea that some workers are better or more special than others, which makes your technology better or more special. That's also a way of saying the value of other workers is a lot lower — so it doesn't matter if they're displaced, it only matters if these workers are displaced. I push back on that, because I don't like being quite so derogatory to so many people in our economy just because they didn't have a knowledge-worker office job.
And two: I'd be willing to accept the exception that it's really, really special when it does something really, really special. I don't mean that in an insulting way. But what have we tangibly seen in our economy as a result of these LLMs being accessible through a subscription-based chatbot?
Newton: That's the Solow paradox — the economist Robert Solow said in the '80s that you can see the computer age “everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” A lot of economists feel the same about AI: it's everywhere, and yet it's not obvious it's having a massive, measurable effect.
Edwards: You went highbrow; I'll go lowbrow. It's like teenage sex: everyone's talking about it, no one's doing it.
I find this question itself a little distracting. What do you need to know, and why? If your concern is that there's going to be job loss, and therefore we need to have a better system for handling what could be cascading layoffs — do you need to know the exact number of people who lost their job, or is the problem the same regardless? Will you act differently if it's 7 million people versus 7.5 million?
If yes, then I really question whether you actually care about helping people affected by job loss. And do you care about all the people who currently don't have a job, who in many respects outnumber most of the projections of how many jobs will be lost to AI? Newton: We've heard companies from Amazon to Salesforce cite AI as a reason behind layoffs. Are there elements of those layoffs you think can properly be attributed to AI? Or are people AI-washing layoffs, and papering over the over-hiring they did during the pandemic?
**Edwards: **We don't know, we might never know, and honestly the company itself might not know. Rarely do actions like that have a single determinant. It could be that you're optimistic about the effect AI will have and could go forward with a leaner staff — and also that you over-hired in the pandemic, and also that the economy has been plagued with uncertainty, and it would just be nice to be leaner anyway, so you have a little less risk through a volatile economic period. All of those can be true. And then in the press release you say, "We've adopted AI," because that has the largest [reward] in the stock market for your shareholders.
What economists will do is look at specific occupations and industries and look for changes apart from the overall trend, or dramatically different from their past trend. Saying "lots of young people are having a hard time finding a job right now, and therefore AI" — I don't think we'd make that claim. “At the same time” is not the same as cause and effect.
And tech, even 15 years ago, is an industry that eats its young. A new technology comes along and they prefer to lay people off and hire young people who know the new programming language, rather than retraining older people. They tend not to employ people as much over the age of 50. So looking for job loss within industries that have long-term high turnover anyway — it's tough.
Newton: Let's zoom out a little bit. In May, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that employment in 18 occupations that are considered exposed to AI declined by 0.2% while employment rose 0.8% everywhere else. Is that the kind of statistic that makes you think, okay, now we're starting to understand something that is really happening? Or is it just another confounding variable?
**Edwards: **It's illustrative, but not definitive. You have to ask yourself: is there another reason why an occupation exposed to AI could be experiencing slower-than-average job growth? Well, if the funding model of those companies is reliant on investment, and interest rates might be poised to rise again, it could be that they're wary about taking on more headcount in an area where they're not profitable to begin with, right? So it's not necessarily ruling out that explanation that AI is causing job loss, so much as leaving in everything that can't be eliminated.
But I genuinely believe AI is already causing job loss, just like I genuinely believe AI is already causing job growth. People want economists to say, "What's the right number? Can we pinpoint it?" And we're kind of pushing back: what do you need to know in order to make a conclusion, and what do you want that conclusion to serve?
**Newton: One conclusion I think people are looking for is basically just: is the rate of AI job creation higher than the rate of AI job loss? Or what is the relationship between those two things? **
**Edwards: **It's going to be hard to know, ever.
Go back and look at a big technology — the internet, Microsoft Office, computers. You're not going to find many reliable estimates of the total job loss and job creation from computers entering the US workforce. Someone has come up with a number, but the number would be one paragraph and the caveats would be 10 pages.
The people who have been loudest about AI creating some permanent idle class — in my assessment, that's all coming from AI founders themselves.
Newton: There's a view in Silicon Valley, most loudly espoused by the AI CEOs, that eventually the models will get good enough that people will just hire less. My sense is you're skeptical that we reach that point.
**Edwards: **So you are able to run a shop with fewer people, because those people can use AI. That will happen, absolutely. It's the next step that makes their claim look ridiculous: they say technology shops will need two workers instead of 10, or 20 instead of 200, and therefore we'll have tens of millions of permanently unemployed people. It's the conclusion they draw that you have to separate out.
The first thing will happen — that's what happened to manufacturing workers. Think of people making shoes in 1905, 2005, 2105. How many are going to be in the factory in 80 years? Not many. How many were there in 1905? A lot. We know that happens with technology. It's the conclusion — "and therefore we have a new idle class" — that I take issue with. That one is borderline absurd. I could see how it could happen, but it's nothing like anything that has happened before, and a lot has to go wrong for it to be the case.
Newton: Let's sketch it out. Say we hit the point where a firm that used to hire 200 people can now get away with 20. We now have 180 people who would have been employed there who aren't. What do we expect to happen, given the normal way the economy evolves?
**Edwards: **Those people will look for new jobs, and the vast majority will find them — the average unemployment spell is less than three months long. There's a smaller, fractional set who are permanently long-term unemployed: however hard they've tried, they're not getting a job, and something has to change — the job they're looking for, or the resume they have. That share could get larger, and it has in the past.
But the jobs exposed to AI don't employ enough people for the dystopian scenario to play out. We have 170 million workers, and they don't all work in AI and tech. So even if you have a tech recession with lots of layoffs, it doesn't mean those people are unemployable forever, and it doesn't mean the economy is fundamentally changed, because we have lots of industry-specific recessions that we then recover from.
It's also about overall aggregate demand, and whether people are trying to buy things. It doesn't happen in isolation.
Newton: The pandemic was close to a rapture for people in leisure and hospitality, and people in the AI world talk about an AI rapture in similar terms. What actually happened for the workers whose jobs disappeared overnight that let the economy reabsorb them?
**Edwards: **Demand increased again. What happened in the pandemic wasn't a drop in aggregate demand, it was a free fall, because so many businesses shut down. Nothing will ever top that job loss — half of leisure and hospitality lost its job within three weeks. Those 22 and a half million workers were met with a broken unemployment insurance system that Congress tried to fix on the fly, plus stimulus checks, forbearance on loans, protection from eviction. The economy's size recovered relatively quickly; the labor market took three years, as people went out and started to spend again.
I don't think AI could ever do anything as dramatic as March of 2020, in terms of a single month's job loss, and yet we recovered from it. It took public policy that we knew would work, fitted to the situation. It wasn't about the type of job that was lost. It was that people didn't have income. That's what you respond to: the person, not the former employer.
Newton: Let me come at it from another angle: entry-level workers. The Dallas Fed found employment in the most AI-exposed sectors is down about 1% since late 2022, with workers under 25 hit hardest — not through layoffs, but because entry-level jobs simply aren't being created. What do you make of AI's impact being felt through jobs that never appear?
**Edwards: **It makes a lot more intuitive sense. I start to use a chatbot, my workers are more productive, so I don't have to expand headcount to expand my business, so I just don't hire. But it's not as if the economy is otherwise perfect. There's a lot going on in our labor market that's much more influential on the youth labor market than AI.
In the spring of 2022, the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates. The labor market peaked about three months later and has been falling since. It was at such an extraordinarily strong place that the fall hasn't been enough to trigger a recession, but it looks like one — a drop-off in hiring, in wage growth, in job openings, in quits. The labor market is slowing down.
When that happens, certain things follow. One is upskilling. When you're an employer with a lot of people applying, you can require more. We saw this in the Great Recession — same job, same title, and suddenly it needed a master's degree, suddenly three years of experience. An entry-level job isn't just lost to AI; it can be lost in a labor market where employers have the upper hand, where so many people are looking for work that they can demand more skills for the same job. The opposite happens when the labor market gets tight — that's downskilling, where the job might not even require a college degree anymore.
The youth unemployment rate is by no means at a record high. But the labor market has started to slow, so we'd expect upskilling. And young workers — I hate to say this so bluntly — because they don't know how to do anything yet, they're not going to be the first ones hired, because I can get someone with more education on the cheap when the labor market is weak.
Typically, youth getting hit happens after a recession; they're a lagging victim. What's special about right now is that it's almost as if it's preceding one. Labor-market weakness would explain almost everything going on with young people, and AI might explain some of it for some of them.
Newton: You explain a lot of these forces on social media. When young people ask what they should do, what do you tell them?
I say it with love, and I try to lower expectations. When you come out of school, you've been part of a pipeline that's been path-dependent and high-stakes almost since high school. Do well on this test to do well in this class to get this GPA to get into this school, and then again to get that job. Everything is set up as: you have to succeed, you have to succeed, you have to succeed.
The labor market is not like that. The labor market has lots of movement, lots of experimentation. You go to a job and you don't like it, and it's not as if you'll never work again — you just pack up and go to another one. Movement is associated with better job matches, better income, more satisfaction. You've got to find the thing you like to do, and you will not find it when you’re a freshman in high school or a freshman in college.
So if you can't find your first job, it is not going to condemn you to a worse life. It's awful right now, especially after working so hard, where it was all built up to "if you do all these things, then you'll be secure" — and to be met with a brick wall of insecurity is so cruel.
But in some ways, you've been built up too much. Like, this is just your first job. Most people won't like their first job, they'll leave their first job, and then they'll figure out what they really want to do through experience.
Newton: I love that point. In school it felt like you were in training to become an "X" — do all these things and then you'll be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an electrician. What I hear you saying is that the reality for most people involves a lot more thrashing.
**Edwards: **There's no good measure of underemployment — people getting out of college and working at Starbucks or the Apple Store because they can't find a job. But even if we collected that data, it wouldn't be that informative, because for the vast majority of people, having education they don't use in their job doesn't mean there's a problem. It just means the labor market is mobile and they don't want to use that specific educational experience anymore. That doesn't make them a failure. I have a PhD in economics, and I'm no longer in a research position — my main job is to be a columnist for Bloomberg and host a podcast. By that measure I'd also look like a failure. But I'm not. I made a lot of choices.
And if they push really hard — this is why no one likes economists — I point out that this is not the hardest young people have had it, not even in the last 20 years. Nothing could match the misery of coming out of the Great Recession as a young person. It sounds condescending to say "it's worse if the unemployment rate is 10%," but it is. The unemployment rate for young graduates was then more than double what it is now.
And it's not as if there's a gap of missing 37-year-olds who are just not in the labor market because the market was tough when they graduated. They got jobs. It wasn't what they wanted, but they're still working.
Newton: Let's move into what we can do about it. You've written that the US needs a real long-term unemployment system — in most states, unemployment insurance runs out at six months. What would your ideal system look like?
**Edwards: **Our unemployment insurance system was designed for manufacturing workers in the 1920s, and one of the things it's done best is teach us all of its shortcomings.
It's a state-based program. It only applies to W-2 workers. It's got a flat benefit, and if you get it, you get it for 26 weeks, and that's it. That's not what unemployment spells look like: a lot of people have short spells, a lot middle-length, and a fraction long ones.
In prior eras, layoffs were how most people went into unemployment. But the labor market doesn't differentiate between getting laid off and quitting — your unemployment insurance benefit does. Right now, to get unemployment you basically need the permission of your former employer, and if they give it, they pay higher taxes on all their remaining employees as a result. So that's all got to go.
The good news is that wouldn't be so hard.
What I envision is a system that mirrors unemployment itself: a relatively short, generous benefit that basically anyone can get — you walk off the street and right into the unemployment office and get it. Then a medium-sized benefit you have to reapply for, that comes with counseling and labor-market information. And then a long-term unemployment program for people who don't find a job after searching, that helps them make the change to their resume they need.
Newton: Lots of folks in tech, most prominently Sam Altman, have made universal basic income their preferred answer for whatever AI is about to do. You've argued AI anxiety won't be eased by UBI. Why not?
**Edwards: **What does it change? You've given people some money. I'm particularly antagonistic about Sam Altman's characterization, because not only did he refer to future unemployed people as a new idle class, he said in an essay that the only thing the government can do is give them money. I am very firmly of the belief that the US worker is an incredible being, and they don't deserve to be written off by their former employer as never being able to work again. I don't like the posture of "I get to decide who's never going to work again because I came up with a shiny new toy."
I get it, it's the best toy that's ever existed. You don't talk about American workers that way in front of me, and you don't really have a place to.
My biggest problem with UBI is that it doesn't change the game. You give people $10,000 — can they afford health care? Child care, housing, rent? We have structural issues in our economy, and UBI does not address them. Proponents who don't come from tech say UBI would empower people to change those structures. I want the same thing, but from a different direction: workers should be empowered in the labor market. We should have a decent health care system, which we don't. We ought to intervene in these market failures.
The biggest drawback is that UBI leaves market failures unaddressed. Rich people can buy their way out of a market failure. Child care costs $24,000 a year — that's a market failure. We don't have enough of it for the people who want it, and they can't afford it. If you make enough money you can buy your way out, but that doesn't make the failure go away. You give someone $20,000 of UBI, and our health care system is still broken. I don't want to spend that many resources on the salve as opposed to the cure.
Newton: One of your suggestions is that government could help people move — if you're not physically where a job is, it could get you there. That sounded so reasonable, and I'd never heard it proposed.
**Edwards: **The real problem in our labor market is often power. Is giving UBI under the guise that some people have lost their job giving power to workers, or is it buying them off? The AI gurus see it as a way to buy them off. I see it as an inefficient way to distribute power. We ought to attack power structures directly. You get a lot of "just train people, be plumbers, we need electricians," with a wave of the hand. A real long-term unemployment program would help people start small businesses, go back for preparation in occupations with a deep shortage like nursing and teaching — and yes, pay people to move. I'm much more of a believer in the worker asserting their own future than in being cash-dependent on the wealthiest who decide to give them some.
Newton: When folks in the AI world talk about UBI, it reflects anxiety that AI consolidates wealth and power into a very small number of companies. Do these companies have any responsibility to the workers they might displace?
**Edwards: **No, I wouldn't want to empower them, or make future economic policy dependent on them. If you make a company pay for something in a targeted way, they'll get out of it, and be quite slippery doing so. And it's not as if they're in favor of a higher corporate income tax rate, or said, "Hey, you should probably change the estate tax so we personally benefit less." They want a solution that preserves their wealth but makes people less mad at them, and they're looking to PR companies to fill in the gaps.
The solutions we need are the ones we have and aren't using. You're worried about a concentration of wealth in companies? Thank God we have an antitrust act — break them up; they're all monopolies or close to it. This is why God invented the estate tax and the corporate income tax. These have been weakened over time by the very people now telling us they need to do something to make people less mad. If they hadn't given so much to Trump's inauguration or his ballroom, I might believe it came from a genuine place.
We had incredible concentration of wealth in the Gilded Age that got busted up by breaking up monopolies and empowering workers through unions. So much evidence exists that what helped the middle class make so much money was unionization. I don't see any of these guys saying maybe we should have unionization in our own workforces, let alone others. A pro-union economist told me what strikes him about AI is the workplace questions: can companies surveil you using AI? Can they use AI to get someone to do your exact job, train it on your work, then fire you? Legislating around that would be hard. It wouldn't be hard if the workplace had a union to bargain for each case. People oppose unionization for so many bad reasons and not the “good” one, which is that it gives workers a lot more power and money.
Newton: There's a union at Samsung in South Korea that was concerned the company's wealth wasn't filtering down to workers, threatened to strike, and Samsung found more money to pay them — a tech union changing the terms through collective action.
**Edwards: **That's the solution and the nightmare [for AI companies]. It returns power and income to workers, and gives them more power over how AI shows up in all kinds of insidious ways. It puts your thumb on the scale for the worker and not the manager, and that's not a solution any of them are running toward.
Same thing with the corporate income tax. Corporate profits are at century highs, and the labor share of income is at absolute lows — basically 1929 levels, a terrible year to be associated with. A very high corporate income tax, fairly distributed, without so many loopholes, was very good at its job: it kept profits at a reasonable level, and workers ended up making more money.
Some people say that because these tools eroded, they're not good anymore and we need new ones. I fall in the camp of: we know they work, that's why they were attacked, so we just need to bring them back. For the record, I don't think AI CEOs want the same outcomes I do.
Newton: Your ideas sound great, but they're expensive and polarized. What levers might actually get them put in place — is it anything short of unemployment going up rapidly?
**Edwards: **That definitely helps unemployed people — when unemployment goes up, it's not just "lazy" people who are unemployed, it's "good" people who are unemployed.
Do not use Congress as your barometer of progress. They will be the literal last institution to do anything on any issue. What I find optimistic is how frustrated people are that so many things haven't had federal leadership yet. Upwards of 80% of Americans want paid family leave, and we're one of two countries in the world that doesn't offer anything to newborn parents. That's not because we don't know what to do. We have a neat little timeline in our heads — Great Depression happened, then we got all this big legislation — but people in the moment were saying, "25 years ago we needed an unemployment system, why did it take so long?" We feel the lack of progress now, not the decades of fighting and waiting that always came with it.
We can do all of this. Most of the policy that would really help families and workers, some state has already done. Paid family leave — 14 states have it. A retirement account that's not dependent on your employer — about 17 states. A higher minimum wage — 34 or 35 states. We just have to get Congress up that hill. I'm a mom — positive reinforcement is so important. You can do this, Congress. Most of the things I want to do, most people want to do. It would make the economy better. It would be better if the labor share of income were not at rock bottom. It would be better if we were paid more.
Don't worry, I'm an economist, it's okay.
Newton: Your podcast is called The Optimist Economy. As the AI transition unfolds, what do you see going right? What's out there that makes you feel like we've got this?
**Edwards: **I'm a quite cynical optimist, and my optimism comes from having tried so little. It's really hard to give up on the US economy when we've done almost nothing. We haven't raised the minimum wage, haven't ended the tipped minimum wage, haven't made universal health care, haven't started universal child care or preschool. We don't give all kids in school meals. We don't really do anything on housing at the federal level. Social Security is broken, but we knew that 35 years ago and have done nothing to fix it.
I take comfort in knowing the lowest bar is the greatest source of optimism, because I'd feel very differently if we had tried anything. What we have tried for the past 25 years is the experiment of whether tax cuts are the solution to every economic problem. The answer is no. Nine pieces of tax legislation — $13 trillion spent. And if you can't afford housing, food, health care, child care, and elder care, maybe we have all we need to know that tax cuts aren't going to solve those problems, because they should have by now. We made a massive investment in a single policy that has not borne fruit, other than making our country indebted. So let's not do that anymore. Let's go do other things.
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Anthropic prepares to go public
What happened: Anthropic filed for an initial public offering of its stock.
In a statement, the company said filing “gives us the option to go public,” and that the timing and size of the IPO will “depend on market conditions and other factors.”
Why we’re following: With its recent private funding round, Anthropic’s valuation has now gone up to $965 billion. With
SpaceX,
OpenAI, and Anthropic preparing for public offerings, 2026 is on track to see the biggest IPOs in history.
SpaceX’s IPO is expected to raise twice as much as any previous public offering. The Economist argues that given the general trend on tech IPOs — which is that see an initial pop but are followed by a years-long decline — this year of mega-IPOs could give the global economy “indigestion.”
Unlike SpaceX, Anthropic has filed privately, meaning that we don’t yet get to see its pitch to investors. (And how will they be able to follow up the SpaceX S-1, which opened with 15 pages of pictures of rockets?) From publicly available information, it does roughly seem like their business plan is to get AI to automate coding and AI research, use that to create human-level AI, and then have that AI do every job. So if that pans out, maybe they will beat the traditional IPO slump!
What people are saying: On X, host of Mad Money Jim Cramer congratulated Salesforce on the success of its early investment in Anthropic. “Salesforce has done a lot of things right and this investment worth $5 billion in Anthropic is one of them.”
Tech lobbyist Zak Kukoff speculated about the politics of the coming wave of AI mega-millionaires: “Anthropic, SpaceX, OAI — huge IPOs are equipping a generation of new political donors whose financial capital dwarfs that of legacy mega-donors.”
NYT reporter and friend of Platformer Kevin Roose wrote that when he first visited Anthropic three years ago, “it was a 160-person start-up in Jackson Square with no products and no revenue.” Strikingly, “there was an office throne made of empty Liquid Death cans and everyone seemed vaguely allergic to making money.”
But now, “they're going to go public at $400 quadrillion and bring about the teleological end of capitalism. what a world.” (Platformer makes no warrant as to the validity of Roose’s math.)
On r/sanfrancisco, Reddit users commented, “housing prices and rents bouta skyrocket,”
“Hello my fellow permanent underclass dwellers.”
__and__One Redditor on r/Anthropic wrote, “As soon as they go public they are legally obligated to maximize shareholder value... Enshitification incoming.”
— Ella Markianos
Florida sues OpenAI
What happened: Florida is suing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman. The suit accuses OpenAI of intentionally designing ChatGPT to be addictive and destructive to children and adults. It mentions examples of teenagers who have taken their own lives after extensive conversations with ChatGPT, and a teenager who overdosed after ChatGPT gave them information on drug interactions.
“ChatGPT proactively aids, abets, and promotes dangerous activities and is a threat to the public safety of Floridians,” the suit said.
The complaint covers sycophancy, dangerous medical advice, and hallucinations in addition to teen suicide.
Why we’re following: Florida has taken to AI regulation harder than any other red state. Gov. Ron DeSantis has championed child safety legislation and data center regulations. And Donald Trump’s pick to succeed DeSantis, Rep. Byron Donalds, just said he disagreed with Trump on federal preemption, and the President should allow states to regulate AI.
Now, their attorney general is trying to hold OpenAI legally liable a for what people do after using its chatbot. While that’s not directly against the will of the administration — Trump’s AI Action Plan recommended AI companies be held to existing liability law — the President has had several stands against AI regulation.
While the lawsuit itself is interesting, we're also interested in what it tells us about the current state of AI politics. With the technology broadly unpopular, Democrats and Republicans are testing various strategies to capitalize. The Florida lawsuit shows one elected Republican seeking to apply the social-media backlash playbook to AI: like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok before it, the case argues, ChatGPT is a public nuisance. What people are saying: Commenters on Hacker News were skeptical of the Florida AG’s arguments. Commenter xp84 thought the claim of liability was too broad. They asked, “would this program also open me up to liability in Florida?” and attached five lines of JavaScript code that randomly spit out “You're absolutely right” or “I agree, let's explore this idea further.”
The residents of r/antiai were relatively cynical about the suit. User chevalier716 wrote, “Is this DeSantis asking for a bribe?”
— Ella Markianos
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