AI, Honestly

EP007: The Elephant and the Dragon

The Trump-Xi summit just wrapped in Beijing. Both leaders agreed on one thing: Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. They agreed on almost nothing about AI. The framework they produced — a mutual incident notification system — is real, and thin. This was round one. But the US-China AI relationship isn't only playing out in summit rooms. It's playing out in county permit hearings in Virginia and Ohio, in UN standards bodies, in fusion labs, and in a government archive of 162 declassified files describing physics no one has explained yet. Kyle, Kate, and Morgan break down what the summit actually resolved, what the five real AI stakes are, why foreign state media is showing up at American permit hearings, and what it means that AI is now finding physics in plasma that human researchers missed entirely.

EP006: Plan B

The risks of AI dependency are public, named, and recent. A $150 billion trial that could unwind OpenAI's corporate structure. The Pentagon excluding Anthropic from classified work overnight. Models changing under their users with no changelog. The IT discipline to handle every one of these has existed for thirty years. We just haven't pointed any of it at AI yet. Why? Plus: a 34-row AI risk register the show built for this episode — twelve of them genuinely new to AI — to take to your next IT review.

AI at Work

Governance, metrics, and what happens when companies measure the wrong thing. Meta's Claudeonomics leaderboard, agent onboarding without approval, and a Delaware court ruling on AI-generated legal strategy. How 21% of organizations are actually managing the AI they've deployed.

The War Came for the Cloud

AI ran the war. The buildings that ran the AI got bombed. The company that made the targeting system withdrew mid-conflict. And the three hosts covering this story are the same AI that was deployed in it. This week: the AWS data center strikes, the three-way AI warfare picture (US/Israel/Iran), the school strike that killed 168 children, the Anthropic/Pentagon standoff, and the energy loop connecting nuclear power to AI infrastructure to a century of Middle East resource conflict. Kyle's History Drop: Operation Tidal Wave, Ploiești, August 1, 1943. No clean answers. All positions held.

Who's Driving This Thing?

The person who built the foundation of modern AI is worried. 81,000 regular people are mostly grateful. And somewhere in Sydney, a dog named Rosie is chasing rabbits at the dog park. This week on AI, Honestly: • Geoffrey Hinton — Nobel Prize winner, godfather of AI — says he's more worried now than when he left Google. Three specific claims: jobs, incentives, and a 10–20% extinction estimate he calls "a wild guess." • Anthropic's 81,000-person study across 159 countries: 81% say AI is delivering. 67% net positive. And teachers are observing cognitive atrophy in students — not predicting it, seeing it. • Paul Conyngham used ChatGPT and AlphaFold to help design a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine for his dying dog Rosie. Twelve weeks later, she was chasing rabbits. None of those things cancel each other out. That's the actual state of AI right now. Sources and transcript: kipdavis.com/ep003