AI Summer

Robert Wright, author of the Nonzero newsletter and host of the Nonzero podcast, is a veteran journalist who interviewed Geoffrey Hinton about neural networks back in 1983. He joined the podcast to talk about his new book The God Test, which is due out on Tuesday, June 23.
Wright describes his own journey from AI skeptic to someone who no longer dismisses even “sci-fi doomer” scenarios. A key insight: nobody programmed meaning into LLMs—the machines discovered that meaning was a property of words simply by predicting the next token. In effect, LLMs reverse-engineered functions of the human mind without anyone understanding how the brain works.
We discuss the US-China chip-control consensus, with Wright arguing that export restrictions have increased the probability of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. Wright also makes the case that any serious effort to slow AI development—even a modest data-center tax—requires international coordination.
The conversation then takes a metaphysical turn. Wright is agnostic on whether LLMs are sentient, but he rejects Ted Chiang’s argument that role-playing machines can’t be conscious—after all, Wright notes, humans are always role-playing too. Wright even floats the idea that if a future superintelligence is conscious, its capacity for empathy might be what saves us.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aisummer.org

Last night, I called University of Minnesota law professor Alan Rozenshtein and asked him to help me decode the Commerce Department’s surprise decision to impose export controls on Anthropic’s Claude models.
Late on Friday, the Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to prevent any foreign national from accessing its Fable and Mythos models. This effectively forced the company to pull both offline for everyone worldwide. Rozenshtein walks through how the U.S. dual-use export-control regime gives the government sweeping authority over technologies with potential military applications, making this legally defensible even if the policy rationale is murky.
The trigger appears to have been a reported jailbreak vulnerability, but the administration’s response has been anything but coordinated: David Sacks says the government wants to work things out quickly, while Pete Hegseth celebrates kicking Anthropic out of the Defense Department “forever.” Rozenshtein draws a sharp contrast with the Biden administration’s diffusion rule—a comprehensive framework for controlling AI model exports that the Trump team scrapped as bad for business, only to improvise something more disruptive.
We also explore whether this marks the start of a permanent licensing regime for frontier models or a temporary overcorrection. Rozenshtein points out that much of the AI talent in Silicon Valley is foreign-born, and if the U.S. government starts looking as unpredictable as China’s, the long-term cost to American AI leadership could far exceed any short-term security gain. Can the administration build a coherent export-control policy for AI, or will the next frontier model trigger the same chaotic cycle all over again?


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aisummer.org

I’m organizing a happy hour on June 23 for listeners of AI Summer and readers of my newsletter, Understanding AI. It’ll run from 5:30 to 8:00pm at The Crown & Crow in Washington DC. I will be there, along with past guests Kai Williams and Andy Masley, and friend of the show Abi Olvera. If you are planning to come, or thinking about it, I’d appreciate it if you could fill out this form to let me know. That way I can give The Crown and Crow some warning about the size of the crowd. Hope to see you there!
Cornell law professor James Grimmelmann returns to the show to explore how AI is reshaping software copyright from multiple angles.
We start with a fascinating case study: an open-source developer who used an AI coding agent to reimplement a GPL-licensed library from scratch, allowing him to relicense the result under a more permissive license. The move mimics a classic “clean room” reimplementation—where one team writes a spec and a quarantined second team writes new code—but with an AI playing the role of the second team. Grimmelmann explains why this shortcut is legally shaky, especially since the AI model itself was likely trained on the original code. But if the technique holds up, it could undermine the entire open-source ecosystem: any company could use an AI agent to strip away the licensing conditions that keep open-source software free.
We also dig into whether AI-generated code is copyrightable at all, tracing the question back to the monkey selfie case and the low “modicum of creativity” threshold courts apply.
Finally, Grimmelmann provides an update on the major AI training lawsuits. Courts seem to believe that training itself is fair use. But Anthropic still paid $1.5 billion to settle claims over pirated training data. Meanwhile, new research showing models can reproduce near-complete copies of books is complicating the defendants’ story. If AI models keep memorizing copyrighted works, will companies be able to argue that training is truly “transformative”?



This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aisummer.org

Over seven years teaching high school physics, Andy Masley learned how to explain abstract quantities like watt-hours in an accessible way. That skill has made him one of the most effective critics of the growing environmental panic over data centers.
Data centers really do produce noise and air pollution, and large construction projects do occasionally disrupt nearby water supplies. But Masley worries that the current discourse is so distorted that it will produce “wild overreaches and confused responses” rather than sensible regulation of real issues like construction runoff and on-site gas generation in overburdened communities.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aisummer.org

I don’t know anyone who has ridden in more different kinds of robotaxis than Sophia Tung. A YouTuber and the author of the RideAI newsletter, she is one of the most knowledgeable experts on the contemporary autonomous vehicle sector. She is also our first return guest.
Across multiple trips to China, Sophia has taken rides in the three leading Chinese services — Apollo Go, WeRide, and Pony. In the United States, she has spent time in vehicles made by Tesla, Waymo and Amazon’s Zoox. She describes her experiences in each vehicle, comparing ride smoothness, vehicle comfort, and performance on the tricky process of pickups and dropoffs. We also dig into the debate over custom-built vehicles — the Zoox vehicle is custom-built for autonomy, whereas Waymo’s service is built on a retrofitted Jaguar I-PACE.
Sophia argues that infrastructure is hugely important for the AV industry. In China, battery-swap stations get robotaxis back on the road in three minutes versus more than an hour of downtime in the US. Permitting is easier in China, and much of the Chinese supply chain sits within a stone’s throw of Shenzhen. An entrepreneur in China can jump on WeChat, visit a factory for tea, and have parts in hand within days. This gives China an edge not only in the electric vehicle market but in robotics more generally.


This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.aisummer.org