Legacy Media types are calling this Alex Karp interview a “crash-out” so that’s your first clue that he is actually saying something extremely insightful. He is articulating what real “AI safety” looks like in the enterprise.
Not abstract alignment research or certification by a government-run DMV for AI. Real AI safety for businesses is the ability to control their own data, model weights, and compute — so a frontier lab can’t hoover up their proprietary knowledge and turn it into their next product.
As Karp explains, technical customers want “control over their compute, their models, their data stack, and their alpha. They want to know they own the means of production, and it’s not being transferred to someone else.”
Don’t think that can happen? Just look at Figma. According to The Information, Anthropic “blindsided” its then-business partner with the launch of Claude Design. Figma’s founder said Anthropic had not been “consistently honest” with them. Anthropic’s chief product officer had even served on Figma’s board until three days before the launch of Claude Design. Figma’s stock has fallen sharply this year while Anthropic’s valuation has surged.
This isn’t an isolated example. Anthropic has launched Claude Science, Claude Security, Claude Legal, and of course Claude Code — each expanding into categories previously served by companies building on top of their models. The pattern is consistent: watch where value is being created, then move in directly. Dominate the model layer, then use that position to capture the most lucrative verticals.
Dario has argued that open source models powerful enough to compete with Anthropic are “dangerous.” But dangerous to whom? Not to enterprises that want to retain control over their data and workflows. Dangerous to a business model that benefits from customers having few real alternatives at the model layer.
As Karp exposes, true enterprise safety isn’t trusting that a lab’s future roadmap won’t include your business. It’s retaining the ability to choose — at the model layer — who gets to see and use your alpha.
I’m pretty sure AAA gaming studios are remastering old games because they’re training their teams on how to develop with AI. It’s much easier to produce a game when you know what it is supposed to look like. They’ll only move to new titles as they derisk the capital investment.
Brad, a 5% tax on Elon's trillion net worth would literally pay for free college and trade school for every American.
And with the market's growth, he still would be worth over a trillion dollars!
You don't think that's worth it?
This problem grows as solutions like Anthropic’s retail products get wider and deeper. So agents’ reach must likewise exponentially deepen and widen.
They must be conscious of downstream and adjacent effects of new rollouts.
They’re going to need lots of compute.
If you don’t think agents can write production code, then look at Anthropic and question this assumption.
Yes, every product release will be buggy, but the bugs will be quickly ironed out by the same agents that wrote the original feature. Less polish. Faster release.
10 things I'm seeing on the frontlines of AI adoption in the enterprise:
1. Chat is where 90% of employees still live. It's the gateway drug. Everything else is downstream of getting people comfortable here first.
2. Power users discover Cowork and lose their minds. It's the "wait, it can actually do the work?" moment.
3. Claude Code has very little penetration with non-technical users in the enterprise still.
4. Microsoft being the "approved" tool doesn't matter. Employees route around Copilot and pitch their managers for Claude access on their own.
5. Artifacts in Claude are a breakout feature. People don't want to view them — they want to deploy them, connect them to Snowflake, etc., ship them as internal MVPs for their org to actually use.
6. Cowork is crossing the line from "demo" to "real work." Legal teams redlining contracts. Ops teams running workflows. Then immediately asking: how do I automate this for production?
7. The next unlock → automated cloud workflows that leverage an agent like Claude while keeping non-technical users within the tools they're already using and in a chat interface. The demand is screaming.
8. Terminology is major blocker. Projects vs. skills vs. plugins vs. agents. I've explained "what is a skill" 200+ times. The moment it clicks, people get excited — but the path there is too long.
9. Enterprise IT restrictions (locked connectors, no browser access) quietly strip Cowork of its superpowers. The features that make it magical are the first ones IT disables.
10. There is a high level of "AI insecurity". For the first time in a long time, people at all levels (even C-Suite) need to signifcantly upskill in order to stay world class in their positions, and this is causing people to be insecure about their skill set across the org.
General note on Microsoft: I spent a lot of this past week deep in Power Automate and Copilot Studio trying to build an automated solution in the cloud — given it's the native tool with sanctioned access to their org's data.
It's ~90% there. But the final 10% is riddled with terrible UX, inconsistent behavior, and a generally poor experience.
Honestly feels like Microsoft is fumbling the biggest moment in their company's history with software that has all the features on paper but lacks the magical "just works" moment for non-technical team members. The gap is wide open and they're letting others
"eat their lunch" right now.
Because we get asked a lot.
The Technological Republic, in brief.
1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.
2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.
3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.
4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.
5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.
6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.
7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.
8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.
9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.
10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.
11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.
12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.
13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.
14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.
15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.
16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.
17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.
18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.
19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.
20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.
21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.
22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?
Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska
https://t.co/8igjazz1On
Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.
The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.
But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.
So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.
TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.
Almost every SaaS app inside Vercel has now been replaced with a generated app or agent interface, deployed on Vercel.
Support, sales, marketing, PM, HR, dataviz, even design and video workflows. It’s shocking.
The SaaSpocalypse is both understated and overstated. Over because the key systems of record and storage are still there (Salesforce, Snowflake, etc.)
Understated because the software we are generating is more beautiful, personalized, and crucially, fits our business problems better.
We struggled for years to represent the health of a Vercel customer properly inside Salesforce. Too much data (trillions of consumption data points), the ontology of Vercel was a mismatch to the built-in assumptions, and the resulting UI was bizarre. We generated what we needed instead. When you don’t need a UI, you just ask an agent with natural language.
We’ve also been moving off legacy systems with poor, slow, outdated, and inconsistent APIs, as well as just dropping abstraction down to more traditional databases. UI is a function 𝑓 of data (always has been), and that 𝑓 is increasingly becoming the LLM.
The future that Cognition will unlock is unfathomable and it will be known as one of the most important AI and reasoning labs in the world
This company will unlock monumental human achievement
So excited to be an investor of this company and their raw competitive nature punching big @antifund@geoffreywoo
s/o @ScottWu46@silasalberti ⚡️