Claude, War, and the State of the Republic (with Dean Ball)

Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links and other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econtalk.org.

We'd love to hear from you. Today is March 12, 2026, and my guest is Dean Ball. Dean is a senior fellow at the Foundation. for American innovation, a policy fellow at Fathom, and author of the AI-focused newsletter Hyper-Dimensional, which you can find on Substack. He works on technological change, institutional evolution, and the future of governance.

And prior to this, he served as senior policy advisor for AI, for artificial intelligence, and emerging technology. at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he was the primary staff drafter of America's AI Action Plan. Dean, welcome to Econ Talk. Thank you so much for having me, Russ. Our topic for today is the relationship between private companies working on AI like Anthropic, which created the LLM, the large language model known as Claude, and the Department of War.

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