Signal Podcast

On June 12, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sent Anthropic a letter, and the company's two most capable models — Fable 5 and the restricted Mythos 5 — went dark for users worldwide. The order, reported to cite the Export Control Reform Act of 2018, barred any foreign national from accessing the models. Rather than try to verify the nationality of millions of users in real time, Anthropic pulled...

Joel and Stephen open on Anthropic's June 4 blog post "When AI Builds Itself," which calls for the industry to keep open the option of pausing frontier AI development — conditional on rival labs verifiably doing the same. The timing is the story: Anthropic confidentially filed an S-1 with the SEC on June 1, reportedly targeting a valuation between $965 billion and $1 trillion on roughly a tenth of...

In April 2026, Elon Musk and Sam Altman faced each other in a federal courthouse in Oakland, California — two men who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 on a shared promise to build AI for humanity, now arguing in front of nine jurors about who owns the soul of it. In this episode, Joel and Stephen go deep on the full story. Who are these two men, really? Where did they come from, what drives them, and wer...

Anthropic built an AI model that can find hidden vulnerabilities in the software running the world's banks, power grids, and governments. They called it Mythos. Then they decided who gets access — and every country outside the US and UK found out they weren't on the list. In this episode, Joel and Stephen break down what Mythos actually does, why the geopolitical fallout was immediate and global,...

Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI in 2023 for not being "consistently candid." He was back five days later. The question his board raised never went away — and a recent New Yorker investigation digs directly into it. Joel and Stephen unpack what the reporting actually says, and why it matters that the person running the world's most influential AI company has a documented credibility problem. Then:...

In February 2026, Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Alex Karp all faced the same external pressure — a Pentagon contract, a binary choice — and responded in completely different ways. This episode uses that moment as an entry point into a deeper question: what does a leader's behavior under real-cost, real-consequence pressure reveal that normal operations never can? Joel and Stephen go through each o...

In the span of a single week, three of the most powerful AI companies in the world made decisions that will define how this technology is used — and who controls it. Anthropic refused a Pentagon ultimatum, got blacklisted by the Trump administration, and watched Claude climb to number one on the App Store. OpenAI signed a military deal hours after its CEO publicly aligned with Anthropic's position...

75% of Americans thought a college degree was essential in 2010. Today that number is 35. But the story gets stranger — the graduates struggling most right now aren't art history majors. They're computer scientists. CS unemployment sits at 6.1%, computer engineering at 7.5%. Higher than philosophy. Higher than fine arts. A decade of "learn to code" advice, and AI learned to code first. Joel and St...

We're back — and this episode covers two of the biggest stories in tech right now. First, Nvidia. The company just reported 73% revenue growth and beat every estimate on Wall Street. So why did the stock still drop? We break down the four forces quietly reshaping the AI chip market — DeepSeek's $6 million bombshell, Trump's tariffs, big tech building their own chips, and whether Michael Burry's bi...

The conversation explores the concept of responsibility in the context of autonomous systems and the implications for liability. It delves into the impact of automated driving systems on accountability and the legal and ethical considerations surrounding autonomous vehicles. Takeaways Autonomous systems introduce a separation between human oversight and operational behavior, leading to a shift in...