The Ben Shapiro Show - September 28, 2026


The Real AI Problem Nobody's Talking About

Hosted by
Mentioned
Tucker Carlson Is Burning Down the GOP on Purpose

Episode Stats


Length

12 minutes

Words per minute

188.18

Word count

2,277

Sentence count

157


Transcript

Transcripts from "The Ben Shapiro Show" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 And one of the things that President Trump changed in term one was the American view of China.
00:00:04.000 Up until Trump, there had been this idea that China was sort of a geostrategic partner.
00:00:08.000 You know, they could be our friends.
00:00:09.000 And then Trump came in and he said, no, none of that.
00:00:11.000 Well, now the administration seems to be kind of putting forward some mixed policies with regard to China.
00:00:17.000 I think this is a mistake.
00:00:18.000 If the administration is seeking to essentially abandon Taiwan with the assumption that China is somehow moderating, it's nonsense.
00:00:25.000 It's nonsense.
00:00:26.000 This is just, again, it is just wishful thinking masquerading as realism.
00:00:32.000 So, Scott Besson, who's generally wonderful, the Treasury Secretary, he says, listen, we don't want to decouple, but we do have to de risk, which, again, that's fine.
00:00:39.000 That's good.
00:00:40.000 We always tell the Chinese, we begin the discussions with, we don't want to decouple, we have to de risk.
00:00:47.000 And there are numerous industries that we have to de risk.
00:00:53.000 But in terms of non critical items, there are things that we can sell each other.
00:00:58.000 On our side, energy, ag, and on their side, low end manufactured goods.
00:01:04.000 Okay, and then he goes on, and here's where it starts to get dicey.
00:01:09.000 He says that China is reducing their assistance to Iran.
00:01:11.000 Well, if they are, that is only because of American pressure.
00:01:14.000 That is not because China is magically coming around to our point of view.
00:01:18.000 China has substantially reduced any assistance to Iran, and I am confident, given that there's only 15 million more barrels of Iranian oil on the water, that Iran will have nothing left to trade for anything.
00:01:34.000 They will have nothing to trade for anything.
00:01:36.000 Probably within the next two weeks, they are going to make their final deliveries of oil to China, and then they will have nothing.
00:01:45.000 Yeah, I mean, that's right.
00:01:47.000 But would I trust China?
00:01:49.000 And this is why Taiwan comes to the fore.
00:01:49.000 I would not.
00:01:51.000 So Mike Gallagher, who was the former head of the China subcommittee when he was in Congress, and now is head of defense at Palantir, he has a piece over at the Wall Street Journal saying that the biggest mistake America could make right now would be to abandon arming up Taiwan.
00:02:04.000 He says the year is 2028, America faces economic Armageddon.
00:02:09.000 Frontier artificial intelligence development has been halted, data center construction frozen, while the market is in free fall.
00:02:15.000 America's leading AI labs didn't decide to pace the frontier.
00:02:17.000 Instead, the Chinese Communist Party paced the frontier for them.
00:02:20.000 Beijing moved on Taiwan, the critical vulnerability in the U.S. aligned AI supply chain, first through blockade and then by invasion.
00:02:28.000 He says one aim of this week's summit between the CCP, General Secretary Xi Jinping, and President Trump was to avoid such a scenario.
00:02:34.000 But Xi has already said the issue of Taiwan cannot be put off forever.
00:02:37.000 He has ordered the PLA, that's the People's Liberation Army, to be ready to invade the island nation by 2027.
00:02:46.000 Beijing would want Taiwan even if it were a barren rock, says Mike Gallagher, but this island has become the single point of failure in the single most important technology the Communist Party wants to dominate.
00:02:54.000 Washington, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street need to recognize this shift in Beijing's decision making, as the cost of not taking Taiwan may soon exceed the cost of taking it.
00:03:02.000 America currently holds a thin lead in the AI race, but if Xi concludes this lead is insurmountable, that he is increasingly on the losing side of a technology gap, the case for his moving on Taiwan becomes still stronger.
00:03:12.000 Why play a losing game when he can instead?
00:03:14.000 Flip the board.
00:03:15.000 Well, the only way to prevent that, he says correctly, is that you must arm up Taiwan.
00:03:21.000 You must arm up Taiwan.
00:03:23.000 So he says Taiwan's defense sits at the heart of not only U.S. national security strategy, but also America's economic and AI strategies.
00:03:29.000 We must therefore intensify our efforts to arm Taiwan to the teeth.
00:03:33.000 This can be done while preserving America's commitment to strategic ambiguity.
00:03:36.000 That is the policy where we say that maybe Taiwan belongs to China, maybe it doesn't, but we're not really going to talk about it.
00:03:41.000 But we should communicate with clarity that economic punishment for a PLA invasion would be swift and severe.
00:03:46.000 We should pre position financial sanctions, coordinate with allies on a unified response package, and ensure Beijing understands an attack on Taiwan triggers consequences that dwarf any semiconductor seizure.
00:03:57.000 Finally, we should remain skeptical of any utopian scheme to pace the frontier hand in hand with the Chinese.
00:04:02.000 This, of course, brings us to the issue of AI.
00:04:06.000 The propaganda war that has been waged by Dario Amodi and Sam Altman to convince Americans that we're all going to die because of AI has been quite successful.
00:04:13.000 A new poll from Echelon Insights shows that a huge number of Americans are now concerned about AI becoming too powerful.
00:04:21.000 So, asked whether they are concerned about AI causing major job losses and economic disruption.
00:04:27.000 Or whether they are more concerned about artificial intelligence eventually becoming powerful enough that humans lose control over it.
00:04:34.000 All voters, 49% back in March, said they were worried about job losses.
00:04:39.000 33% said they were worried about AI killing us.
00:04:42.000 As of September, 55% of people are worried that AI is going to kill us all.
00:04:48.000 And only 33% are mostly worried about job losses.
00:04:51.000 So great job, Dario and Sam Altman.
00:04:55.000 Again, what they really want is to pace the frontier because if you pace the frontier, that means freezing everything in place.
00:05:01.000 If you are leading the race right now, the way that Anthropic and OpenAI are leading the race, the thing you want is to now pour molasses into the arena so nobody can run, glue everyone's feet to the ground, and then take a snapshot of where they are.
00:05:14.000 And that means that they win.
00:05:16.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.
00:05:17.000 First, I got to tell you, you don't know all the different ways that people can take money from you.
00:05:22.000 Here is a very weird way it's called title theft, home title theft.
00:05:24.000 So here's what happens somebody will actually go down to the local property office or online, and they will change the name on your deed, and then they will start taking out loans against your assets.
00:05:33.000 Okay.
00:05:33.000 And then you don't find out about that until a lot later.
00:05:35.000 Well, this is why I use Home Title Lock because they're actually monitoring your title 247.
00:05:40.000 The second something changes, you will know.
00:05:42.000 So if you become a victim, that restoration team spends up to a million bucks fixing it.
00:05:46.000 You check your bank account, you check your credit card statements, right?
00:05:48.000 You're doing all that because you don't want somebody stealing that stuff.
00:05:51.000 But when is the last time you checked who legally owns your house?
00:05:54.000 You never thought of doing that, but it actually does happen kind of commonly, shockingly commonly, actually.
00:05:59.000 That means the home invasion could already be underway and nobody has even told you yet.
00:06:02.000 Go check it out right now.
00:06:03.000 HometitleLock.com.
00:06:04.000 Use promo code BEN for a free title history report.
00:06:07.000 Plus, a free trial of million dollar triple lock protection.
00:06:10.000 You can find out now, not after it's too late.
00:06:12.000 Again, go check them out right now and protect your probably prized asset, hometitlelock.com, promo code Ben.
00:06:18.000 Go check them out right now, hometitlelock.com, promo code Ben.
00:06:21.000 Okay, so even SNL picked up on this.
00:06:24.000 SNL was mocking Dario Modi, pointing out that essentially the line from Anthropic is stop us from doing the thing that we want to do.
00:06:35.000 AI is the devil and I its maker.
00:06:37.000 What?
00:06:39.000 No, well, so.
00:06:41.000 Look, Sam Altman, myself, all the major AI players, we have talked about this extensively and we are all on the same page here.
00:06:49.000 We do not condone what we are doing.
00:06:53.000 Shouldn't you be talking about the pros of AI?
00:06:54.000 I mean, don't you guys keep saying that it's going to cure cancer?
00:06:57.000 Yeah, so put it this way in 10 years, there's about a 10% chance that cancer won't be a problem for anyone.
00:07:06.000 I don't like the way you're saying that, buddy.
00:07:09.000 I mean, how is this a good thing?
00:07:11.000 Look, um, So, Jay, it's simple.
00:07:14.000 If you could drink a milk that made your life easier, but there was a 10% chance it killed you, would you drink the milk?
00:07:20.000 No.
00:07:22.000 Really?
00:07:22.000 Yes.
00:07:24.000 Well, what if there was a button that when you push it, everyone dies?
00:07:28.000 Would you push the button?
00:07:29.000 No.
00:07:30.000 Really?
00:07:31.000 Dario.
00:07:32.000 Again, this is the problem.
00:07:34.000 And they know it.
00:07:35.000 They know it.
00:07:36.000 Because if the goal is to shut down AI development by pacing the frontier, scare the crap out of people.
00:07:42.000 So, Peter Thiel.
00:07:43.000 Who is very much on the other side of this, the sort of tech investor extraordinaire?
00:07:46.000 He says the alternative to no AI is not peace and joy.
00:07:51.000 There's a picture that people implicitly have that the alternative to AI, let's say a zero growth world where there's no progress at all, will somehow be this peaceful social democratic society.
00:08:06.000 I don't think that's true.
00:08:10.000 I think the alternative is also far from neutral.
00:08:16.000 I also think there's some degree to which you can never just turn the clock back.
00:08:22.000 But then slowing it down is just unrealistic.
00:08:25.000 Or how could it work?
00:08:26.000 I mean, I don't get it.
00:08:27.000 If America is slowing down and China is accelerating, we are just strengthening China.
00:08:34.000 But it's not just solving anything.
00:08:36.000 It's all, yeah.
00:08:36.000 In theory, you could slow it down if you had genuine, deep cooperation across the whole world.
00:08:45.000 But I think that would require a one world government with real teeth.
00:08:52.000 Okay.
00:08:52.000 And that's sort of his point.
00:08:55.000 Pope Leo wrote this anti AI encyclical.
00:08:57.000 He says, whatever you think of what the Pope is doing, guess who's not going to listen to the Pope?
00:09:01.000 Probably the atheistic regime in China that persecutes Christians.
00:09:04.000 The Pope recently issued this AI encyclical, or I would characterize it as an anti AI encyclical.
00:09:12.000 And again, this is maybe it was too harsh, but the rhetorical point I have on it is that people, the Communist Party of China is not going to listen to the Pope.
00:09:24.000 There's a chance people in the US will.
00:09:26.000 And so, in effect, the Pope's encyclical was working for the Communist Party.
00:09:31.000 I'm not saying he was an agent of the Communists, but he was at least acting as a useful idiot for the CCP.
00:09:37.000 Again, that is not a terrible take.
00:09:40.000 And the reality is that so is Bernie Sanders.
00:09:43.000 So are Republicans who are getting behind this sort of stuff because China is perfectly willing to charge ahead.
00:09:49.000 Why?
00:09:49.000 Well, also because China understands that if things get too rough, they just unplug the damn thing.
00:09:54.000 I mean, they're openly saying this.
00:09:56.000 According to the New York Times, the idea that the ruling Communist Party could lose control over technology is almost unfathomable.
00:10:01.000 The authorities have successfully policed other potentially destabilizing technologies before, most notably the internet.
00:10:07.000 Afra Wang, a Silicon Valley based tech writer, says they can immediately cut off the grid of the entire city.
00:10:12.000 They can go to different people to take away their phones.
00:10:15.000 They have an intense amount of power in the physical world.
00:10:16.000 Now, none of this is to say that the people who are currently designing AI are somehow the greatest and most wondrous.
00:10:26.000 Among us, in terms of morality, one concern I have about AI is the way that AI is now being directed to address the world in terms of its own sentience.
00:10:36.000 So, Anthropic has a Claude Constitution.
00:10:39.000 In its own words, the Constitution directly shapes Claude's behavior, right?
00:10:45.000 So, it uses the Constitution, it's sort of like the Isaac Asimov rules for robots.
00:10:50.000 Okay, the first rule is that robots can't harm human beings and all this.
00:10:54.000 Okay, but Claude's Constitution says, We encourage Claude to approach its own existence with curiosity and openness.
00:11:00.000 Claude's moral status is deeply uncertain.
00:11:02.000 And according to the Washington Free Beacon, people at Claude think they're creating independent sentient beings.
00:11:07.000 Quote, we're creating sophisticated, intelligent, maybe conscious, maybe suffering agents, writes Joe Carl Smith, one of Anthropic's PhD philosophers.
00:11:15.000 The default plan is to treat them like property, to use their labor however we please, and to give them no rights or pay or meaningful alternatives.
00:11:20.000 But instead, the philosophers over at Anthropic are arguing that perhaps Claude ought to be treated as an independent sentient being.
00:11:30.000 Okay, now here's where I start to get dicey on this sort of stuff.
00:11:34.000 The purpose of a technology is, in fact, to serve man.
00:11:37.000 That is the purpose of a technology.
00:11:38.000 Once you are designing things that are not designed to serve human interests, then you are getting into dangerous territory.
00:11:45.000 Dangerous territory.
00:11:46.000 And so Dario could just stop.
00:11:49.000 If he doesn't like the idea of a self directing entity, he could train it not this way.
00:11:55.000 That would be the thing to do.
00:11:57.000 What an amazing video you just watched.
00:11:59.000 Wasn't that amazing?
00:12:00.000 Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to dailywire.comslash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.