AI and Political Freedom: Anthropic's Matthew Botvinick on the Risk to Democracy and How to Respond

Andrew Keen (0:00)

Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.

Hello, everybody. It is Wednesday, the 7th of October, 2026 We live in strange times, apocalyptic times, or at least on the part of many people, a fear of the apocalypse. And when you get the details from them on that supposed impending apocalypse, it's usually either associated with the death of democracy or the taking over by Silicon Valley of all our lives, particularly associated with AI, the apocalyptic flavor of the month these days. My guest today, Matthew Botvinick, understands this. He has a front row seat on this supposed apocalypse, although I'm not sure he thinks of it in quite so apocalyptic terms. He works for Anthropic. He's a scholar and a gentleman, and he has a new book out, came out yesterday, AI and Political Freedom, The Risk To Democracy and How To Respond. Matthew is joining us from just north of me, in Marin County, in Belvedere, just on the Bay. Matthew, congratulations on the book. It took you a while. How long did it take you to write?

Matthew Botvinick (1:45)

Thanks, Andrew. It's great to be with you. Yeah, it's something that I started working on during time I was spending at Yale Law School, 2023-2024, and it's quite remarkable how quickly the world has changed around the project. In fact, I had to update my thinking about what was plausible, what we had to worry about most as the project went along.

Andrew Keen (2:12)

You couldn't get our mutual friend Matthew to write the book for us, Claude?

Matthew Botvinick (2:20)

I'm not down for that. I will say, I asked Claude to write many things for me as part of my work. It's wonderful at summarizing areas of the scholarly literature or introducing me to an idea or area that I'm unfamiliar with. But no, I still believe in human-written books, and this is one.

Andrew Keen (2:44)

That's good to know. The book is called AI and Political Freedom. Is democracy, in your view, leaving AI out of it for the moment? Is democracy in America in crisis?

Matthew Botvinick (2:56)

Well, I mean, I pivoted my whole career because I had that specific worry.

I think regardless of which political party you adhere to in the United States, or if you adhere to neither of the major parties at all, you have to be worried about the trend over the last 15, 20 years toward a disregard for what were previously taken to be fairly well-established political and legal norms, you have to be worried about the concentration of power within the executive branch. Again, I think stating the problem that way, there are people on both sides of the political spectrum who will see signs of those trends from their own perspective. They may identify different political actors, they may identify different political events, but I think there's a general sense that the foundations of democracy in the US, and by the way, in many other places around the world, feel less solid than they used to. Yeah.

Andrew Keen (4:09)

It strikes me, Matt, at least in the way you presented that, that you see this as a bipartisan problem or coming from both sides. A lot of people who come on this show suggest that the real problem is coming from the right. Do you not believe that? Is the problem not an ideological one? It's more broadly a crisis of democratic institutions, norms, ideologies?

Matthew Botvinick (4:33)

Well, I mean, taking the point of view that I, you know, I try to take up in the book, I'm trying to talk about problems that are coming at us in a few years. So there are problems that are not on the agenda.

Well, we can talk about whether they're coming on the agenda actually, you know, this month, but problems that we're going to be facing down the line. So I guess as a strategic matter, I'd like to talk about this as something that we should all agree on across the political spectrum, something to the degree that we believe in the foundations of democracy. You know, we should recommit to particular actions to deal with this possible future. One thing that I will say is that's a little, maybe a little bit more substantive and connected with current events. Many of your listeners will have watched or at least read reporting about this recent appearance on the same stage in back-to-back talks of Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon, at a meeting in Washington that was about the risks of AI.

I think that was a very important and telling moment about where we are in terms of the politics around AI, specifically with respect to left versus right or Republican versus Democrat. The fears that AI is creating about job security, about social upheaval, about just honestly what it means to be human, are ones that I think are starting to eat away at people across the political spectrum. In fact, in this case, for two people who are really at opposite ends of the political spectrum, I have concerns about that political moment which we can talk about, which will relate to populism. But yeah, I think the issues that I talk about in the book and that I'm personally concerned about really do go beyond partisan alignment.