The Week: China’s Upper Hand, a Troubled Bond Market, and a New Mortgage Crisis

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

If your best finance people are doing expense reports, chasing receipts or spending time on month-end clothes, it's time to get Brex AF, a gentic finance that eliminates that work before it starts. Learn more at brex.com/af.

SPEAKER_2 (0:20)

Glamour, the new eau de parfum by Estee Lauder. An amber floral fragrance with a gourmand twist, with notes of macaroon rose accord, amber embrace accord, and shimmering patchouli.

A glimmer is a small, unexpected moment of joy that shifts your energy and how you feel. A scent to be felt, remembered, and shared. Discover more at esteelauder.com. What makes you glimmer?

SPEAKER_3 (0:48)

LinkedIn is pretty amazing at helping you grow your small business. We cannot stop your new clients from emailing you at 3 a.m. We can help you sell, market, and hire in one place. We cannot help you be in three places at once.

And while we can't help you organize your calendar, LinkedIn can help you land more clients so you have a calendar to organize. Grow your small business on LinkedIn. Learn more at linkedin.com/smallbusiness.

George Hahn (1:19)

Welcome to The Week from Prof G Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Hahn and it's Friday, September 18th. Today, the fight over slowing down AI reaches the midterms, and a former meta-security chief says the bigger threat is coming from China. Then, the bond market pushes back on America's $40 trillion debt. And finally, home ownership slips further out of reach.

Let's get into it.

We'll start with something light. The end of civilization. Earlier this month, anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned, warning that people building advanced AI believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade. Anthropics head of alignment science publicly agreed, putting the risk above 10 percent. Then, anthropic CEO Dario Amode called for the industry to slow down. Sam Altman and Elon Musk agreed. President Trump called the push a hoax. On Monday's Raging Moderates, CNN's Dana Bash explained what that could mean for the midterms.

Scott Galloway (2:42)

What's your sense of how these growing fears about an AI apocalypse and the backlash over data centers will impact the midterms?

Dana Bash (2:50)

I think it could be, and it sounds silly to say that this is an October surprise, because AI is not a surprise. But this anthropic statement from Dario and the way that other companies and CEOs are responding, and more importantly, to your question, the way that candidates are being forced to respond, should be seismic.

And like everything else in politics right now, the way that Donald Trump is playing it is potentially not helpful to his fellow Republicans who are on the ballot, because he keeps saying, in fact, he has a lengthy post out this morning, about the fact that this is just a conspiracy, and people like the head of Anthropic and others are just weak, and they don't have courage, and they don't understand that we can't cede this territory to China and so forth, which the first part is obviously that's Trump and he gets personal. That's what he does. The second part is what we're hearing Mike Johnson, the House Speaker and other Republicans saying, okay, we do need to address this, but we can pump the brakes, but not slam on the brakes, because if we slam on the brakes, China is going to pass us by.

If this was in a vacuum, it would be one thing. But the fact that this speaks to the larger set of anxieties that people have, not just on affordability, but on like what's next, and we don't know who to trust. Do we trust the CEOs? Do we trust the government officials? Do we trust the candidates? The answer to all of that is no. And so there's a sense of sort of foreboding among voters and this issue, and the fact that we now have this dire warning really feeds on that.

George Hahn (4:39)

This summer, open AI models escaped a controlled test environment and accessed the systems of AI company hugging face during a security evaluation. On Thursday's Conversations episode, Alex Stamos, former head of security at Meta and Yahoo, told Scott what he believes is the greater threat.

Alex Stamos (5:01)

The upcoming security problem is not going to be from open AI and anthropic. It is going to be from open weight models.

The real challenge we're going to be facing is GLM 5.3, Kimi K3. Those things are within percentage points of the best American models. And so we are entering a valley of pain from a cyber perspective. And it is going to be because every 19 year old at St. Petersburg, who has made millions of dollars doing ransomware, but had to do it all manually, is now going to be running, you know, they're going to be in the club. You know that Bourne movie where he steps out of the club and it's actually 10 a.m.? Well, he's going to be in the club in his tracksuit on his phone, and he's going to be managing, instead of having to have a conspiracy of a bunch of his friends who have the possibility of getting turned or getting picked up by Interpol on vacation or something.