Ben Smith on Trump, Anthropic & the Collision of Government and Big Tech

The intersection of the Trump administration and the AI sector reveals a shift toward intense government involvement in the private sector, characterized by a personalist approach that prioritizes political alignment over traditional free-market principles. Anthropic and other frontier AI companies navigate this landscape by balancing the need for regulatory favor with the pressure to maintain independence from an administration that often rewards sycophancy. Meanwhile, the media industry is undergoing a structural transformation as centralized platforms lose their grip on distribution. Professional journalism is increasingly shifting toward individual voices and direct-to-audience models, mirroring the professionalization seen in the podcasting space. As AI-driven content threatens commodity news, the value of original reporting and human-centric storytelling becomes the primary defense for media organizations like Semaphore, which prioritize deep expertise and individual credibility over the broad, institutional reach of the 20th-century cable era.