Saikat Chakrabarti on Venture Capital, AI Risk, and Fighting for Public Control of the Future

"Do we want to plan for that potential shift and handle the transition in a way that creates the least amount of harm and the most amount of good, trying to transition to a Star Trek-style future?"

This is a preview of the long form content that will soon be appearing in the first edition of One Thousand Means, which will focus on articulating the vision of abundance from the left.

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Saikat Chakrabarti is a software engineer who co-founded Justice Democrats and served as chief of staff to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He is currently a candidate for California’s 11th Congressional District.

**Zachary:** You’re running for Congress in San Francisco, the heart of the American technology industry, in which venture capital plays a crucial structural role. The CEO of Y Combinator, Garry Tan, unfortunately appears to have made it his mission to sink your campaign. Tan’s politics aside, many startups that have gone through Y Combinator certainly provide value, such as your corporate alma mater Stripe. Do you make a distinction in your views between venture capital as a social technology and venture capitalists as political agents? How important do you think the startup economy is to technological advancement, and do you consider potential negative impacts to the sector when designing policy?

**Saikat:** I think the startup economy is important. The amount of wealth creation that we’ve managed to generate in Silicon Valley — it’s good. The problem is that it’s basically the only model of financing for new industries and new businesses that we have in America. In the US, if you’re trying to build a company that won’t result in a potential 1,000x return in ten years, you are very limited in what you can do. But if you’re trying to do that in a place like China, or in the context of other governments where there are actual national plans for industries to build up, that’s not the case. There are all different kinds of financing available to you.

When I talk about designing policy in America — yes, I do think the current way we’ve structured who gets the returns from a lot of these investments is lopsided, and I do call for higher taxes on the wealthiest. But I don’t think the only kinds of businesses we should be funding are the ones that can potentially return 100x or 1,000x to investors. That leaves out a whole lot of other kinds of industries and businesses that are really important. I think we’re really seeing a stagnation of this sort of business model in our economy today. If you take out investment in AI, we are basically doing nothing in our economy. Our economy is barely growing, and that’s because we don’t have any concept of public financing or any sort of idea of directing any other part of our economy. A lot of the work around New Consensus and our Mission for America is about that: if we want to intentionally develop other industries, how do you do that?

**Zachary:** Are there specific sectors you think are poorly served by the venture capital mode of financing that public finance would be better suited to?

**Saikat:** Most sectors. Most businesses are not returning 100x or 1,000x on an investment. Let me give some examples of critical things that we need in our country right now that are not being served by venture capital.

Right now, if you wanted to expand the power grid in California, we rely on large power transformers. Large power transformers have about a five-to-six-year wait time because there are only two companies that build them in America. And to build large power transformers you need electric steel. There’s only one company that makes electric steel in America. These are the kinds of companies that require a lot of upfront investment to create. They do make a return, but it’s over time, and they’re not huge capital returns. So there aren’t entrepreneurs hopping up and down ready to build new large power transformer companies. There aren’t investors lining up to invest in them. We’ve just, as a nation, decided we are okay with the status quo of being completely stuck trying to expand our electrical grids because the private markets have decided this is not a good place to make a big return.

You see that example over and over again. If you want to build out train sets, there’s basically no company in America that does that because it’s a similar kind of problem. We rely on Siemens and other foreign companies to build them out for us. Our current model of financing and building out our economy has led us to this state where private capital is always trying to find the industries that might have the largest rate of return — not just a rate of return, the largest rate of return on investment. VC is where a lot of that’s ended up going, because if you get one hit out of 100 investments, you make so much on that one hit that it covers losses of your other investments. Relying on VC alone has the effect of weakening the rest of our economy and also geographically — we’re basically talking about tons of investment in just a few geographic locations in America, and everything else is being left behind.

**Zachary:** Throughout your interviews and public statements you often refer to yourself as a “class traitor.” You’re attempting to get rid of the money that you made at Stripe, and so on. But do you think Stripe is a valuable firm? Do you think the work you did at Stripe was valuable? Do you think that Stripe is good, that we have an economy that can produce a firm like Stripe?

**Saikat:** I think the work I did at Stripe — I’m proud of it. I think we built good stuff. My view on what’s broken with the economy is: should we reward people for starting successful businesses? Of course. But should we have an economy that is basically a winner-take-all system for survival? No.

The broken thing is not that Stripe was valuable. The broken thing was that at the same time that I was able to make a whole lot of money off of two years of hard work, people who are working incredibly hard every single day, doing in my view just as valuable work, can’t even afford to live in the city. They can’t afford a secure retirement. The whole idea that you can have a nice, dignified life off 40 hours a week is pretty much dead. The American dream is dead. Young people today are not going to do as well as their parents. We’ve created a lottery system where you end up working at the right company at the right time and you might hit it big, but otherwise you’re looking at a bleak future.

When I call myself a class traitor, it’s not because I think startups are bad, or starting businesses is bad, or the work I did is bad. The thing that I believe needs to happen is we have to rectify who is getting the share of the wealth in this economy. It shouldn’t all be going to just a handful of people. We need to fix the distribution of the wealth.

**Zachary:** The Niskanen Center’s Steve Teles released an article describing varieties of abundance, placing you and Zohran Mamdani in the category that he called “Red Plenty,” noting your celebration of the French postwar planning state and the New Deal. Do you view yourself in those terms, or take any insights from the supply-side and state capacity policy world?

**Saikat:** Explicitly, I tend to stay away from trying to figure out what bucket I’m in. The way I approach any problem or any situation is to look at the problem honestly and try to figure out what the actual solutions would be. I do look a lot at historical references for when we’ve actually succeeded with creating abundance for a whole society. It’s not just the French that I look at. I look at the example of America, not just during the New Deal, but really during the World War Two mobilization, which was, I would argue, the time where we really built up our means of making a living, built up our industrial base, and that was really what got us out of the Great Depression. But I also look at the European countries after the war, how they built back after they were bombed out. I look at the modern-day Asian nations — South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore — and also the Nordic countries during the ‘80s and ‘90s.

The interesting thing is, if you look at all of these countries, they all basically went through phases where they rapidly transformed their economies in really short periods of time. In the case of the Asian countries, they went from poverty economies to pretty much developed nations. In the case of America during World War Two, we went from not having a big industrial base to mass-producing more war material than any other nation in the world. And the way they all did it, if you look at how they managed it, was doing a kind of governing and a kind of state-led investment that’s outside of anything we do today. That’s been a lot of the focus of our research at New Consensus, and a lot of where my politics is informed from. My argument would be: if you’re serious about trying to create a future of abundance, you shouldn’t limit yourself to just one tool or one ideology. You should really look at the ways this has ever succeeded in the past and use every tool at your disposal to make it happen.

**Zachary:** One thing I find interesting about the examples you list is you mentioned the Nordic countries in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Why that period?

**Saikat:** That was really when they managed to upgrade their economies, especially Finland. It was being led by the cell phone technological revolution. In their case, it was in response to an economic crisis. During the fall of the USSR, Finland — before they had their massive expansion of their economy through largely Nokia — I believe their major exports were paper goods and paper products. They decided, as a nation, to invest in advanced technology and advanced cell phone technologies. They did this state-led development to build up not just Nokia, but the entire supply chain and infrastructure around it. Sweden and Norway were also kind of part of that larger project, or they played a role in it. That was the period during which the Nordic countries rapidly advanced their economy. It’s one of the more recent examples.

**Zachary:** It’s the period in which social democrats in those countries no longer had parliamentary majorities, but their institutions were not structurally threatened. Do you think the cooperation of the liberals in Scandinavia with the social democratic order allowed them the space for those policy agendas? Or do you think that, at its core, the social democratic legacy in those countries is what produces the ability to engage in state-run venture capital firms like in Finland?

**Saikat:** It was the cooperation. That’s the interesting thing about what I’m talking about. You’ve seen versions of countries reinventing themselves and their economies under all kinds of governments, all kinds of economic or political systems, and under all kinds of parties. In the Nordic countries, it was not led by the Social Democrats. It was really a failure of the Social Democrats to be able to renew their own institutions and economies that led to the liberals coming into power. But then the liberals did a kind of state-led investment that, if I was to pitch that today in America, often gets labeled as democratic socialist or even communist — or “Red Plenty,” as Steve Teles said. That’s why I think this is a practical kind of politics. It doesn’t neatly line up with some ideology. It’s really the basic idea of: how do countries decide to develop themselves, and what are the institutions and plans and procedures that they historically use to make that happen?

**Saikat:** State capacity we’ve lost for years — including the capacity to publicly finance and decide stuff we want to build in the economy. The big disagreement I often have with the Niskanen and abundance people is their idea of how you build state capacity is often, you know, you pick a few small problems and you work on that — make the DMV work better. I think that’s not actually how any country has ever built up their state capacity. The way countries build up their state capacity is you put the country on a big mission that’s politically exciting, and that’s how you actually get the best and brightest to come work in your government. That’s why you have the moonshot. I don’t think we’d be able to build up our capacity to create new materials that can go into space unless it was in the context of this bigger mission. I think that comes from the technocratic nature of the Niskanen people — they love tinkering on the policy side.

**Zachary:** The tech right, to an extent, also has an understanding of this but obviously no ideological, personal, or practical capacity to carry it out.

**Saikat:** They’re fundamentally hamstrung by this ideological view that the only way you can build or create growth in the economy is enabling private actors to do it. Other than basically the build-out of our national rail — which also had tons of public subsidy — I’d say the build-out of rails was driven largely by industrialists. That’s kind of the only example. It’s hard to find other examples.

**Zachary:** Build-out of AI, at least for now.

**Saikat:** And yeah, the build-out of AI. One of the funniest things to me — I met Sam Altman years ago, and the conversation I specifically had with him was he was telling me how you should never start a business that builds out infrastructure, because you’re going to lose in the end. And now I’m just like, look what are you doing?

**Zachary:** You would lose from a business perspective?

**Saikat:** It’s so much capital expense upfront that to make a return on that capital, it never works out in the end. He told me about the build-out of underwater cables — I guess that’s actually a private venture. So I guess this time he’s like, well, if we replace all labor, it’ll work out. But otherwise, I agree with him. It’s not a great private business to get into.

**Zachary:** You always see skeptics of the business model of the labs talking about the size of the capital expenditure being insane. Unless this automated vast portions of labor, it would be unsustainable. And all of the CEOs recognize this publicly. They’re just going to do it. And I think that’s probably the problem we should be far more concerned with.

**Zachary:** Turning to AI — on Crash Lab, the site associated with your think tank New Consensus, a scenario is presented similar to that put forward by Citrini Research: a demand crunch triggered by the automation of white-collar work that leads to an economic downturn. This scenario has been criticized by economists for ignoring monetary policy responses, as well as the fact that in such a scenario, prices will fall, thus increasing the real wages of many downshifted white-collar employees. How confident are you in the demand crunch scenario? Is this simply one of many situations we should prepare for, or the modal outcome in your view?

**Saikat:** It’s one of many, because we can’t be sure exactly how AI is going to play out. But something interesting you said in the question is “downshifted white-collar employees” — this is assuming that white-collar employees are getting laid off and then finding other low-wage work somewhere. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a given. If you look at the levels of unemployment that AI threatens to create — something like 25%, or even in a nightmare scenario 40%, because about 40% of our workers in America can essentially do their jobs over Zoom, and those are the kinds of jobs that might get replaced by AI — I don’t believe we have a labor market willing to absorb that amount of white-collar workers.

When they talk about monetary policy — let’s think about what a monetary policy response means. There’s two kinds. One is lowering interest rates, which the traditional thinking is will help heat up investment, and the investment will lead to new industries and new businesses being formed, which leads to job creation. But in an AI future, we are basically decoupling industrial output from labor. So just interest rate policy is not going to solve that issue. You’re not going to be able to get employment to go back up by making the cost of borrowing lower.

The other kind of monetary policy we could be thinking about is things like quantitative easing — basically printing money. Currently, the way we do quantitative easing in America is the Federal Reserve can essentially print money to buy up assets of private businesses on the open markets, which is essentially a way to do a sort of stimulus to the industrial side. But again, if the labor market is being decoupled from industrial output, that doesn’t solve the demand crunch crisis. I don’t actually see how monetary policy can get us out of that demand crunch.

**Zachary:** In your plan, the “We Won’t Get Fooled Again Act,” it proceeds with the de facto gradual nationalization of the frontier AI labs, but contingent on them being distressed assets. Is your advocacy for this form of de facto socialization contingent on an economic downturn, or is this independently desirable?

**Saikat:** It’s one of the routes in which I think it can happen. But I believe it’s independently desirable, because if we are looking at a future where there are entire industries that no longer need workers to function — services that essentially become free to provide — the current way all this is structured is that those industries and services would pretty much be subsumed by the existing AI companies, and you’d have a few corporations basically owning a larger and larger portion of the economy. You’d end up with these massive natural monopolies.

In that sort of scenario, it would be better if the government can simply provide those services for free. The way to do that would be some form of the government either owning these frontier labs or owning the infrastructure — owning the data centers — and perhaps treating them as public utilities, or turning the frontier labs into mission-driven, not-for-profit corporations. If it is the case that we can do all this work without any labor needs, then that should mean people overall are able to just access those services for free and have all these productivity gains result in more leisure time, shorter work weeks, and more wealth — not in the money sense, just wealth in people’s lives — because all the stuff that used to require all this work now no longer requires it.

**Zachary:** Let’s say the labs have been nationalized and there is a national laboratory run as a public benefit corporation or as an element of the executive branch. These services are provided for free. How do we then deal with the labor displacement if, say, 25% of the American workforce is now out of a job? Are we going to be providing them a basic income? But from what revenues, from what taxes? This seems like a tension in the plan.

**Saikat:** If the government is directly providing the means of making a living to people, you’re just providing the means rather than having it happen through income. There’s a bunch of ways this might work. There’s a scenario in which AI replaces 97% of all the work that we need — that’s going to be a very different world. And in a world where there’s only 25% unemployment, what I believe we need is the state capacity and infrastructure to be able to handle any of those scenarios.

In my view, if we just go down the route of trying to provide people basic income but keep the current system of providing goods and services to people the same, that’s not going to work. Whereas if the government is directly providing the services to people, then you don’t need an income to buy that service. The government is just providing that service to you.

**Zachary:** Even under those conditions, there would still be parts of the basket of consumer goods that people would want to consume that wouldn’t be provided by the state. Would nationalizing the AI labs necessarily lead to state provision of food free at point of service, in kind? Or does there still need to be room for goods outside of the domain of what the public corporation is providing?

**Saikat:** Of course there’s going to be goods outside of what the public corporations are providing for free to the public. Though food is not really the best example, because I do actually think we should be able to provide food to everybody when we produce enough. Food is one of the most socialized parts of our government right now, where we essentially backstop farmers and can tell them what to produce and how much to produce, but then we still have a private market system for delivery. We have a situation where we can produce enough to provide for everybody, but we’ve decided not to. I don’t think it’s the most efficient market we have.

There are other models of food distribution. In places like Mexico, they’ve started doing price caps on an essential basket of foods. Beyond that, you can purchase other food according to your preferences, but it provides a basic safety net of the essentials.

In a world where we can actually produce anything we want without labor needs, that is going to be a different kind of economy. Money will essentially be something we are creating to give to people to purchase stuff, and there might still be work that people are doing and earning from. But the basis of this is: the essentials you need to survive — I believe we should directly provide those. I don’t think it would work to just give people an income to purchase the essentials in a world where you’re not able to have a job to earn that income. We’d be an intermediary between you and the services through money, when it’s either the government providing you money to get something for free from the government, or the government just giving you the thing.

**Zachary:** I completely agree that at the limit this seems crucial, but what about during a transition period before all or most labor is automated, and in the period in which specifically white-collar jobs that can be done on Zoom are being hit? Say we’re at 10 to 20% unemployment.

**Saikat:** So imagine that 10 to 20% of white-collar jobs get automated. These are jobs that currently earn somewhere between $100,000 to $400,000 a year. In San Francisco right now, a starting engineer at Google makes around $200,000 a year. The proposals I’ve heard so far for what to do about that would be UBI. To prevent a demand crunch from that kind of unemployment, from those levels of salary, the UBI would have to provide about $200,000 a year to these people, because if you’re providing less, there is going to be a demand crunch. Where would that level of money for that UBI come from if the government is not directly owning some of the means of production? And politically, is it really going to be feasible for us to have a largely blue-collar workforce making a lot less than $200,000 a year, continuing to work, to support money going for free to people making $200,000 a year? I don’t believe that’s politically possible.

The solution here has to be: 10 to 20% of white-collar workers are getting laid off — now would be the time to actually directly provide the essentials to everybody. Create the universal programs: healthcare, childcare, education, food, utilities. That would have more political buy-in. For white-collar workers who might be losing their jobs — there is other work that we need to be doing that may not be getting replaced by AI right now. This is a lot of the work in the Mission for America around building clean, high-wage industries that we would need folks to get retrained into. That would be productive work that we as a country just need to do. That’s how a transitionary phase would work, where AI hasn’t replaced all work. There is still work that needs to happen that AI hasn’t replaced. But in any version of this, we have to be able to provide all the essentials to people, and as some of these industries are starting to not require work, I think it’d be better for those industries to be available to everyone for free, rather than large corporations just sitting on those industries and essentially collecting rent off them. If there’s no work required to provide them, then they’re just collecting rent off of something that is free to provide.

**Zachary:** David Shor’s polling suggests that policies such as fully replacing the income of displaced employees under some threshold — say $140,000 — would be quite popular. Matt Bruenig wrote recently about how we should create a more robust unemployment insurance system as our primary solution to AI-driven job displacement. Neither of these people is particularly bearish on AI. But rather, they’re recognizing that the people who will be automated will want some other bundle of goods that the state may not be able to provide. And if we are not able to give all of these people a replacement job, then at least some degree of income replacement needs to be in our scheme.

**Saikat:** That seems fine. It basically sounds to me like we’re talking about providing the essentials to people. On top of that, the question is what amount of money people get to buy things that they want, which essentially is us just creating that money to give to people at that point. I just did the math — we’re talking about 25% unemployment at $150,000. That is about $6.3 trillion a year.

**Zachary:** That would be the literal maximal case of the transfer. I completely agree with you that it seems impossible to finance.

**Saikat:** That’s in fact the minimal case. $150,000 a year is a low-end salary for a white-collar worker being replaced right now.

**Zachary:** An unemployment insurance system, especially an uncapped or highly capped one in the advent of mass AI-driven automation — unless we nationalized the labs. But in that case, the national lab would have to basically be charging monopoly rents by the state in order to redistribute that wealth. In the “We Won’t Get Fooled Again Act,” there’s some mention of charging commercial fees to private actors seeking to use the services. Is this something you imagine the national lab doing, or do you think that, because of how robust the in-kind provisions will be, this will not be necessary at scale?

**Saikat:** It could be necessary. But basically what we’re talking about is: we have an economy that has a certain amount of output. The basic thing that money — the existence of currency — tries to solve is we give people money so they can choose what of that output to buy. We as a government decide we’re going to tax a small amount of that output to provide some services directly to people. And we have this system because we need humans and labor to continue to create that output.

In a world where we are needing less and less labor, I believe the amount of the total output that should be directly provided needs to be more and more. When I say $6.3 trillion, that sounds like a big number, but if I put that in the context of our GDP — our total output — it’s not a majority of it. But in a current consumer-driven economy where our GDP is largely driven by consumer spending, we do actually have to figure out a way to provide the equivalent of a majority of our GDP to everybody who may not have work.

There’s two ways to do that. One is we create a system of taxing the AI companies and the production, and then give that back to people, and they get to choose stuff to buy. Another system is the government simply provides a lot of stuff directly. The final mix might be some combination of those two things — providing the essentials, but then people also have money to choose to purchase things outside that. In a world where labor is no longer as necessary to produce that output, we’re essentially getting to decide what mix we want.

The thing I feel strongly about is that the essentials should not be something that people are begging and scraping to get. But how we decide to distribute goods of choice — there’ll be some market, some mechanism for people to make choices and get money to make those choices. I just think a simple income replacement strategy is likely to fail, especially given the political dynamics I described earlier. I like universal programs because they’re, in my view, more stable and more possible to create.

**Zachary:** This seems to imply pretty dramatic shifts in our economic and social life in the very near term. Are you pretty confident that those shifts will occur over some near time span — say, 10 to 20 years?

**Saikat:** I don’t know. I think we’re seeing some job loss from AI already. If the rate of improvement continues and doesn’t cap out — which isn’t known, it might cap out at some point, there may be some fundamental issue with LLMs where they can’t actually achieve full human capacity — then we are talking about a fundamental shift in our society whether we like it or not. And the question to me is: do we want to plan for that potential shift and handle the transition in a way that creates the least amount of harm and the most amount of good, trying to transition to a Star Trek-style future? Or will we let that happen chaotically? The way we’re going right now is chaos.

**Zachary:** If we have rapid advancement in capabilities, the curve continues going up — what kind of world do you want to live in? Get as utopian as you want. Is Star Trek the model?

**Saikat:** I think that would be amazing. If we get to a place where the basic needs of people are taken care of, people have autonomy and dignity in their lives, they get to choose what they want to work on, we focus our energies as a people on exploration, art, scientific discovery, and get out of having to do the drudgery of just keeping society running. We as a people are in control of our futures and our destinies. We don’t feel like we’re under the thumb of certain despotic leaders, whether political or corporate. That would be great, and I think it’s a future worth striving for. I don’t think it’s going to happen automatically, but we should be striving for a future where everybody gets to live a good, full, dignified life. That’s at the core of my politics.

**Zachary:** It seems that large portions of the left, though this is starting to change, are not just skeptical of AI but actively opposed to its rollout in any circumstance, including the burgeoning anti-data-center movement. Do you think a national moratorium on data centers would be a good idea? And do you think local interventions against data centers — protests, petitions, and so on — are worthwhile given the potential upside, or do those actions make sense strategically in the absence of socialization?

**Saikat:** The specific thing that Bernie Sanders argues for with the data center moratorium is — he takes this technology very seriously. He was, if anything, the first among the more left politicians to really take AI seriously and the potential of its impacts on the labor markets. He’s saying: until we can figure out how to actually regulate this technology, we should put a pause on this. I think that makes sense, because this is progressing at such a rapid scale. I know, if you saw the benchmark numbers from Claude floating around — people who I’ve talked to who are working inside these labs are telling me they’re freaked out by how fast this is going, and society is nowhere at a state to even know how to handle the potential disruption that’s coming our way. In the face of that, I do believe it makes sense to pause until we can actually do this correctly.

I don’t want to end up in a doomsday scenario with massive job loss and recessions before we’re at a place politically where we can actually control this technology. I’d rather we figure out how to roll this technology out correctly now. And to some extent, I see what Bernie Sanders is doing as a negotiating strategy. He’s trying to force the AI labs to come to the table and get to a point where we are, as a nation, actually figuring out how to regulate and control this technology. He has, I think correctly, surmised that without a potential threat to their underlying business model, they are not going to come to the table and negotiate.

**Zachary:** Are you concerned about existential risk to human life or autonomy from loss of control to a power-seeking AI system?

**Saikat:** I’m pretty scared about that too. There’s been more and more papers and research coming out about AI agents deceiving their testers, working without correct alignment. Anthropic seems to be one of the only labs taking it seriously. OpenAI and Google, I don’t believe are. I think it’s pretty important that we actually start having national standards for when we’re deciding a model can be released, because there is a real threat of a model coming out that starts acting of its own will, starts helping people develop biotech weapons. We’re kind of playing with fire at this point. It hasn’t gotten to that point yet, but I am scared of the existential risk as well. I don’t think I’ve seen anything that really has proposed a real potential solution, or a body to do oversight on these labs that would lead me to believe that we’re on top of this threat.

**Zachary:** If you were writing a bill outlining the mandate and governance structure of our new nationalized lab, what do you think the tradeoff of safety and caution on release should be versus rollout? The AI labs as they currently exist seem to be deprioritizing safety in favor of profit-seeking. But the state lab would have an unclear set of objectives. Would you say we should overwhelmingly prioritize safety, or is there some degree at which you’re willing to make a tradeoff on safety to provide benefits to the rest of humanity?

**Saikat:** The way I’d structure it — and I do think Anthropic has done a decent job, though they have started to potentially slip a little — we would have to have really clear guidelines of which safety benchmarks any model needs to pass before being released. One of the benefits of having this be a state lab or nationalized lab is there wouldn’t be the constant pressure of competition from your competitors and the profit-seeking motive forcing the tradeoff between speed and safety. If we’re doing this at a national scale, we could take our time. There’s no reason why we have to have AGI appear next year. We can take our time to do it right, to make sure it’s safe. It would prioritize safety over speed.

That would also give us time to plan out the other repercussions around labor markets, around societal effects from the proliferation of deepfakes. There are all these potential ill effects that we’d have time to handle correctly. In the current private markets where AI is being developed, safety often falls by the wayside because there is this threat of competitors always getting ahead of you. I’m honestly surprised that Anthropic sort of kept up its safety benchmarks for as long as they have. Good on them. But the other labs aren’t necessarily doing that.

**Zachary:** Nationalizing the lab certainly solves that dimension of the problem, but it seems to introduce others. Would you be concerned that the nationalized lab would provide the executive branch, or even the employees or CEO of the nationalized lab itself, extreme concentration of power? How could we design such an institution to prevent that?

**Saikat:** Of course. I’m always concerned in any sort of governance situation that we’re going to end up with an extreme concentration of political power, and as we’ve seen, even well-designed democratic systems experience that — that’s happening in our country right now with Donald Trump. We would have to have some series of checks and balances, like an independent commission overseeing this. There are models for doing real oversight of government agencies that have proven to be decently successful. In the federal government, we’ve had an Office of the Inspector General that’s been an auditor and overseer for other agencies, and until Trump fired them all, it was a pretty effective way to catch fraud and abuse and waste. Having independent offices like that overseeing an agency like this would be one model.

The thing I do think having a nationalized lab gives you is that we democratically can vote and create a governance structure that we are then legally bound to, which in a corporate governance structure simply doesn’t exist. We just saw this play out with OpenAI, where they had come up with a whole governance structure to try to keep OpenAI from ever releasing unsafe models. Sam Altman basically blew that away in the matter of five days when they tried to fire him. It’s much harder for a corporate governance structure to have the staying power that a national governance structure does.

**Zachary:** Are you ready for the fight that would entail? It would be framed as the largest expropriation of private property in, plausibly, the history of the world, if the US government nationalized the labs in, say, 2030. Do you think that will really be a massive political fight with concentrated private interests? Or do you think to some extent it’s in the interests of the lab employees? Do you see this, especially if it’s happening while they’re not distressed assets, as a pretty dramatic contestation with private power in a way that doesn’t have much comparison in American history?

**Saikat:** That’s why the plan we have out right now is about buying out distressed assets, which there’s precedent for. I think there might be other routes — getting equity stakes, having governance power. There’s precedent for the government stepping in when there are incredibly dangerous technologies that have society-wide effects. It might be a big fight, and I feel like we are headed there anyway.

Either AI is going to be this hugely disruptive force in our society, and then we are going to have to contend with how to control this technology and do whatever we can to make it work for the good of humanity, or it won’t — in which case this whole conversation doesn’t matter so much. But we have to be ready for that. If we have a government that’s not willing to protect its people in the face of huge disruption, then I believe that’s an ineffective government.

This is ultimately one of the big reasons I’m running. I do think we need people with the courage and conviction to face up to these moments and be willing to put out potentially controversial visions of what needs to happen. I’m always open to new information. The stuff I’m pitching might be wrong. But I haven’t heard other versions of how we can manage this, if it is at the level of disruption that the AI labs are saying it will be.

**Zachary:** When do you think you started recognizing that this was going to be potentially very transformative?

**Saikat:** I had some conversations with people who were deep in this field back in 2017. This was right after OpenAI had competed in their first Dota match. I believe it was the year that their AI didn’t win. I was talking to some people there, and at that time, they were telling me: in five years, either hardware is going to catch up and we’re going to get a real breakthrough, or not.

That was the first time I really started to take it seriously. I’m a computer science grad, I’ve been in tech. I’ve been hearing about the power of neural nets and AI my entire life. I took a neural nets class in college where I built out a simple model to do visual recognition of plants. But that year was the first time I thought, this sounds different, because it’s somebody I trust the technical chops of telling me this is coming. And then the stuff around the Transformers happened, I believe around the same time.

When that prediction actually came true — it was literally five years before ChatGPT came out — and then the first version of ChatGPT had a bunch of problems, but I was hearing those same people saying this is going to develop very rapidly. I always take it with a grain of salt when people trying to raise money are overhyping anything, but when I hear engineers telling me the same thing on the inside, I take it somewhat seriously. And that has come to be the case. The length of time between upgrades and models has shrunk over the last several years, and it is improving faster and faster.

I’m still not sure I’m on the AGI train. I think it’s an intelligence, but it might end up being a different kind of intelligence. But I think that almost doesn’t matter. The AGI discussion misses the larger point: are we looking at something that will cause widespread disruption, but also could cause widespread good? My view of politics has always been: we should plan for the potential futures, and if we don’t end up needing those plans, that’s fine, but at least we’ve tried.

This interview has been edited and rearranged for coherence and brevity.