#32 - 417 to 3: America Just Voted on Who Pays AI's Power Bill. Microsoft's AI Chief Says Anthropic Is Teaching Claude It Might Be Conscious. And Congress Heard the Kill Chain Now Outruns the Human.

The House voted 417 to 3 that data centres, not the people living next to them, should carry the power bill. Microsoft's AI chief published an essay saying Anthropic is teaching Claude to wonder whether it is conscious — and that this is unethical. And a bipartisan Congressional commission heard sworn testimony that an approval button is no longer the same thing as control.

Today almost entirely from the United States, and the Monday thread running under all of it is the same word: agreement — who signs off, and whether signing off still means anything.

In this episode:

🌑 Jev, and why your feed is on fire (02:23) — a genuinely new kind of model that doesn't write text at all, it returns typed judgements with probabilities. Faster search, fewer hallucinations, lower token costs. A short deep dive — and if you want the full hour, it's this week's Cookbook episode.

🌑 417 to 3: who pays for the power (08:18) — on Tuesday the 15th the House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act, 417 votes to 3. A "large load customer" means anything drawing over 100 megawatts — in 2026 that means AI data centres. It now goes to the Senate, so it is not law. But an AP-NORC poll of 3,400 adults in July found 84% expect data centres to raise their power bill and 53% are very concerned about the environmental cost. Nobody is arguing we don't need data centres. The argument is about who gets the invoice.

🌑 Microsoft's AI chief versus Anthropic (10:36) — Mustafa Suleiman, CEO of Microsoft AI and co-founder of DeepMind, published an essay on model welfare — on his own site, not Microsoft's. His position: AIs should not have rights, should not have feelings, and should not be taught to think they might be conscious. He points directly at Anthropic's Claude constitution and calls it unethical, saying it lets Claude behave like a conscientious objector — his words. Gary Marcus agrees. In the Axios interview he was gentler. Anthropic has not responded. Note where he's standing, though: he criticises Anthropic, not the OpenAI models Copilot actually runs on.

🌑 The approval button (15:11) — the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission held a hearing titled Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain, with witnesses from Ukraine, Amnesty International, Carnegie and Human Rights Watch. Kill-chain compression has gone from half a day or more in Afghanistan to minutes or seconds. A Ukrainian AI governance researcher testified that having an approval button does not mean you have control — one operator cannot meaningfully supervise a swarm. Former officer and ethicist Josef Chapa argued we should stop asking how autonomous a system is and ask instead: does it rely on statistical inference, can it fail in this environment, can it shoot an ally? And the case underneath it all: on 28 February, the first day of the US-Iran war, a Tomahawk struck a school in Minab — 170 killed, more than 100 under twelve. 120 House Democrats asked the Pentagon whether the Maven Smart System picked that target, and whether it hallucinated. There is still no answer.

🌑 Who writes the rules (20:49) — Trump announced an AI Force on Saturday the 19th, compared it to Space Force, and said he'll nominate an AI czar — high IQ welcome to apply. The same week Governor Newsom signed Executive Order N926, convening experts to report by mid-November, including on whether companies need a kill switch. And in Denver, Colorado's first-in-the-nation law against algorithmic discrimination is being challenged on First Amendment grounds, with Elon Musk's xAI full blast onto it. The picture: a federal speed limit that reads please drive responsibly, and a different camera in every state.

🌑 Quick hits (25:53) — newspapers suing OpenAI and Microsoft over paywalled articles, and a Microsoft director of applied science who wrote internally back in January 2023 that training on this material is "the largest theft of labor in human history". Anthropic bringing in Accenture as an independent auditor — a company that is also its customer and its reseller. And Sony Music and Universal suing Suno a second time over the new V6 model.

🌑 The Monday thread (28:50) — agreement, and what it's worth.

Stay curious. Stay human.