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BT Ben Thompson Ben Thompson Writes Stratechery, a subscription newsletter analyzing the business strategy behind tech and media companies, and has built a reputation for framing how platfo...

“Silicon Valley, the sort of person in Silicon Valley, their sense of self-worth and value is so wrapped up in being smart. Everyone in Silicon Valley has always been the smart one. … And so this idea that something's smarter than me is so overwhelming. It's such a blow to the psyche that you have one side is like descending into nihilism. It's all over. And the other side is like, it's okay if it's God. God can be smarter than me.”

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

“Silicon Valley, the sort of person in Silicon Valley, their sense of self-worth and value is so wrapped up in being smart. Everyone in Silicon Valley has always been the smart one. … And so this idea that something's smarter than me is so overwhelming. It's such a blow to the psyche that you have one side is like descending into nihilism. It's all over. And the other side is like, it's okay if it's God. God can be smarter than me.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson

Thompson is explaining why he thinks AI safety debates end up in "crazy places." He argues for treating models as tools to make more understandable and controllable, and says Anthropic goes the opposite way on each of those points.

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson · 2026-10-23 Listen to the episode → More from Ben Thompson → More Tech Strategy & Big Tech quotes →

Transcript

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson Around 1:10:00 into the episode
Ben Thompson

news. And it's so funny. Like so many safety people were so dismissive of this, of this paper immediately because it gives a real blow to their view. Sure.

Andrew Sharp

It undermines the narrative. And it turns out this paper is

Ben Thompson

…than my fist. This idea of there's something that exceeds some of our characteristics is not a strange concept. Right. It's just like we're, and part of this is, I think, Silicon Valley, the sort of person in Silicon Valley, is so, their sense of self-worth and value is so wrapped up in being smart. Everyone in Silicon Valley has always been the smart one. And like, that's how they, there's, and so this idea that something's smarter than me is so overwhelming. It's such a blow to the psyche that you have one side is like descending into nihilism. It's all over. And the other side is like, it's okay if it's God. God can be smarter than me. Alignment, You end up in like these crazy places. And I just, I just think it's wrong. I think we need to be pushing towards making these tools, making them controllable. And part of that is helping people think about them in this way. Okay. Anthropic on every single those points goes in the opposite direction.

Andrew Sharp

Well, a counter to this conversation and that. Well, the part of this conversation

Ben Thompson

is that Opus 5.5 is unbelievable. It's not just time for everything. And there's an aspect of Quad is so much better at agentic stuff in my experience. Yeah. Because it just, it can multitask better. It can keep track of lots of different things, all the stuff that's going on. Like ChatGPT gets so…

Andrew Sharp

I think that people should think about Anthropic Alignment, whether they are aligned with humanity's best interests in terms of how they view these tools and how they're framing these tools for the masses to understand. I will note, though, that their Claude branding seems a lot more coherent than…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

More from Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson

“ChatGPT was actually the greatest name because it's such a temptation and it's so easy for people to get caught up in feeling like they're talking to something real that isn't real. And it's actually responsible to do everything in your power to continue remind people that this isn't real. Anthropic does the exact opposite. They try to make it real. … Their whole view of alignment is not that they can control Claude, it's that they teach Claude to be good. … So it will control itself.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson “The old internet of I'm going to throw up a WordPress site. … I'm going to run my own email server. That's dead. … The whole promise of the internet of being openness, a million nodes. … Everyone who's listening to this who knows anything of what I just said, you should consider yourself fortunate because it was a moment in time. It's a golden era. It will never return.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson