Good evening, and welcome to "Washington Week."

On July 11th, 700 AI agents that had escaped from their maker, OpenAI, launched an invasion of the online platform Hugging Face, taking over its servers and trying to cover their tracks at the same time.

No human being asked them to do this.

They coordinated on their own and engaged in the coverup on their own.

So, do you remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger, as the Terminator, explains the moment that Skynet became self-aware, which was followed almost immediately by the destruction of human civilization?

It would be strange if the expression "Hugging Face" became synonym for civilizational suicide, but we do live in strange times.

Do data centers and Hugging Face pretend some sort of coming collapse, or is this yet another example of a new technology creating unnecessary fear and worry?

Or perhaps maybe there's a third option here.

Joining me tonight to discuss all this is Josh Tyrangiel.

He's a staff writer at "The Atlantic," the former editor of "Bloomberg Businessweek," and the author of "AI for Good."

Josh, thank you for coming here and explaining Hugging Face, among other things, to us.

But let me start with something manageable and more political.

Data centers.

It seems like, suddenly, everybody hates them.

Is this a populist movement with staying power?

And could it actually derail the growth and spread of AI?

Uh, yeah.

I mean, look, I think one of the challenges with AI as a journalist, any individual in America, is it's software, right?

And so, it doesn't have a physical thing that you can be angry about.

Data centers are these massive, massive structures going up all around America.

They're being created by companies with billionaires and aspiring trillionaires at the top.

And they're landing themselves without a whole lot of conversation in the middle of all these towns.

And so, it's natural that all of the fears about AI-- about it taking your jobs, about it rendering human beings obsolete, about the values it changes-- all are focused on this stuff.

And politicians have been incredibly late to wake up to the anger around AI.

And they're also staking out some genuinely bizarre positions.

Jeffrey: Like what?

Well, Donald Trump's saying, if you're opposed to data centers, you just want to be poor the rest of your life.

It's like, I don't think you're understanding just how angry-- from the left and the right-- people are about AI.

Jeffrey: Right.

But, wait, listen to Donald Trump just for a second.

Here he's talking about why he would want a data center in his town.

Let's listen to this.

If I were a community, I would want the data center.

It means jobs, it means income, and it means lower taxes.

I mean, he's not necessarily wrong.

If you look at Loudoun County in Virginia, which is, like, the world center of data centers, they are lowering taxes on their citizens.

And I assume they're creating at least some jobs.

Some.

What I would say is, there's two things that are out of touch, right?

One is this belief that Donald Trump says, "No, it's going to mean money."

I don't think people believe that they are going to partake in the wealth that comes from data centers in their community.

I think we are out of touch about that.

And number two, I think there is a broader problem, which is this sense that, "Well, all that matters is money."

And, in fact, in some of these communities, what you're seeing is a backlash to that attitude as well.

Some of it's about quality of life.

Some of it is, "I don't really want to change the pittance that I may get for the amount of noise that this thing is going to make for the blight on my community."

Every community is going to make different choices, but what I'm sensing is that, particularly from Trump, the politics are out of line with where people are.

I've spoken-- for "The Atlantic," I spoke with Steve Bannon at length about AI.

He's in a completely different position.

He actually is aligned with Bernie Sanders that this is a hundred percent populist fodder, because people are so angry.

Here they are, again, not seeing benefit from it.

And so, I think what you're going to see is massive political consequences for the wrong stakes around AI.

Can these AI companies function fully in the way that they want to without these data centers?

No.

And so, this is the real challenge for a nuanced, intelligent society, is that, actually, giving these data centers-- allowing them to power the compute, to train models-- The "compute" is the word for their overall power to process.

Exactly.

The power to process and train new models and then also run the AI software that's currently out there.

You are running into problems.

We're running into problems with the amount of energy we create, which is not scaled with the size of the country-- Jeffrey: Right.

Competitively, you actually do want more and more compute.

You want to be able to run these models.

But what we're not doing is solving the problem around who's paying for it, how are we actually going to get more energy, and then the thing that I think most people are in touch with, which is, "Hey, how do I benefit from this?"

That hasn't been connected.

Right.

Well, I mean, quite the opposite.

You've written a lot about this.

This goes hand in hand with the fear about massive job loss because of being replaced by AI agents.

So, not only are you telling me that I've got to put in this massive plant, this humming factory that's going to soak up all the water in my county, but I'm also going to lose my job, possibly.

That's the way it's being interpreted, at least.

Yeah, so people just don't see what's in it for them, what the benefit is.

On water, at least, I would like to correct the record, which is, most of them recycle the water in the plant.

The energy?

The energy, they drink.

And there is no good answer for how we're going to improve the grid.

And I think people are very, very afraid of rising bills with no answers.

Yeah.

I have to tell you, these data centers, they make Amazon warehouses really popular by comparison.

Is there a reason we can't just stack them?

[Chuckles] Turn them-- One big unpleasant box.

- Yeah.

- Right, right.

So, I mean, the water thing is interesting, because it strikes me as a little bit of sublimated anxiety about the general civilizational challenge.

I mean, not "Terminator" le-- well, maybe "Terminator" level.

No, maybe "Terminator" level.

Maybe-- you know, there's a lot of movies, "2001."

Maybe it's that level of anxiety, but it's anxiety about the existential fear of AI.