JD Vance's answer to the slowdown camp: stop building Frankenstein

Vice President JD Vance's segment on All-In runs about seven minutes of a twenty-eight-minute episode, and it is the most concrete statement the administration has given on why it is pushing the AI buildout through the complaints about it 1.

Chamath Palihapitiya opened the exchange by describing the resistance as a whack-a-mole problem: forces trying to slow the country down, with the President calling in to debunk the doom story on Jensen Huang's episode and Meta and Microsoft making the same argument on their own.

Vance's answer reframes it. When he campaigns and talks to voters, he said, he hears two things in the anti-data-center backlash. One is ordinary NIMBYism. The other is a household whose monthly power bill went from $290 to $580 1. In states where building new generation has been made difficult, rising electricity costs land on people who have already been told the grid is full.

The root cause, in his telling, is a generation of underbuilding. China's electricity generation crossed above the United States' in 2005, he said, American output has been roughly flat since, and China now generates about three times as much electricity as the United States does. Vance draws a line from that gap to a wide range of national problems, and the remedy he names is more generation, with a long-run target he phrased as electricity too cheap to meter. That puts the federal government on the side of the data centres against the local politics that have slowed them, and it means the political risk he is accepting belongs to a ratepayer rather than to a regulator.

The second half of the exchange is about the labs. Vance relayed the President's question in his own words: why is it that the people at the frontier of the AI economy throw up their hands and say they have built Frankenstein, and then propose a one-world governance structure for artificial intelligence as the remedy?

His instruction to those companies was unusually direct. If you are building Frankenstein, stop. If the cat is out of the bag, then build the defensive mechanism against Frankenstein, rather than coming to the government and asking for regulation. He then described a complaint he said he hears from companies: at the same time a cyber-hacking capability has come out of Anthropic's newest models, firms that need the tools to defend against it are being denied access to those tools 1. The remedy he drew from that was to give them the tools.

On Dario Amodei he separated motive from remedy. Vance said he does not know Amodei well, that he has read everything Amodei published over the preceding weeks, and that everyone he speaks to describes Amodei as earnest, with a deeply held belief that is sincere and has nothing to do with regulatory capture. The disagreement he named is over the fix. Where Amodei's essay asks labs and governments to hold the rate of capability improvement steady, Vance's position is that a lab which builds the risky thing should internalise the consequence itself, and should hand over whatever defences it has built.

The same conversation carried one more policy item that touches the technology industry. Vance described a $100,000 fee on H-1B applications as an administrative answer to a programme he said was riddled with fraud, on the reasoning that the visa exists for people who meaningfully add to the tech ecosystem rather than for replacing an accountant paid $60,000 with one paid $45,000 1. Congress, he said, was not going to pass the change, so the administration did what it could without one. He added that the administration is looking at ways to keep companies using H-1B visas from laying off American workers at the same time.

In a week when Mark Zuckerberg argued that each lab should pace itself and Bernie Sanders shared a stage with Steve Bannon to call for AI regulation, the segment puts the executive branch's position on record with the same bluntness: the constraint the administration recognises is a grid that will not build and a visa system it says will not filter.