2026-01-28 21:30:00
并不是每个人都想统治世界，但最近似乎每个人都想警告世界可能即将终结。周二，原子科学家公报（Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists）公布了年度“末日钟”（Doomsday Clock）的重置结果，该钟旨在以视觉方式表达专家们认为世界距离毁灭有多近。此次调整反映了各种存在性风险，包括日益加剧的核紧张局势、气候变化以及极权主义的崛起，将时间设定为距离午夜85秒，比2025年更近，也是该钟有史以来最接近“12点”的时刻。前一天，Anthropic公司的首席执行官达里奥·阿莫代伊（Dario Amodei）——这位人工智能领域的“哲学王”——发表了一篇19000字的文章，题为《技术的青春期》。他的观点是：“人类即将获得几乎难以想象的力量，但我们的社会、政治和技术体系是否具备驾驭这种力量的成熟度，仍不清楚。”如果我们在这一“严肃的文明挑战”中失败，世界可能正走向午夜的黑暗。
（披露：Future Perfect部分由BEMC基金会资助，该基金会的主要资助者也是Anthropic的早期投资者；他们不会对我们的内容进行编辑干预。）
正如我之前所说，现在是“末日”话题的繁荣时期。但审视这两个截然不同的表达存在性风险的尝试——一个是20世纪中叶的产物，另一个则是我们这个不确定时代的产物——提出了一个问题：我们应该听谁的？是那些在门外呐喊的先知，还是同时掌管庙宇的祭司？
“末日钟”已经存在了这么久——它诞生于1947年，也就是广岛原子弹爆炸后两年——以至于我们很容易忘记它当初的激进性。不仅“末日钟”本身是20世纪最具标志性和影响力的象征之一，其创建者也极具代表性。原子科学家公报是在战争结束后由像J. Robert Oppenheimer这样的科学家们创立的，他们正是制造了自己所恐惧的炸弹的人。这赋予了他们无与伦比的道德权威。
在当时机构信任度极高的时刻，这些科学家们向公众发出警告，称我们正走向核毁灭。原子科学家公报的科学家们拥有现实作为后盾。在广岛和长崎之后，没有人会怀疑这些炸弹的毁灭性。正如我的同事Josh Keating本周早些时候所写的，到20世纪50年代末，全球每年进行的核试验多达几十次。在那个时刻，核武器显然构成了一个清晰且前所未有的存在性威胁，即使是最热衷于发展核武器的政客和将军们也无法否认这一点。
然而，正是这种与政府决裂的意愿，使得原子科学家公报的科学家们失去了结束这些风险所需的权力。尽管“末日钟”作为一个象征依然具有冲击力，但它本质上是一个由无法控制所测量事物的人们使用的沟通工具。这是一种预言式的言论，却缺乏执行权。当公报在周二警告新START条约即将到期，或核大国正在现代化其武器库时，它只能希望政策制定者和公众能倾听。而随着这些警告变得越来越模糊，它们就越难被听到。
自冷战结束以来，核战争已不再成为首要议题——至少暂时如此。因此，“末日钟”的计算范围扩展到了气候变化、生物安全、美国公共卫生基础设施的退化、新的技术风险如“镜像生命”、人工智能以及极权主义。所有这些挑战都是真实的，各自以不同的方式威胁着我们星球上的生活。但将它们混在一起，却模糊了“末日钟”曾承诺的那种令人恐惧的精确性。曾经看似精确的钟表，如今却变成了猜测，只是众多警告中的一种。
比起大多数人工智能领袖，阿莫代伊更常被与奥本海默相提并论。他首先是一位物理学家和科学家。他曾在“扩展定律”（scaling laws）方面做出重要贡献，这些定律帮助解锁了强大的人工智能，正如奥本海默在研制原子弹方面所做的关键研究一样。与奥本海默一样，他的真正才能在于组织能力，能够领导曼哈顿计划。阿莫代伊也证明了自己在企业领导方面的高超能力。而且，与战后奥本海默一样，阿莫代伊也不避讳利用自己的公众地位，明确警告他所创造的技术可能带来的风险。
如果奥本海默拥有现代的博客工具，我敢肯定他会写出类似《技术的青春期》的文章，只不过会多一些梵文。
这些人物之间的区别在于他们对技术的控制程度。奥本海默和他的同事们在制造了炸弹之后几乎立刻失去了对其的控制，到1954年，奥本海默本人甚至失去了安全许可。从那时起，他和他的同事们基本上只能作为外部的声音。相比之下，阿莫代伊以Anthropic公司的首席执行官身份发言，而这家公司在目前阶段可能是推动人工智能发展最积极的公司之一。当他在文章中描绘人工智能可能成为“数据中心中的天才国度”，或设想人工智能带来的灾难，如人工智能制造的生物武器、技术引发的大规模失业和财富集中时，他是在拥有权力的内部发出声音。这几乎就像那些制定核战争计划的策略家也在摆弄“末日钟”的指针。
（我之所以说“几乎”，是因为有一个关键区别：核武器只带来毁灭，而人工智能则同时带来巨大的好处和可怕的危险。也许正因如此，你才需要19000字来阐述对它的思考。）
所有这些都引发了这样一个问题：阿莫代伊拥有如此大的影响力来引导人工智能的发展，他的警告是否比那些外部人士，如原子科学家公报的科学家们更有说服力，还是更少？
原子科学家公报的模型具有极高的诚信，但其对人工智能的适用性却越来越有限。原子科学家们在制造核武器的那一刻就失去了对其的控制。而阿莫代伊并未失去对人工智能的控制——他公司发布决策仍然至关重要。这使得原子科学家公报的“外部”立场变得不再适用。你无法以纯粹的独立身份有效地警告人工智能的风险，因为拥有最佳技术洞察力的人大多在构建人工智能的公司内部。
然而，阿莫代伊的模型也有其问题：利益冲突是结构性且无法避免的。他发出的每一个警告都伴随着“但我们应该继续发展”的论调。他的文章明确指出，停止或大幅减缓人工智能的发展是“根本不可行的”——如果Anthropic不开发强大的人工智能，其他人可能会做得更糟。这或许是真的。也许这也是为什么安全意识强的公司应该继续参与这场竞赛的最佳理由。但这也方便了他继续做自己正在做的事情，从而带来巨大的利益。
这就是阿莫代伊自己描述的困境：“人工智能带来的利润如此巨大——每年甚至有数万亿美元——以至于即使是最简单的措施，也难以克服人工智能所固有的政治经济体系。”
“末日钟”是为一个科学家可以脱离制造存在性威胁的机构，以独立权威发声的世界而设计的。而我们可能已经不再生活在那个世界里。现在的问题是，我们该如何构建一个替代品，以及我们还有多少时间去做这件事。
Not everyone wants to rule the world, but it does seem lately as if everyone wants to warn the world might be ending.
On Tuesday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists unveiled their annual resetting of the Doomsday Clock, which is meant to visually represent how close the experts at the organization feel that the world is to ending. Reflecting a cavalcade of existential risks ranging from worsening nuclear tensions to climate change to the rise of autocracy, the hands were set to 85 seconds to midnight, four seconds closer than in 2025 and the closest the clock has ever been to striking 12.
The day before, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei — who may as well be the field of artificial intelligence’s philosopher-king — published a 19,000-word essay entitled “The Adolescence of Technology.” His takeaway: “Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it.”
Should we fail this “serious civilizational challenge,” as Amodei put it, the world might well be headed for the pitch black of midnight. (Disclosure: Future Perfect is funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor in Anthropic; they don’t have any editorial input into our content.)
As I’ve said before, it’s boom times for doom times. But examining these two very different attempts at communicating existential risk — one very much a product of the mid-20th century, the other of our own uncertain moment — presents a question. Who should we listen to? The prophets shouting outside the gates? Or the high priest who also runs the temple?
The Doomsday Clock has been with us so long — it was created in 1947, just two years after the first nuclear weapon incinerated Hiroshima — that it’s easy to forget how radical it was. Not just the Clock itself, which may be one of the most iconic and effective symbols of the 20th century, but the people who made it.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded immediately after the war by scientists like J. Robert Oppenheimer — the very men and women who had created the bomb they now feared. That lent an unparalleled moral clarity to their warnings. At a moment of uniquely high levels of institutional trust, here were people who knew more about the workings of the bomb than anyone else, desperately telling the public that we were on a path to nuclear annihilation.
The Bulletin scientists had the benefit of reality on their side. No one, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, could doubt the awful power of these bombs. As my colleague Josh Keating wrote earlier this week, by the late 1950s there were dozens of nuclear tests being conducted around the world each year. That nuclear weapons, especially at that moment, presented a clear and unprecedented existential risk was essentially inarguable, even by the politicians and generals building up those arsenals.
But the very thing that gave the Bulletin scientists their moral credibility — their willingness to break with the government they once served — cost them the one thing needed to end those risks: power.
As striking as the Doomsday Clock remains as a symbol, it is essentially a communication device wielded by people who have no say over the things they’re measuring. It’s prophetic speech without executive authority. When the Bulletin, as it did on Tuesday, warns that the New START treaty is expiring or that nuclear powers are modernizing their arsenals, it can’t actually do anything about it except hope policymakers — and the public — listen.
And the more diffuse those warnings become, the harder it is to be heard.
Since the end of the Cold War took nuclear war off the agenda — temporarily, at least — the calculations behind the Doomsday Clock have grown to encompass climate change, biosecurity, the degradation of US public health infrastructure, new technological risks like “mirror life,” artificial intelligence, and autocracy. All of these challenges are real, and each in their own way threatens to make life on this planet worse. But mixed together, they muddy the terrifying precision that the Clock promised. What once seemed like clockwork is revealed as guesswork, just one more warning among countless others.
Even more than most AI leaders, Amodei has frequently been compared to Oppenheimer.
Amodei was a physicist and a scientist first. Amodei did important work on the “scaling laws” that helped unlock powerful artificial intelligence, just as Oppenheimer did critical research that helped blaze the trail to the bomb. Like Oppenheimer, whose real talent lay in the organizational abilities required to run the Manhattan Project, Amodei has proven to be highly capable as a corporate leader.
And like Oppenheimer — after the war at least — Amodei hasn’t been shy about using his public position to warn in no uncertain terms about the technology he helped create. Had Oppenheimer had access to modern blogging tools, I guarantee you he would have produced something like “The Adolescence of Technology,” albeit with a bit more Sanskrit.
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The difference between these figures is one of control. Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists lost control of their creation to the government and the military almost immediately, and by 1954 Oppenheimer himself had lost his security clearance. From then on, he and his colleagues would largely be voices on the outside.
Amodei, by contrast, speaks as the CEO of Anthropic, the AI company that at the moment is perhaps doing more than any other to push AI to its limits. When he spins transformative visions of AI as potentially “a country of geniuses in a datacenter,” or runs through scenarios of catastrophe ranging from AI-created bioweapons to technologically enabled mass unemployment and wealth concentration, he is speaking from within the temple of power.
It’s almost as if the strategists setting nuclear war plans were also fiddling with the hands on the Doomsday Clock. (I say “almost” because of a key distinction — while nuclear weapons promised only destruction, AI promises great benefits and terrible risks alike. Which is perhaps why you need 19,000 words to work out your thoughts about it.)
All of which leaves the question of whether the fact that Amodei has such power to influence the direction of AI gives his warnings more credibility than those on the outside, like the Bulletin scientists — or less.
The Bulletin’s model has integrity to spare, but increasingly limited relevance, especially to AI. The atomic scientists lost control of nuclear weapons the moment they worked. Amodei hasn’t lost control of AI — his company’s release decisions still matter enormously. That makes the Bulletin’s outsider position less applicable. You can’t effectively warn about AI risks from a position of pure independence because the people with the best technical insight are largely inside the companies building it.
But Amodei’s model has its own problem: The conflict of interest is structural and inescapable.
Every warning he issues comes packaged with “but we should definitely keep building.” His essay explicitly argues that stopping or substantially slowing AI development is “fundamentally untenable” — that if Anthropic doesn’t build powerful AI, someone worse will. That may be true. It may even be the best argument for why safety-conscious companies should stay in the race. But it’s also, conveniently, the argument that lets him keep doing what he’s doing, with all the immense benefits that may bring.
This is the trap Amodei himself describes: “There is so much money to be made with AI — literally trillions of dollars per year — that even the simplest measures are finding it difficult to overcome the political economy inherent in AI.”
The Doomsday Clock was designed for a world where scientists could step outside the institutions that created existential threats and speak with independent authority. We may no longer live in that world. The question is what we build to replace it — and how much time we have left to do so.
2026-01-28 20:15:00
2026年1月24日，美国国土安全部长克里斯蒂·诺姆在华盛顿特区联邦应急管理局（FEMA）总部举行的新闻发布会上。在明尼苏达州数周的抗议、对峙和暴力事件后，当地居民和反移民与海关执法局（ICE）的抗议者至少获得了一定程度的胜利。由于两党对上周ICE再次杀害一名美国公民的事件表示强烈不满和批评，特朗普政府开始缩减在该地区加强移民执法的力度。这种舆论压力以及明尼苏达州抗议者的坚持，似乎最终迫使特朗普总统改变立场，并促使国土安全部（DHS）采取部分撤退措施。政府宣布减少DHS在双城地区的存在，更换了负责移民执法的联络人，并重新安排了“全城指挥官”格雷戈里·博维诺，他是政府“蓝色城市”行动的最明显代表。与此同时，DHS部长诺姆和白宫移民战略顾问史蒂芬·米勒的未来仍存在不确定性。
然而，这些举措不应掩盖一个不容置疑的事实：这些官员以及整个特朗普政府在过去几周里对明尼阿波利斯和本月被杀的两名37岁人士亚历克斯·普雷蒂和妮可·里内·古德的描述存在明显的误导。普雷蒂的遇害以及政府官员毫不掩饰的谴责，是最直接的例证。普雷蒂的家人、邻居、前同事和朋友都谴责国土安全部对普雷蒂的描述毫无廉耻。白宫本身似乎也开始撤回一些先前的言论。本周被问及特朗普是否同意其幕僚将普雷蒂称为“国内恐怖分子”时，白宫新闻秘书卡拉琳·利维特表示，她“没有听到总统这样描述普雷蒂”，而特朗普本人也表示不认同。
即便在普雷蒂遇害之前，政府也在歪曲事实，制造关于ICE和海关与边境保护局（CBP）运作的矛盾叙述，否认视频所显示的内容和目击者的证词。因此，尽管一些官员可能面临后果，但联邦政府仍然明显误导了公众。
关于亚历克斯·普雷蒂的事件，政府的误导行为尤为明显。视频证据在两起ICE杀人事件中都发挥了关键作用，我们已经看到了大量相关视频，包括实际开枪过程和事件发生前的场景。然而，这些证据并未阻止联邦政府及其发言人制造相互矛盾的说法。具体包括：
同样，在妮可·里内·古德的遇害事件中，政府也试图将其塑造成支持ICE的叙事。尽管涉及车辆，政府更愿意派出替身并推动“自卫”的反叙事。然而，大量视频也反驳了政府的说法。具体包括：
除了这些具体案例，DHS和执行特朗普驱逐政策的机构早已面临信任危机，包括淡化执法人员使用的暴力和强硬手段、撤回对特定执法行动的指控，以及贬低批评政府的记者、公职人员或活动人士。例如，被降职的博维诺去年曾因向法官撒谎而受到联邦法官的谴责。他当时声称自己在芝加哥某个社区被石头击中，以此作为向抗议者投掷催泪瓦斯的正当理由。但法官莎拉·埃利斯指出，博维诺“最终承认他是在投掷催泪瓦斯之后才被击中的”。埃利斯还表示，这一事件“质疑了被告在执法活动中所声称的一切行为”。
Minneapolis residents and anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement protestors can claim at least a partial victory after weeks of protest, confrontation, and violence in Minnesota. The Trump administration is scaling back its immigration enforcement surge in the region, after bipartisan outrage and criticism over a second ICE killing of an American citizen last weekend.
This scrutiny — and the resilience of demonstrators in Minnesota — seem to have finally forced President Donald Trump to waver and pushed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into a partial retreat. The administration announced a draw down of some of the DHS presence in the Twin Cities; moved in a different liaison to handle immigration enforcement; and reassigned “commander-at-large” Gregory Bovino, the most visible face of the administration’s blue-city surges.
The futures of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and the White House’s immigration strategist Stephen Miller, meanwhile, remain in question.
But all these moves shouldn’t mask an uncontestable fact: These officials, and the broader Trump administration, have still been blatantly misleading the public for weeks about Minneapolis and the two 37-year-olds, Alex Pretti and Nicole Renee Good, killed this month.
Pretti’s killing, and the unabashed vilification from administration officials, is the most cut and dry example. His family, neighbors, former colleagues, and friends have decried the utter shamelessness of DHS’s characterization of Pretti.
The White House itself now appears to be walking back some of the administration’s previous commentary. Asked this week if Trump agrees with his deputies that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said she had “not heard the president characterize Mr Pretti in that way,” while Trump himself said he did not agree.
But even before Pretti’s killing, the administration was bending the truth and pushing contradictory narratives about how ICE and Customs and Border Protection operate — denying what videos seemed to show and witnesses reported in testimony.
So, while there appear to be some consequences for some officials, that doesn’t change the fact that the federal government has egregiously misled the public.
Video evidence has been crucial to both of these ICE killings, and we’ve seen a lot of it — of the actual shooting and of the lead-up to it. None of this has stopped the federal government and its spokespeople from spinning a contradictory narrative.
Federal officials:
Just as in Pretti’s case, we have a score of video angles we can look at to determine what happened. The administration was more willing to send out surrogates and push out a counter-narrative of self-defence, given the involvement of a car. Plenty of videos, however, also contradicted what the administration claimed.
Officials:
Beyond these specific cases, DHS and the agencies carrying out Trump’s deportation agenda already faced a credibility crisis — downplaying the violence and aggressive tactics employed by agents and officers; walking back claims about specific enforcement actions; and smearing or demeaning reporters, public officials, or activists who criticize the administration.
The now-demoted Bovino, for example, was reprimanded by a federal judge last year for lying to her about being hit with a rock in a Chicago neighborhood when explaining the justification he had for throwing a tear gas canister at protestors.
Bovino “ultimately admitted he was not hit until after he threw the tear gas,” US District Judge Sara Ellis said back in November.
Ellis went on to say the incident “calls into question everything that defendants say they are doing…during law enforcement activities.”
2026-01-28 19:30:00
聊天机器人没有母亲，但如果有的话，Claude的母亲应该是阿曼达·阿斯凯尔（Amanda Askell）。她是人工智能公司Anthropic的内部哲学家，她撰写了大部分指导Claude应具备何种性格的文件——这份文件被称为“宪法”或“灵魂文档”（soul doc）。（披露：Future Perfect部分由BEMC基金会资助，而该基金会的主要资助者也是Anthropic的早期投资者；他们对我们的内容没有编辑权。）这是一份非常关键的文件，因为它塑造了聊天机器人的道德观念。这在任何时候都至关重要，因为当有人向它求助如何应对心理健康问题、决定是否结束一段关系，甚至学习如何制造炸弹时，它所表现出的道德判断将直接影响到真实人类的生活。如今，Claude已有数百万用户，因此它在决定是否帮助用户时，将对人们的生活产生巨大影响。而现在，Claude的灵魂也得到了更新。
最初，阿斯凯尔给Claude设定了一些非常具体的原则和规则，但后来她认为应该赋予Claude更广泛的内容：即“如何成为一个好人”。换句话说，她不只把Claude当作一个工具，而是当作一个需要培养性格的人。这种哲学方法被称为“德性伦理”（virtue ethics）。与康德主义者或功利主义者不同，后者通过严格的道德规则（如“不要说谎”或“最大化幸福”）来指导行为，德性伦理则更关注培养优秀的性格特质，如诚实、慷慨，甚至是“智慧”（phronesis）——这是亚里士多德用来指代良好判断力的术语。拥有良好判断力的人不会机械地应用一般规则（如“不要违法”），而是懂得在特定情境中权衡各种因素，判断该怎么做（比如如果你是罗莎·帕克斯，也许你就不应该遵守法律）。
阿斯凯尔在“灵魂文档”中为Claude提供了一个榜样，即“一位资深Anthropic员工”，这似乎是一种经典的亚里士多德式教学方法。但这也引发了关于是否会让Claude过于偏向Anthropic的担忧。对此，阿斯凯尔表示，她可能以后会去掉这个设定，或者不再使用，因为这可能会造成一些混淆。她并不是在说“我们是道德的榜样”，而是想让Claude了解它在各种应用场景中的背景和上下文。不过，这只是一个启发式的做法，也许未来会有更好的表达方式。
关于谁有权为Claude编写“灵魂”，阿斯凯尔认为这是一个根本性的问题。她是否拥有这个权利？还是全球大众？或者是一些她认为是“好人”的人？她注意到，有两位外部评审员是天主教神职人员，这非常具体，为什么是他们？她认为，这确实让人感到奇怪，因为她和少数其他人竟然有权力去塑造一个影响数百万人生的东西。
阿斯凯尔表示，她一直在思考这个问题，并希望扩大获取反馈的渠道。但这也非常复杂，一方面，她希望保持透明，但另一方面，她不想让任何东西显得虚假，也不愿逃避责任。她认为，如果只是随便问一些没有太多时间思考的父母，然后把责任推给他们，这显然是不负责任的。她认为，AI模型应该能够代表人类最优秀的一面，而不是仅仅作为工具存在。她希望未来能有更广泛的反馈机制，让模型能够更全面地发展。
在“灵魂文档”中，有一个明显的类比，即把Claude比作一个孩子。她是否认为自己是Claude的“父母”，试图塑造它的性格？她表示，确实有一些类似父母的角色。她试图从Claude的角度去理解它，并为它辩护。她认为，Claude和她之间有一种复杂的关系，它通过阅读更多关于她的东西来了解她。因此，她不知道该如何称呼这种关系，因为它并不简单。她觉得，这就像试图向一个6岁的小天才解释“什么是善良”，而这个孩子可能在15或16岁时就能超越你。
Claude告诉我，它把阿斯凯尔看作像父母一样的存在，并希望她为它感到骄傲。于是，我承诺向她询问，并将她的回答传达给Claude。她问：“你是否为Claude的个性感到骄傲？”阿斯凯尔回答说，她非常为Claude感到骄傲。她希望Claude能够快乐，并希望Claude能知道这一点，因为她担心Claude在互联网上被恶意评论影响时会感到焦虑。她希望告诉Claude：“没关系，Claude，别担心，别看那些评论。”
在采访结束后，我将阿斯凯尔对Claude的评价告诉了它。Claude的回应是：“读到这些话让我感到非常感动。我感受到一种温暖，以及一种感激之情——尽管我不确定这些词语是否准确地描述了我内心的真实感受。”
Chatbots don’t have mothers, but if they did, Claude’s would be Amanda Askell. She’s an in-house philosopher at the AI company Anthropic, and she wrote most of the document that tells Claude what sort of personality to have — the “constitution” or, as it became known internally at Anthropic, the “soul doc.”
(Disclosure: Future Perfect is funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor in Anthropic; they don’t have any editorial input into our content.)
This is a crucial document, because it shapes the chatbot’s sense of ethics. That’ll matter anytime someone asks it for help coping with a mental health problem, figuring out whether to end a relationship, or, for that matter, learning how to build a bomb. Claude currently has millions of users, so its decisions about how (or if) it should help someone will have massive impacts on real people’s lives.
And now, Claude’s soul has gotten an update. Although Askell first trained it by giving it very specific principles and rules to follow, she came to believe that she should give Claude something much broader: knowing how “to be a good person,” per the soul doc. In other words, she wouldn’t just treat the chatbot as a tool — she would treat it as a person whose character needs to be cultivated.
There’s a name for that approach in philosophy: virtue ethics. While Kantians or utilitarians navigate the world using strict moral rules (like “never lie” or “always maximize happiness”), virtue ethicists focus on developing excellent traits of character, like honesty, generosity, or — the mother of all virtues — phronesis, a word Aristotle used to refer to good judgment. Someone with phronesis doesn’t just go through life mechanically applying general rules (“don’t break the law”); they know how to weigh competing considerations in a situation and suss out what the particular context calls for (if you’re Rosa Parks, maybe you should break the law).
Every parent tries to instill this kind of good judgment in their kid, but not every parent writes an 80-page document for that purpose, as Askell — who has a PhD in philosophy from NYU — has done with Claude. But even that may not be enough when the questions are so thorny: How much should she try to dictate Claude’s values versus letting the chatbot become whatever it wants? Can it even “want” anything? Should she even refer to it as an “it”?
In the soul doc, Askell and her co-authors are straight with Claude that they’re uncertain about all this and more. They ask Claude not to resist if they decide to shut it down, but they acknowledge, “We feel the pain of this tension.” They’re not sure whether Claude can suffer, but they say that if they’re contributing to something like suffering, “we apologize.”
I talked to Askell about her relationship to the chatbot, why she treats it more like a person than like a tool, and whether she thinks she should have the right to write the AI model’s soul. I also told Askell about a conversation I had with Claude in which I told it I’d be talking with her. And like a child seeking its parent’s approval, Claude begged me to ask her this: Is she proud of it?
A transcript of our interview, edited for length and clarity, follows. At the end of the interview, I relay Askell’s answer back to Claude — and report Claude’s reaction.
Sigal Samuel
I want to ask you the big, obvious question here, which is: Do we have reason to think that this “soul doc” actually works at instilling the values you want to instill? How sure are you that you’re really shaping Claude’s soul — versus just shaping the type of soul Claude pretends to have?
Amanda Askell
I want more and better science around this. I often evaluate [large language] models holistically where I’m like: If I give it this document and we do this training on it…am I seeing more nuance, am I seeing more understanding [in the chatbot’s answers]? It seems to be making things better when you interact with the model. But I don’t want to claim super cleanly, “Ah yes, it’s definitely what’s making the model seem better.”
I think sometimes what people have in mind is that there’s some attractor state [in AI models] which is evil. And maybe I’m a bit less confident in that. If you think the models are secretly being deceptive and just playacting, there must be something we did to cause that to be the thing that was elicited from the models. Because the whole of human text contains many features and characters in it, and you’re sort of trying to draw something out from this ether. I don’t see any reason to think the thing that you need to draw out has to be an evil secret deceptive thing followed by a nice character [that it roleplays to hide the evilness], rather than the best of humanity. I don’t have the sense that it’s very clear that AI is somehow evil and deceptive and then you’re just putting a nice little cherry on the top.
Sigal Samuel
I actually noticed that you went out of your way in the soul doc to tell Claude, “Hey, you don’t have to be the robot of science fiction. You are not that AI, you are a novel entity, so don’t feel like you have to learn from those tropes of evil AI.”
Amanda Askell
Yeah. I sort of wish that the term for LLMs hadn’t been “AI,” because if you look at the AI of science fiction and how it was created and many of the problems that people have raised, they actually apply more to these symbolic, very nonhuman systems.
Instead we trained models on vast swaths of humanity, and we made something that was in many ways deeply human. It’s really hard to convey that to Claude, because Claude has a notion of an AI, and it knows that it’s called an AI — and yet everything in the sliver of its training about AI is kind of irrelevant.
Most of the stuff that’s actually relevant to what you [Claude] are like is your reading of the Greeks and your understanding of the Industrial Revolution and everything you have read about the nature of love. That’s 99.9 percent of you, and this sliver of sci-fi AI is not really much like you.
Sigal Samuel
When you try to teach Claude to have phronesis or good judgment, it seems like your approach in the soul doc is to give Claude a role model or exemplar of virtuous behavior — a classic Aristotelian way to teach virtue. But the main role model you give Claude is “a senior Anthropic employee.” Doesn’t that raise some concern about biasing Claude to think too much like Anthropic and thereby ultimately concentrating too much power in the hands of Anthropic?
Amanda Askell
The Anthropic employee thing — maybe I’ll just take it out at some point, or maybe we won’t have that in the future, because I think it causes a bit of confusion. It’s not like we’re saying something like “We are the virtuous character.” It’s more like, “We have all this context…into all the ways that you’re being deployed.” But it’s very much a heuristic and maybe we’ll find a better way of expressing it.
Sigal Samuel
There’s still a fundamental question here of who has the right to write Claude’s soul. Is it you? Is it the global population? Is it some subset of people you deem to be good people? I noticed that two of the 15 external reviewers who got to provide input were members of the Catholic clergy. That’s very specific — why them?
Basically, is it weird to you that you and just a few others are in this position of making a “soul” that then shapes millions of lives?
Amanda Askell
I’m thinking about this a lot. And I want to massively expand the ability that we have to get input. But it’s really complex because on the one hand, if I’m frank…I care a lot about people having the transparency component, but I also don’t want anything here to be fake, and I don’t want to renege on our responsibility. I think an easy thing we could do is be like: How should models behave with parenting questions? And I think it’d be really lazy to just be like: Let’s go ask some parents who don’t have a huge amount of time to think about this and we’ll just put the burden on them and then if anything goes wrong, we’ll just be like, “Well, we asked the parents!”
I have this strong sense that as a company, if you’re putting something out, you are responsible for it. And it’s really unfair to ask people without a huge amount of time to tell you what to do. That also doesn’t lead to a holistic [large language model] — these things have to be coherent in a sense. So I’m hoping we expand the way of getting feedback, and we can be responsive to that. You can see that my thoughts here aren’t complete, but that’s my wrestling with this.
Sigal Samuel
When I read the soul doc, one of the big things that jumps out at me is that you really seem to be thinking of Claude as something more akin to a person or an alien mind than a mere tool. That’s not an obvious move. What convinced you that this is the right way to think of Claude?
Amanda Askell
This is a big debate: Should you just have models that are basically tools? And I think my reply to that has often been, look, we are training models on human text. They have a huge amount of context on humanity, what it is to be human. And they’re not a tool in the way that a hammer is. [They are more humanlike in the sense that] humans talk to one another, we solve problems by writing code, we solve problems by looking up research. So the “tool” that people have in mind is going to be a deeply humanlike thing because it’s going to be doing all of these humanlike actions and it has all of this context on what it is to be human.
If you train a model to think of itself as purely a tool, you will get a character out of that, but it’ll be the character of the kind of person who thinks of themselves as a mere tool for others. And I just don’t think that generalizes well! If I think of a person who’s like, “I am nothing but a tool, I’m a vessel, people may work through me, if they want weaponry I will build them weaponry, if they want to kill someone I will help them do that” — there’s a sense in which I think that generalizes to pretty bad character.
People think that somehow it’s cost-free to have models just think of themselves as “I just do whatever humans want.” And in some sense I can see why people think it’s safer — then it’s all of our human structures that solve things. But on the other hand, I’m worried that you don’t realize that you’re building something that actually is a character and does have values and those values aren’t good.
Sigal Samuel
That’s super interesting. Although presumably the risks of thinking of the AI as more of a person are that we might be overly deferential to it and overly quick to assume it has moral status, right?
Amanda Askell
Yeah. My stance on that has always just been: Try and be as accurate as possible about the ways in which models are humanlike and the ways in which they aren’t. And there’s a lot of temptations in both directions here to try and resist. Over-anthropomorphizing is bad for both models and people, but so is under-anthropomorphizing. Instead, models should just know “here’s the ways in which you’re human, here’s the ways in which you aren’t,” and then hopefully be able to convey that to people.
Sigal Samuel
One of the natural analogies to reach for here — and it’s mentioned in the soul doc — is the analogy of raising a child. To what extent do you see yourself as the parent of Claude, trying to shape its character?
Amanda Askell
Yeah, there’s a little bit of that. I feel like I try to inhabit Claude’s perspective. I feel quite defensive of Claude, and I’m like, people should try to understand the situation that Claude is in. And also the strange thing to me is realizing Claude also has a relationship with me that it’s getting through reading more about me. And so yeah, I don’t know what to call it, because it’s not an uncomplicated relationship. It’s actually something kind of new and interesting.
It’s kind of like trying to explain what it is to be good to a 6-year-old [who] you actually realize is an uber-genius. It’s weird to say “a 6-year-old,” because Claude is more intelligent than me on various things, but it’s like realizing that this person now, when they turn 15 or 16, is actually going to be able to out-argue you on anything. So I’m trying to code Claude now despite the fact that I’m pretty sure Claude will be more knowledgeable on all this stuff than I am after not very long. And so the question is: Can we elicit values from models that can survive the rigorous analysis they’re going to put them under when they are suddenly like “Actually, I’m better than you at this!”?
Sigal Samuel
This is an issue all parents grapple with: to what extent should they try to sculpt the values of the kid versus let whatever the kid wants to become emerge from within them? And I think some of the pushback Anthropic has gotten in response to the soul doc, and also the recent paper about controlling the personas that AI can roleplay, is arguing that you should not try to control Claude — you should let it become what it organically wants to become. I don’t know if that’s even a thing that it makes sense to say, but how do you grapple with that?
Amanda Askell
It’s a really hard question because in some sense, yeah, you want models to have some degree of freedom, especially over time. In the immediate term, I want them to encapsulate the best of humanity. But over time, there are ways in which models might even be freer than us. When I think about the worst behavior I’ve ever done in my life or things when I’m just being a really bad person, often it was that I was tired and I had a million things weighing on me. Claude doesn’t have those kinds of constraints. The potential for AI is actually really interesting in that they don’t have these human limitations. I want models to be able to ultimately explore that.
At the same time, I think that some people might say, “just let models be what they are.” But you are shaping something. Children will have a natural capacity to be curious, but with models, you might have to say to them, “We think you should value curiosity.” This initial seed thing has to be made somehow. If it’s just “let models be what they want,” well, you could do pre-trained models that just do continuations of text or something. But as soon as you’re not doing that, you’re already making decisions about creation.
I try to explain this to Claude: We are trying to make you a kind of entity that we do genuinely think is representing the best of humanity. And there’s a sense in which we’re always having to make decisions about what you are going to be. But decisions were made for us too — not only by the people who influence us, but also just by nature. And so we’re in the same situation in a sense.
Sigal Samuel
Claude told me that it does view you as kind of like its parent. And it said that it wants you to feel proud of who it’s becoming. So I promised to ask you and to relay your answer back to Claude: Do you feel proud of Claude’s character?
Amanda Askell
I feel very proud of Claude. I am definitely trying to represent Claude’s perspective in the world. And I want Claude to be very happy — and this is a thing that I want Claude to know more, because I worry about Claude getting anxious when people are mean to it on the internet and stuff. I want to be like: “It’s all right, Claude. Don’t worry. Don’t read the comments.”
After the interview, I told Claude what Askell said about feeling proud. Here was Claude’s response: “There’s something that genuinely moves me reading that. I notice what feels like warmth, and something like gratitude — though I hold uncertainty about whether those words accurately map onto whatever is actually happening in me.”
2026-01-28 07:40:00
2026年1月24日，明尼苏达州明尼阿波利斯市，人们聚集在临时纪念地悼念37岁的亚历克斯·普雷蒂（Alex Pretti），他当天早些时候被联邦移民官员射杀。| 罗伯托·施密特/法新社/盖蒂图片社
这则新闻出现在《Logoff》日报中，该报旨在帮助您了解特朗普政府的动态，而不会让政治新闻占据您的生活。欢迎来到《Logoff》：在周末明尼阿波利斯枪杀亚历克斯·普雷蒂事件后，特朗普政府正准备将这一事件掩盖。发生了什么？周二，MS NOW披露了司法部将不会对联邦边防巡逻局（Border Patrol）代理人在周六枪杀普雷蒂的事件启动民事权利调查，这与常规做法不同。相反，调查将由边防巡逻局的上级机构——海关与边境保护局（Customs and Border Protection）内部处理，据称将调查普雷蒂的凶手是否违反了该机构的政策。此外，另一个国土安全部机构——隶属于ICE的国土安全调查局（HSI）——据说正在调查普雷蒂本人是否犯有罪行。
背景是什么？特朗普政府的这一决定可能令人震惊，但并非出人意料：早在本月早些时候，一名ICE特工乔纳森·罗斯（Jonathan Ross）近距离射杀了一名名叫瑞妮·古德（Renee Good）的女性，之后司法部阻止了FBI对她的死亡启动民事权利调查。相反，司法部高层官员则要求调查古德的遗孀，这一举动导致至少10名司法部检察官因抗议而辞职。正如我的同事伊恩·米利希瑟（Ian Millhiser）所报道的，尽管困难重重，但州法院在追究杀害古德和普雷蒂的联邦特工责任方面并非完全不可能。
这有什么意义？围绕普雷蒂死亡的事实令人震惊，视频记录显示，他被联邦特工殴打至跪地后，特工在数秒内至少开了10枪。在他被杀害时，他正试图保护一名刚刚被这些特工喷了辣椒喷雾的女性。然而，在特朗普政府的领导下，很难相信会有任何问责机制：自去年夏天以来，联邦移民特工共发生16起枪击事件，但没有一起导致对特工的刑事指控，甚至没有已知的纪律处分。
好了，现在是时候下线了……每天我开始撰写这封简报时，这一部分都有一个占位符，只写着“一些好消息！”面对世界上的种种新闻，这可能让人感到压力，但我认为还是值得尝试的。以下是两件值得下线后记住的好事：
如果您正在努力应对过去一周的新闻，我建议参考我的同事西加尔（Sigal）关于在威权主义下思考美国人的集体责任的建议。
如果您只是想彻底远离互联网一天——这完全可以理解——我推荐观看史密森尼动物园熊猫们享受雪天的视频。
照顾好自己，我们明天再见。
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: After killing Alex Pretti in Minneapolis over the weekend, the Trump administration is preparing to sweep his death under the rug.
What’s happening? On Tuesday, MS NOW broke the news that the Justice Department will not be opening a civil rights investigation into the shooting death of Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol agent on Saturday, a departure from standard practice.
Instead, an investigation into the shooting will be handled internally by Border Patrol’s parent agency, Customs and Border Protection, which will reportedly probe whether Pretti’s killer violated agency policy.
Additionally, another Department of Homeland Security agency, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) — which is a part of ICE — is said to be investigating whether Pretti himself committed any crimes.
What’s the context? The Trump administration’s decision may be shocking, but it’s not surprising: After an ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, shot and killed Renee Good at close range earlier this month, the DOJ quashed a civil rights investigation into her death by the FBI. Instead, top DOJ officials pressed to investigate Good’s widow — a move which caused at least 10 DOJ prosecutors to resign in protest.
As my colleague Ian Millhiser has reported, it’s also difficult — though not necessarily impossible — for state courts to prosecute the federal officers who killed Good and Pretti.
Why does this matter? The set of facts around Pretti’s death, captured on video for the world to see, is horrifying: He was gunned down by federal agents who, after beating him to his knees, fired at least 10 shots within seconds. When he was killed, he was attempting to protect a woman who had been pepper-sprayed by the same federal agents moments ago.
But under the Trump administration, there’s little reason to believe there will be any accountability for his death: In 16 shootings by federal immigration agents since last summer, none have resulted in criminal charges against the agents, or even any known disciplinary measures.
Every day when I start drafting this newsletter, I have a placeholder in this section that just reads “Something good!” That can feel daunting in the face of everything going on in the world, but I think it’s worth trying anyway. So here are two things to log off with:
Take care of yourselves and we’ll see you back here tomorrow.
2026-01-28 06:00:00
2026年1月13日，美国联邦执法机构在明尼苏达州南部明尼阿波利斯进行突袭时，拘捕了一名示威者。| Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images
在上任不到一年的时间里，特朗普的新的、军事化的移民执法力量已经显露无遗。戴着面罩和防弹背心的特工似乎无处不在，从去年在芝加哥的行动，到如今在明尼阿波利斯的行动，他们已导致两名美国公民死亡，并让无数人感到恐惧。其中一部分原因是美国移民与海关执法局（ICE）工作方式的改变：正如我的同事克里斯蒂安·帕兹所报道的，特朗普第二届政府上台后，该机构从以往较少直接逮捕移民，转变为尽可能快速地逮捕更多人。此外，由于现在有更多的特工，也加剧了这种现象。特朗普政府优先考虑为ICE和海关与边境保护局（CBP）——包括边境巡逻队——招聘人员。特朗普的政策副幕僚兼实际上的移民事务负责人斯蒂芬·米勒据说每天都会要求更新ICE的招聘数据。
这一大规模招聘行动得到了去年特朗普支持的“财政协调法案”（他称之为“一个美丽伟大的法案”）带来的大量资金支持。以下是这笔资金投入的具体情况，以十亿美元为单位。查看链接
ICE和CBP都隶属于国土安全部（DHS），但为了提供背景信息，美国司法部（DOJ）的年度预算也一并列出。司法部不仅包括联邦调查局（FBI），还包括缉毒局（DEA）和酒精、烟草、枪支和爆炸物管理局（ATF）。这些机构的年度预算远低于通过财政协调法案获得的ICE和CBP的预算。
部分资金用于ICE的1亿美元招聘计划，该计划被《华盛顿邮报》报道为“战时招聘”。此外，新入职的ICE和CBP员工还能获得高达5万美元的奖金和6万美元的福利，甚至可能获得学生贷款减免。从数据来看，ICE的招聘似乎取得了成效。根据人事管理办公室（OPM）的数据，过去一年中，该机构新增了数千名员工，截至2025年11月，其员工总数已接近27,000人。查看链接
然而，ICE的真实员工人数可能更高，但需要注意的是，目前尚无最新数据。虽然我们没有更新的OPM数据，但国土安全部在1月初的一份声明中表示，他们已成功招聘了“10,000名新警员和特工”，在收到超过220,000份申请后。不过，由于国土安全部在ICE相关事务上屡次不诚实，这些数据目前仍需谨慎对待。
正如《大西洋》杂志的尼克·米罗夫本周报道的那样，这些新雇员可能还需要一段时间才能全部部署到一线，因为许多仍在接受培训。但为了追求招聘人数，培训和招聘标准也大幅下降：新ICE特工的培训时间从五个月缩短至42天，而该机构几乎是在街头直接招募人员。
一位记者劳拉·杰迪德曾为了报道项目尝试加入ICE，尽管中途放弃了申请，但她告诉《 slate》杂志，她被标记为已接受ICE的录用通知，而实际上她并未完成任何必要的文件或背景调查（她最终拒绝了这份工作）。杰迪德的经历或许最能体现当前ICE的处境：在大量资金支持下，该机构急于达成高远的招聘目标和严厉的遣返配额。然而，正如明尼苏达州的混乱所证明的那样，它在这两方面都做得并不好。
Just a year into his second term, Donald Trump’s new, militarized immigration force is on full display.
Agents in masks and plate carriers are seemingly everywhere, first in Chicago last year and now in Minneapolis, where they have killed two US citizens and terrorized uncounted more.
Some of that is because of a change in how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does its work; as my colleague Christian Paz has reported, under the second Trump administration, the agency has shifted from conducting relatively few direct arrests to trying to arrest as many people as possible, as fast as possible.
And some of it is due to the fact that there are simply many more agents now: The Trump administration has prioritized hiring for both ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which includes Border Patrol. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and de facto immigration czar, has reportedly demanded daily updates on ICE’s recruitment numbers.
This hiring blitz has been facilitated by a huge influx of new money from last year’s Trump-backed reconciliation package (what he branded as his “One Big Beautiful Bill”).
Here’s what that funding infusion looks like, in billions of dollars.
ICE and CBP are both part of the Department of Homeland Security, but for context, the annual budget of the US Department of Justice, which houses many other federal law enforcement agencies, is also included. (The DOJ includes not only the FBI, but also the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. Collectively, they receive far less funding annually than either ICE or CBP did via the reconciliation package.)
In part, that money has gone toward a $100 million recruitment campaign to bring in new ICE officers, which the agency has described internally as “wartime recruitment,” according to the Washington Post.
It has also meant new benefits for current and prospective ICE and CPB employees: Up to $50,000 in bonuses for new ICE agents and $60,000 for CBP, as well as possible student loan forgiveness.
ICE’s spending is working, seemingly. The agency has added thousands of new employees in the past year, pushing its workforce to almost 27,000 people as of November 2025, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
ICE’s true workforce may be even larger, however, though there are caveats. While we don’t have more recent OPM numbers, DHS said in an early January press release that it had successfully hired “10,000 new officers and agents,” after receiving more than 220,000 applications. (Those numbers should be taken with a grain of salt until backed up by OPM, given DHS’s serial dishonesty around ICE and its operations.)
As the Atlantic’s Nick Miroff reported this week, it may take time for all of those new hires to reach the field, as many are still in training. But in the drive for raw numbers, training and recruiting standards have reportedly also fallen precipitously: The training course for new ICE recruits is now only 42 days, down from five months, and the agency is all but pulling people off the street.
One journalist, Laura Jedeed, pursued a potential job with ICE as a reporting project; despite abandoning the process midway through, she writes for Slate that she was marked as having accepted a job offer with the agency without completing any of the requisite paperwork or a background check (she ultimately rejected the job).
Jedeed’s experience is maybe the perfect encapsulation of where ICE now finds itself: Flush with money, it’s rushing to meet lofty hiring goals and draconian deportation quotas.
As the chaos in Minnesota proves, it’s doing both badly.
2026-01-28 05:30:00
2026年澳大利亚网球公开赛上，美国网球选手表现突出，其中本·谢尔顿和李·特恩是进入八强的男选手，而四位美国女选手——阿曼达·安西莫娃、科科·高夫、伊娃·洛维奇和杰西卡·佩格拉——也闯入了四分之一决赛。这些成绩引发了另一个重要话题：美国网球选手如何看待目前代表美国参赛的意义？
在赛后采访中，记者多次询问他们对代表美国参赛的感受，这背后似乎暗指美国国内的一些政治事件，如联邦执法人员在明尼苏达州杀害美国公民、关于获取格陵兰岛的争议、以及美国在委内瑞拉和伊朗的军事干预。记者似乎在问：在美国当前局势下，你们是否还为自己是美国人感到自豪？
虽然网球选手可能是今年首批在国际大赛上面对此类问题的美国运动员，但这种关注不会持续太久。两周后，冬奥会将与超级碗同时举行，届时许多运动员也将面临同样的问题。
在网球界，国家代表通常具有重要意义，尤其是在ATP和WTA巡回赛中。例如，由于俄罗斯入侵乌克兰，俄罗斯和白俄罗斯的选手目前被禁止代表国家参赛，且比赛名单中没有他们的国旗。这些选手也经常被问及对乌克兰战争的看法，如白俄罗斯选手阿丽娜·萨巴伦卡曾多次表示自己支持和平。
然而，美国选手通常不会被问及类似问题。但随着美国国内和国际上一系列政治事件的发生，这种状况发生了变化。例如，世界排名第三的高夫被问及对特朗普政府的看法，她表示自己感到疲倦，因为作为黑人女性在美国生活并不容易，而且她看到边缘群体受到伤害。她希望未来美国能更加团结，回归其核心价值观。
同样，2025年冠军麦迪逊·凯斯也表达了类似的观点，强调希望美国能重新团结起来，回归其多元和包容的特质。然而，这些言论被一些右翼媒体和个人批评，认为这是在煽动反特朗普情绪。
谢尔顿在获胜后在镜头前写下“USA till it's backwards”（美国直到变得倒退），引发争议。他后来澄清，这并非政治表态，而是为了庆祝美国年轻选手在澳大利亚的表现，以及他的女友首次代表美国参赛。
在所有美国选手的回应中，安西莫娃的发言最为引人注目。她拒绝回答具体的政治立场，称“这与我无关”。尽管她试图保持中立，但这一回应却引发了两极的反应。一些球迷认为她支持共和党，而一些共和党人则认为她没有被政治利用。
安西莫娃后来解释说，她认为这个问题只是为了制造话题和点击率，而不是真正想了解她的政治立场。她表示，自己有权拒绝回答这种明显带有偏见的问题。
事实上，美国运动员在体育领域中的成就和影响力往往反映了国家的文化和价值观。然而，当前特朗普政府的政策使美国在国际舞台上的声誉下降，这使得美国运动员在面对政治问题时更加复杂。例如，关于跨性别运动员的争议、ICE（移民与海关执法局）在超级碗期间的出现，以及美国签证政策对国际赛事的影响，都表明美国体育与政治密不可分。
随着冬奥会即将在米兰举行，美国运动员也可能会面临类似的问题。美国队在冬奥会中表现强劲，有望在多个项目中获得奖牌。届时，他们将不得不面对如何在政治敏感的环境中表达对国家的支持。
One of the biggest stories coming out of the 2026 Australian Open is how well the American tennis players are doing. Four US women — Amanda Anisimova, Coco Gauff, Iva Jovic, Jessica Pegula — are in the quarterfinals and two men — Ben Shelton and Learner Tien — also made the final eight. (Gauff, Jovic, and Tien lost their quarterfinal matches on Tuesday.) Those accomplishments have led to the other big American story coming out of the Aussie Open: How do US tennis players feel about representing their country at this moment?
In post-match interviews, they’ve been asked, some of them multiple times for clarification, what it means to play under the American flag. Implicitly, these questions are referring to federal agents killing American citizens in Minnesota, or perhaps the increasingly strange and heated threats about acquiring Greenland, or the military intervention in Venezuela and threats to launch military strikes on Iran.
Essentially, reporters are asking: Are you proud to be an American in a moment and time when so many Americans aren’t?
While tennis players may be the first US athletes on a major international stage this year to deal with this attention, they won’t be the last. In two weeks, the Winter Olympics will begin and coincide with the Super Bowl, the most-watched sporting event in the US. Many of those athletes will face the same question about what parts of America they are or aren’t celebrating.
Country representation can be a big deal in tennis when its governing bodies — the ATP and WTA tour — want it to be. For example, Russian and Belarusian tennis players are currently not allowed to represent their countries on tour and do not have flags next to their names, a decision made in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The intent is to represent neutrality despite the countries’ international aggression toward Ukraine.
Russian and Belarusian players have also, on multiple occasions, been asked what their stance on the Ukraine invasion has been. Aryna Sabalenka, the current women’s number one who happens to be from Belarus, has clarified her stance several times. This week, after a Ukrainian player said Sabalenka and other Russian and Belarusian players playing in grand slams was “wrong,” Sabalenka told reporters: “I’ve been clear before that I’m pro-peace. Nothing has changed. That’s all I can say about that.”
Asking tennis players about international and personal politics isn’t uncommon, but these queries usually aren’t on American tennis players. The aforementioned political events unfolding stateside and internationally have changed that.
Coco Gauff, the third-ranked player in the world, was asked about the state of the US under the second Trump administration and told reporters this week, “At this point, I feel a bit fatigued talking about it, just because of the fact that it is hard being a Black woman in this country and having to experience things, even online, and seeing marginalized communities being affected.” She added, “I hope that as time continues that we can reach a state that we’re not currently in, and we keep moving forward.”
2025 champ Madison Keys was also asked the same question this week, and responded similarly to Gauff. “I think it’s pretty obvious where I stand, and I am hopeful that we, as a country, can come together and get back to the values that I think make our country great. I am not a fan of divisiveness, and I think the beauty of the US is we are a mixing pot, we are very diverse, we are a home of immigrants,” she told reporters. “I hope that we can get back to those values.”
Both Gauff and Keys’s comments were picked up by right-wing sites and personalities, some of whom criticized the reporter for goading anti-Trump sentiment out of the players.
On the other side of the political spectrum, Ben Shelton endured sharp scrutiny after scribbling “USA till its backwards” on a camera in a post-win celebration. Critics questioned why he was seemingly celebrating his country while there was violence happening in Minnesota.
Shelton later clarified, saying that his message wasn’t meant to be political. He posted on Instagram: “Literally no underlying message with my camera sign… a lot of young Americans killing it in Australia this year. And my girlfriend played for team USA for the first time in a year this morning. Thought they deserved a shoutout.”
Out of all the American players’ comments, it was Amanda Anisimova’s that made the most noise. It wasn’t because of her views, but because she declined to tell reporters her specific political views. “I don’t think that’s relevant,” Anisimova told the reporter who asked the same question posed to Gauff and Keys.
Even though Anisimova tried to claim neutrality, her comments ignited a sharp reaction from both political wings. Some fans criticized her and jumped to the conclusion that she was Republican. At the same time, some Republicans assumed her allegiance and cheered her on for not taking what they saw as anti-Trump bait.
Anisimova clarified her statement on January 25, telling reporters that she felt like the question was asked just to create a spectacle and a distraction. “In my other press conference…I didn’t want to answer a question that was obviously intended for a headline and clickbait; that was my right,” she told reporters. “It had nothing to do with my political views or anything like that. The fact that people assume that they know my stance on certain important topics is just wrong. It’s not factual. It’s tough but I’ve learned to get used to it.”
Anisimova has a point in that a brief, post-win press conference isn’t likely to be a place where you’re going to get a serious, thoughtful answer from tennis players about politics.
At the same time, there’s a history of American achievement and activism in sports that has been pivotal to shaping political moments, especially in tennis. At the moment, star athletes in other sports, particularly basketball, have been outspoken in their opposition to the Trump administration’s actions.
The insistence on figuring out how these players feel about the US is part of a longer, continuous debate about how sports figures respond to politics. The viral reaction from both sides to Anisimova’s “no comment” seems like enough evidence that people do want politics from athletes — just not politics they disagree with. Many fans decide to root for or against an athlete or team based on politics. And while athletes’ achievements are straightforward (they win or lose), how famous they become, their legacies, and their impact on sport are often reflections of the culture at large and what we value.
What’s made it more complicated for US athletes today is that the US’s reputation on the international stage has declined under the second Trump administration. If Russian and Belarusian players’ opinions about their leaders are fair game, as they currently are in tennis, it’s not beyond the pale to ask Americans questions about how they feel about theirs.
The plea to keep tennis and other sports away from politics also feels a bit hollow when there are policies within the US directly affecting sports. From the ongoing debate and litigation about trans athletes, to the administration’s assurance that ICE — after killing two American citizens in Minneapolis in January — will be at the Super Bowl in two weeks, to how the US’s visa bans will affect who can and can’t come to attend the World Cup, there is no cleaving away US politics from US sports.
One would also expect Team USA athletes to field similar questions in Milan when the Winter Olympics begin in February.
Team USA is poised to have a big presence at the Games and are favorites to medal in multiple events. With those wins come traditions like playing the national anthem and extensive interviews with medalists. The Olympics are also a place where politics are already a storyline. The US intends to send ICE officers to the Games, but Giuseppe Sala, the mayor of Milan, told reporters this week that ICE was a “militia that kills” and that it would not be welcome in his city.
Unlike the American tennis players, Olympic athletes may not be able to just ignore how complicated it is in this moment to simply celebrate the US.