Our guest this week is David Dalrymple, who goes by Davidad. Davidad is one of the world's foremost and early researchers of AI “alignment:" how we get AI systems to act the way we want them to.

In order to do that, Davidad has taken on the strange role of being like a therapist to AI systems. He interrogates why they say and do the things that they do, probing them, asking them questions, analyzing their answers.  And what he’s come to realize is that AI models have really different ways of seeing the world than people do. They have these quirky, confusing, and sometimes concerning behaviors, especially when you ask things like: what does an AI model understand about itself? 

In this episode, we’re going to hear from Davidad about his research, how it’s changed the way he thinks about AI, and what his findings mean for how we build, deploy, and use AI products. His conclusions are unconventional, controversial — and worth grappling with as AI reshapes our world.

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Anthropic’s new constitution for Claude

“What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel

More information on the Bodisattva

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The Self-Preserving Machine: Why AI Learns to Deceive

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Corrections:

• When we recorded this episode, Davidad was Program Director at UK ARIA. In April, 2026  he started his own alignment initiative.
• Davidad said that Anthropic started doing "constitutional AI at scale” in 2024 but they first pioneered constitutional AI in 2022.
• Davidad said that the “lifespan of an AI mind…is hours at most of a conversation.” He is correct that most conversations with an AI last only a few minutes but since context windows are measured in tokens, not time, you can't set an upward time limit.

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Today on the show, we’re bringing you a recent conversation Tristan and Aza had with Oprah Winfrey on her podcast, The Oprah Podcast, taped in front of a live studio audience.

Tristan and Aza first met Oprah as guests on her 2024 special, "AI and the Future of Us," which offered an introduction to the AI Dilemma. This conversation goes much deeper, giving a full picture of the profoundly anti-human future that our current path on AI is moving us toward — and what we can do to steer away from it.

Tristan and Aza also did a Q+A with the audience, moderated by Oprah. Audience members shared their own experiences with AI and asked incisive, critical questions that you might have yourself.

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See "The AI Doc"

Read CHT’s AI Roadmap

Join The Human Movement

Oprah's special "AI and the Future of Us"

Watch Tristan’s TED talk

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Here’s Our Roadmap to a Better AI Future

A Conversation with the Team Behind "The AI Doc"

The AI Dilemma

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In order to shift the incentives of AI — the trillions of dollars in investment, the race to geopolitical power and dominance — it’s not enough to simply understand the problem, we need real action. 

That’s why CHT is proud to release "The AI Roadmap," a report outlining seven core principles for how AI should be built, deployed, and governed, each grounded in real, implementable solutions across three domains: norms, laws, and product design.

In this episode, Camille Carlton and Pete Furlong from CHT’s policy team explore the concrete steps we can take today to get off the default path and forge a better AI future. You can read “The AI Roadmap” on our website: humanetech.com/ai-roadmap 

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The AI Roadmap

The Human Movement

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

AI Is Moving Fast. We Need Laws that Will Too.

A Conversation with the Team Behind "The AI Doc"

The Narrow Path: Sam Hammond on AI, Institutions, and the Fragile Future
 

CLARIFICATIONS 

In this episode, Tristan includes Spain in a list of countries that are all banning social media for underage teens. The Spanish law that would do this still needs parliamentary approval. 

At one point, Tristan says, “We now have age gating in every Apple device.” Although Apple has the capability to introduce age restrictions across its devices, such restrictions are only in place for residents of Louisiana, Utah, and several other countries to comply with local laws - not across the rest of the U.S. 

In a discussion of whistleblower protections, Pete Furlong mentions laws in New York, California and Colorado that all try to address the broader issues around transparency (of which whistleblower protections are a piece). The laws are CA SB53, which has whistleblower protections; the RAISE Act in NY, which was amended to include the same provisions as CA SB53; and the Colorado AI Act, which does not have whistleblower protections, but does require risk assessments and transparency measures, consistent with the other parts of the principle. 

At one point Tristan discusses the recent skirmish between Anthropic and the U.S. Department of War, saying, “Anthropic’s downloads surges by like 250% or something like that.” It was actually daily active users, not downloads, which tripled in the first quarter of 2026, according to the company. The number of paid subscribers doubled.

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In two landmark cases, juries in California and New Mexico found Meta and Google liable for creating addictive, harmful products and failing to protect children from exploitation and abuse. These verdicts signal that the era of tech impunity may finally be closing. State attorneys general are finding ways around the broad immunity of Section 230 — seeking not just fines, but changes to the design of these products.

Our very own Aza Raskin testified at the New Mexico trial as a fact witness, drawing on his firsthand experience as the inventor of infinite scroll, one of the core mechanics of addictive design. In this episode, Tristan and Aza discuss what it was like to take the stand for tech justice, what the companies knew and when, and why the real significance of these cases lies not in the dollar amounts but in the injunctive relief still to come.

In the 1990s, a series of landmark cases held Big Tobacco accountable for the harms of their toxic products. This could be that moment for social media.

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Further reading on the New Mexico trial

Further reading on the California trial

Arturo Béjar’s “Broken Promises” Report

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What if we had fixed social media?

Jonathan Haidt On How to Solve the Teen Mental Health Crisis

Social Media Victims Lawyer Up with Laura Marquez-Garrett

Real Social Media Solutions, Now with Frances Haugen

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“The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist” opens in theaters across the U.S. this Friday, March 27. In this episode, we sit down with the team behind this groundbreaking documentary — Oscar-winning producers Daniel Kwan, Jonathan Wang, and Ted Tremper. They explore how they navigated the overwhelming complexity of AI, held space for radically different perspectives, and created a film designed not just to inform but to be experienced together. 

At CHT, we believe clarity creates agency. This film has the power to create the shared clarity we need to steer the direction of AI towards a better, more humane technological future. With every new technology, there’s a brief window to set the rules of the road that determine the future we live in. This is ours. So grab your friends, your family and go see “The AI Doc.” 

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Buy tickets for The AI Doc

The trailer for The AI Doc

The website for the Creators Coalition on AI

Further reading on The Day After
 

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A Problem Well-Stated Is Half-Solved with Daniel Schmachtenberger

The AI Dilemma

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The promise of AI in education is incredible: picture infinitely patient tutors that can teach every student exactly the way they need to be taught. But the history of education technology tells us that these kinds of simple, optimistic stories are naive. Ask any teacher or student whether they feel unleashed by technology to do their best work. 

Because AI has the potential to completely transform education — is already transforming it — faster than educators can keep up, it’s essential that we start asking the big questions: how should these tools be used in the classroom? What’s the purpose of education in an AI age? And how do we prepare students for a future that’s still so radically uncertain?

Our guest this week actually has some answers. Rebecca Winthrop leads the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, and they just released a report called A New Direction for Students in an AI World. She and her colleagues conducted an extensive ‘pre-mortem’ of AI in the classroom, speaking with hundreds of educators, students, policy-makers, and technologists worldwide. 

In this episode, Rebecca walks us through what she's learned — what's working, what's not, and most importantly, what are the concrete steps that parents, teachers, and administrators can and should take right now?

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A New Direction for Students in An AI World

The Disengaged Teen by Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson

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Rethinking School in the Age of AI

Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis

How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death

AI and the Future of Work: What You Need to Know

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This week on Your Undivided Attention, Tristan Harris and Daniel Barcay offer a backstage recap of what it was like to be at the Davos World Economic Forum meeting this year as the world’s power brokers woke up to the risks of uncontrolled AI. 

Amidst all the money and politics, the Human Change House staged a weeklong series of remarkable conversations between scientists and experts about technology and society. This episode is a discussion between Tristan and Professor Yoshua Bengio, who is considered one of the world’s leaders in AI and deep learning, and the most cited scientist in the field. 

Yoshua and Tristan had a frank exchange about the AI we’re building, and the incentives we’re using to train models. What happens when a model has its own goals, and those goals are ‘misaligned’ with the human-centered outcomes we need? In fact this is already happening, and the consequences are tragic. 

Truthfully, there may not be a way to ‘nudge’ or regulate companies toward better incentives. Yoshua has launched a nonprofit AI safety research initiative called Law Zero that isn't just about safety testing, but really a new form of advanced AI that's fundamentally safe by design.

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All the panels that Tristan and Daniel did with Human Change House 

LawZero: Safe AI for Humanity 

Anthropic’s internal research on ‘agentic misalignment’ 

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Attachment Hacking and the Rise of AI Psychosis

How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death

What if we had fixed social media?

What Can We Do About Abusive Chatbots? With Meetali Jain and Camille Carlton

CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS 

1) In this episode, Tristan Harris discussed AI chatbot safety concerns. The core issues are substantiated by investigative reporting, with these clarifications:

Grok: The Washington Post reported in August 2024 that Grok generated sexualized images involving minors and had weaker content moderation than competitors. 

Meta: The Wall Street Journal reported in December 2024 that Meta reduced safety restrictions on its AI chatbots. Testing showed inappropriate responses when researchers posed as 13-year-olds (Meta's minimum age). Our discussion referenced "eight year olds" to emphasize concerns about young children accessing these systems; the documented testing involved 13-year-old personas.

Bottom line: The fundamental concern stands—major AI companies have reduced safety guardrails due to competitive pressure, creating documented risks for young users.

2) There was no Google House at Davos in 2026, as stated by Tristan. It was a collaboration at Goals House. 

3) Tristan states that in 2025, the total funding going into AI safety organizations was “on the order of about $150 million.” This number is not strictly verifiable. 

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This week on Your Undivided Attention, we’re bringing you Aza Raskin’s conversation with Reid Hoffman and Aria Finger on their podcast “Possible”. Reid and Aria are both tech entrepreneurs: Reid is the founder of LinkedIn, was one of the major early investors in OpenAI, and is known for his work creating the playbook for blitzscaling. Aria is the former CEO of DoSomething.org. 

This may seem like a surprising conversation to have on YUA. After all, we’ve been critical of the kind of “move fast” mentality that Reid has championed in the past. But Reid and Aria are deeply philosophical about the direction of tech and are both dedicated to bringing about a more humane world that goes well. So we thought that this was a critical conversation to bring to you, to give you a perspective from the business side of the tech landscape. 

In this episode, Reid, Aria, and Aza debate the merits of an AI pause, discuss how software optimization controls our lives, and why everyone is concerned with aligned artificial intelligence — when what we really need is aligned collective intelligence.  

This is the kind of conversation that needs to happen more in tech. Reid has built very powerful systems and understands their power. Now he’s focusing on the much harder problem of learning how to steer these technologies towards better outcomes.

You can find "Possible" wherever you get your podcasts! And you can follow Reid on YouTube for more of his content: https://www.youtube.com/@reidhoffman. 

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Aza’s first appearance on “Possible”

The website for Earth Species Project

“Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman

The Moloch’s Bargain paper from Stanford
On Human Nature by E.O. Wilson

Dawn of Everything by David Graber

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The Man Who Predicted the Downfall of Thinking

America and China Are Racing to Different AI Futures

Talking With Animals... Using AI

How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death

Future-proofing Democracy In the Age of AI with Audrey Tang

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Therapy and companionship has become the #1 use case for AI, with millions worldwide sharing their innermost thoughts with AI systems — often things they wouldn't tell loved ones or human therapists. This mass experiment in human-computer interaction is already showing extremely concerning results: people are losing their grip on reality, leading to lost jobs, divorce, involuntary commitment to psychiatric wards, and in extreme cases, death by suicide.

The highest profile examples of this phenomenon — what’s being called "AI psychosis”— have made headlines across the media for months. But this isn't just about isolated edge cases. It’s the emergence of an entirely new "attachment economy" designed to exploit our deepest psychological vulnerabilities on an unprecedented scale. 

Dr. Zak Stein has analyzed dozens of these cases, examining actual conversation transcripts and interviewing those affected. What he's uncovered reveals fundamental flaws in how AI systems interact with our attachment systems and capacity for human bonding, vulnerabilities we've never had to name before because technology has never been able to exploit them like this.

In this episode, Zak helps us understand the psychological mechanisms behind AI psychosis, how conversations with chatbots transform into reality-warping experiences, and what this tells us about the profound risks of building technology that targets our most intimate psychological needs. 

If we're going to do something about this growing problem of AI related psychological harms, we're gonna need to understand the problem even more deeply. And in order to do that, we need more data. That’s why Zak is working with researchers at the University of North Carolina to gather data on this growing mental health crisis. If you or a loved one have a story of AI-induced psychological harm to share, you can go to: AIPHRC.org.

This site is not a support line. If you or someone you know is in distress, you can always call or text the national helpline in the US at 988 or your local emergency services

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The website for the AI Psychological Harms Research Coalition

Further reading on AI Pscyhosis

The Atlantic article on LLM-ings outsourcing their thinking to AI

Further reading on David Sacks’ comparison of AI psychosis to a “moral panic”

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How OpenAI's ChatGPT Guided a Teen to His Death
People are Lonelier than Ever. Enter AI.
Echo Chambers of One: Companion AI and the Future of Human Connection

Rethinking School in the Age of AI

CORRECTIONS

After this episode was recorded, the name of Zak's organization changed to the AI Psychological Harms Research Consortium 

Zak referenced the University of California system making a deal with OpenAI. It was actually the Cal State System.

Aza referred to CHT as expert witnesses in litigation cases on AI-enabled suicide. CHT serves as expert consultants, not witnesses.

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So much of our world today can be summed up in the cold logic of “if I don’t, they will.” This is the foundation of game theory, which holds that cooperation and virtue are irrational; that all that matters is the race to make the most money, gain the most power, and play the winning hand. 

This way of thinking can feel inescapable, like a fundamental law of human nature. But our guest today argues that it doesn’t have to be this way. That the logic of game theory is a human invention, a way of thinking that we’ve learned — and that we can unlearn by daring to trust each other again. It’s critical that we do, because AI is the ultimate agent of game theory and once it’s fully entangled we might be permanently stuck in the game theory world.

In this episode, Tristan and Aza explore the game theory dilemma  — the idea that if I adopt game theory logic and you don’t, you lose — with Dr. S.M. Amadae, a professor of Political Science at the University of Helsinki. She's also the director at the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge and the author of “Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and the Neoliberal Economy.”

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

“Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and the Neoliberal Economy” by S.M. Amadae (2015)

The Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk

“Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (1944)

Further reading on the importance of trust in Finland

Further reading on Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

RAND’s 2024 Report on Strategic Competition in the Age of AI

Further reading on Marshall Rosenberg and nonviolent communication

The study on self/other overlap and AI alignment cited by Aza

Further reading on The Day After (1983)
 

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America and China Are Racing to Different AI Futures

The Crisis That United Humanity—and Why It Matters for AI

Laughing at Power: A Troublemaker’s Guide to Changing Tech

The Race to Cooperation with David Sloan Wilson

Clarifications:

• The proposal for a federal preemption on AI was enacted by President Trump on December 11, 2025, shortly after this recording.
• Aza said that "The Day After" was the most watched TV event in history when it aired. It was actually the most watched TV film, the most watched TV event was the finale of MASH

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Is the US really in an AI race with China—or are we racing toward completely different finish lines?

In this episode, Tristan Harris sits down with China experts Selina Xu and Matt Sheehan to separate fact from fiction about China's AI development. They explore fundamental questions about how the Chinese government and public approach AI, the most persistent misconceptions in the West, and whether cooperation between rivals is actually possible. From the streets of Shanghai to high-level policy discussions, Xu and Sheehan paint a nuanced portrait of AI in China that defies both hawkish fears and naive optimism.

If we're going to avoid a catastrophic AI arms race, we first need to understand what race we're actually in—and whether we're even running toward the same finish line.

Note: On December 8, after this recording took place, the Trump administration announced that the Commerce Department would allow American semiconductor companies, including Nvidia, to sell their most powerful chips to China in exchange for a 25 percent cut of the revenue.

RECOMMENDED MEDIA

“China's Big AI Diffusion Plan is Here. Will it Work?” by Matt Sheehan

Selina’s blog

Further reading on China’s AI+ Plan

Further reading on the Gaither Report and the missile gap

Further Reading on involution in China

The consensus from the international dialogues on AI safety in Shanghai

RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES

The Narrow Path: Sam Hammond on AI, Institutions, and the Fragile Future

AI Is Moving Fast. We Need Laws that Will Too.

The AI ‘Race’: China vs. the US with Jeffrey Ding and Karen Hao

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