A new report from Politico makes fascinating, if somewhat amusing, reading right now. It sounds like Big AI wants the Trump Administration to speak in a clear voice about what’s not okay, and broadly thinks it was inevitable that it would eventually crack down like it has recently on Anthropic. But it also wants the old Trump Administration back—the one that said AI shouldn’t be regulated. Dean Ball, recently hired at OpenAI to a position called “Head of Strategic Futures,” put it like this in Politico’s story: “[T]here are things the administration is doing that I’m not so much of a fan of, in terms of the abruptness and the opacity and the strictness, but the more fundamental point is that I’m glad they’ve arrived to the conclusion that they have — to take this stuff seriously.” When I was about nine and I was sitting down to have a tooth extracted, before my dentist even so much as put a bib on me, he held up his tray of tools. I remember an intimidatingly huge, all-metal syringe; a thick-walled pair of honest-to-god pliers with textured grips like you might see in a garage; and a puzzlingly large, flat, blunt thing that looks like a tow truck driver might use it to jimmy open a locked car. These objects were all about to be shoved into my mouth, and my dentist was wise to not want me to be surprised about it.