AI Bans Are Here. I Told You So. Now Let’s Talk About Why This Is Bad.

I said it before. I said it on this very blog, on Interfaith Intrepid, back when folks were still treating artificial intelligence like it was some kind of science fiction novelty that only tech bros in San Francisco cared about. I said that the AI bans were coming, and I said that they were not going to look the way people thought they were going to look. They were not going to be principled stands against corporate overreach or thoughtful regulatory frameworks designed to protect everyday people. No. They were going to be messy, politically motivated, and ultimately harmful to the very people that the folks doing the banning claim to care about. And here we are. June 2026. AI bans. In the United States of America. So let us talk about it.

For those who have not been following the news, here is what happened. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI, launched two new models called Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on June 9th of this year. Three days later, the United States government issued a formal export control directive ordering Anthropic to suspend access to both models for foreign nationals anywhere in the world. Because Anthropic cannot realistically verify the nationality of every single user in real time, the practical effect of this directive was that both models went dark for essentially everyone on the planet. This did not happen in a vacuum, either. This came after months of escalating conflict between the Trump administration and Anthropic, which began when the Pentagon tried to strong arm Anthropic into allowing military use of Claude for what they called, and I want you to really sit with this phrase, “all lawful purposes,” including lethal autonomous warfare and mass surveillance of American citizens. Anthropic said no. And from that point forward, the federal government has been treating Anthropic like an adversary. They actually designated the company a “supply chain risk,” which is a label that is normally reserved for foreign enemies of the United States. A federal judge looked at that designation and called it troubling. And yet here we are.

Now, I want to be clear about something before I go any further, because I know how these conversations go. I know that the moment you start defending AI or defending the people who use AI, someone is going to come out of the woodwork and say that you are a corporate shill, or that you are naive, or that you are ignoring the very real problems that AI creates. And look, I am not ignoring those problems. I have never ignored those problems. There are legitimate concerns about how AI companies handle data, about how these models are trained, about the labor practices involved, about environmental costs, about the ways powerful people can use AI to concentrate even more power. Those concerns are real and they deserve serious attention. But here is what I am also saying, and what I have always been saying: the existence of legitimate concerns about AI does not justify blanket bans that hurt everyday people who are using these tools for entirely reasonable purposes. Those are two different conversations, and too many people are collapsing them into one because it is convenient for a certain narrative.

Here is the thing about that narrative. Have you noticed something? Have you noticed that for all the noise about how dangerous AI is, there is not really a substantial, meaningful, sustained challenge to the idea that AI is inherently bad? Think about that. Think about who benefits from everyday people being convinced that AI is a threat, that people who use AI are doing something shameful or deceptive or harmful. Think about who benefits from AI becoming a wedge issue that divides people who should actually be on the same side of a lot of these fights. I will tell you who benefits. The powerful people who want AI for themselves. The governments who want to use AI for surveillance and military applications and propaganda. The corporations who want to use AI to cut costs and consolidate markets. Those people are not against AI. They are against you having AI. There is a massive difference between those two things, and I think a lot of people are not seeing it clearly enough.

Look at the Trump administration. This is the same administration that has used AI generated content to make posts attacking political adversaries. This is the same administration that signed deals to use Claude on classified military networks. They are not against artificial intelligence. They are against Anthropic specifically because Anthropic said no to one of their demands. And so now they are using the levers of government power, export controls and supply chain risk designations and the full weight of federal authority, to punish a company that would not play ball. And in the process, they are taking a tool away from millions of ordinary people who never had anything to do with any of this. That is not a principled stand against dangerous technology. That is a power move dressed up in the language of national security.

And I want to talk about that language for a second. National security. Safety. Protecting the public. These are the phrases that get deployed every single time a government wants to do something that would not survive scrutiny if it were stated plainly. We have been here before. We have been here a lot. Think about the Patriot Act. Think about what happened in the aftermath of September 11th, 2001, when the government told the American people that they needed to give up certain freedoms and certain privacies in the name of keeping everyone safe. And people went along with it. People went along with it because they were scared, and because the people asking them to go along with it were wrapping the whole thing in the flag and talking about threats and enemies and the need for sacrifice. And look at what that gave us. Mass surveillance. Warrantless wiretapping. Decades of overreach that we are still reckoning with. I am not saying that what is happening with AI bans is identical to that. I am saying that the logic is the same. The structure of the argument is the same. And if you lived through the Patriot Act era and you watched what happened when people uncritically accepted the idea that security justifies just about anything, and you are now looking at AI bans and nodding along, I have to ask you what exactly you think is different this time.

Now let me tell you something personal, because I think it matters here. AI has helped me. It has helped me with this blog. It has helped me put my thoughts together and express myself in ways that I genuinely did not think were possible for me before. And I know how that sounds to some people. I know there are folks who are going to read that and immediately assume that what I mean is that AI writes my posts for me, that I am some kind of fraud who is passing off machine generated text as my own thought and my own voice. That is not what I mean. What I mean is that AI has been a tool that helped me organize and articulate ideas that were already mine. It helped me find the words for things I knew I believed but struggled to say clearly. In that sense, it has made me more honest, not less. It has made my voice more mine, not less mine. Which I know is counterintuitive to people who assume that AI use is inherently about deception, but that is because those people have a very limited and frankly condescending idea of what AI use actually looks like for everyday people.

And yes, some people use AI to be dishonest. Some people use AI to generate misinformation, to fabricate content, to deceive others. That is real and it is a problem. But here is the thing about that. People who are determined to be dishonest are going to use whatever tools are available to them to be dishonest. They used Photoshop before they used AI. They used copy and paste before that. They used typewriters and printing presses before that. Dishonesty is not a property of the tool. It is a property of the person using the tool. And when you ban the tool, you do not stop the dishonest people, because the dishonest people with resources and power will always find a way around whatever restrictions you put in place. What you do is make things harder for the honest people. The everyday people. The people who were using the tool for legitimate, productive, meaningful purposes and who now no longer have access to it.

That brings me to something that I do not think gets talked about nearly enough in these conversations, and that is the First Amendment dimension of what is happening here. Now I am not a lawyer, and I am not going to pretend to give you a legal analysis. But I want to make a common sense argument here. AI tools, tools like Claude, are things that people use to help them express themselves. They are communication tools. They help people write, think, organize ideas, produce content. For a lot of people, especially people who struggle with writing, or who are not native English speakers, or who have disabilities that make traditional forms of expression more difficult, these tools are not just convenient. They are genuinely transformative. They make self expression accessible in a way that it was not accessible before. And when the government takes those tools away, when it decides on the basis of national security claims that have not been seriously scrutinized that millions of people can no longer access something they were using to communicate and express themselves, that is at minimum a free speech adjacent problem that we should all be paying attention to.

I am not saying that every restriction on every technology is automatically a First Amendment violation. I am not making that argument. I am saying that we should be extremely suspicious of any government action that has the practical effect of limiting the means by which ordinary people communicate and express themselves, regardless of what that action is officially described as being about. And I am saying that the fact that a lot of people are not raising this concern, the fact that you can find people across the political spectrum who are either cheering this ban or simply not bothering to push back on it, tells you something about how muddled and confused the public conversation about AI has become.

Here is the part that really gets me. And I have mentioned this before on this blog, so bear with me if you have heard this from me already. I have heard self described progressives call for AI bans. People who in other contexts talk about access, about equity, about who gets to participate in public life and who gets left out. And they are calling for bans on a technology that, yes, has problems, yes, involves powerful corporations who do not always act in the public interest, but that also has genuinely expanded access to certain kinds of tools and capabilities for people who never had access to those things before. And I look at that and I genuinely do not understand the logic. If you care about who has access to powerful tools, if you care about leveling the playing field in some meaningful way, why are you cheering when the government takes a tool away from ordinary people? Who do you think benefits when these bans go into effect? It is not the everyday person who was using Claude to help draft a letter to their landlord, or to work through an essay for school, or to put together a blog post about the news. Those people lose access. The powerful people, the well resourced people, they find alternatives. They always do.

I am not asking anyone to defend everything that AI companies do. I am not asking anyone to pretend that there are no problems with the way these technologies have been developed or deployed. There are problems. Some of them are serious. But there is a difference between saying we need better regulation, we need more transparency, we need accountability for how these systems are built and who benefits from them, and saying ban it, take it away, shut it down. The first position is the position of someone who is genuinely thinking about how to make things better for people. The second position is the position of someone who either has not thought it through, or who is serving interests that are not the interests of the people they claim to represent.

I will be honest with you. I did not expect to be writing this post. Not because I did not see AI bans coming, because I did, I said they were coming, I said it on this blog before a lot of people were taking it seriously. But because I hoped, maybe naively, that when we actually got here, when AI bans were actually happening in the United States and not just a hypothetical future scenario, more people would be alarmed. More people would be asking the hard questions. More people would be connecting the dots between what is being said publicly about why these bans are happening and what the actual interests are that are being served by them. And instead, a lot of the conversation has been either cheerleading from people who have wanted to see AI restricted for various reasons, or silence from people who should know better.

So I am saying it plainly. AI bans are here. They are not what people thought they would be. They are not thoughtful, principled interventions designed to protect the public from genuine harms. They are political tools being used by powerful actors to consolidate control over who gets access to powerful technology. And the people who get hurt are not the corporations, not the governments, not the powerful players who have been doing this dance in the background while most of us were not watching. The people who get hurt are the everyday people. The people who found in these tools something that genuinely helped them. The people who, like me, used AI not to deceive anyone but to be more fully themselves.

I raised the alarm on this before. I am raising it again now. Because somebody has to. And because if we do not start having a more honest conversation about what is actually happening here and who it actually serves, we are going to keep watching these bans roll out, keep watching access get restricted, and keep being told that it is for our own good. And I, for one, am not buying it.

There is something else I want to address while I am at it, because it is relevant to everything I just said and it has been sitting with me for a while now. I have been seeing videos lately. Videos of people vandalizing delivery robots. Kicking them, knocking them over, messing with them in the street. And I know the first instinct for a lot of people when they see that kind of thing is to laugh it off. Oh, it is just a joke. Oh, people are just blowing off steam. Do not take it so seriously. And look, I get that impulse. I really do. But I cannot go along with it. Because when I see those videos, I do not see harmless venting. I see something that points to a much deeper and much more troubling problem with the way a significant portion of the population has started thinking about artificial intelligence and technology in general. And I think we need to talk about it honestly.

What I see in those videos is technophobia that has curdled into something almost feral. People are not just skeptical of AI. They are not just raising reasonable concerns about automation or corporate power or the pace of technological change. Some of these folks are genuinely rabid about it. They are acting out physically against machines in the street like that is a normal and reasonable response to having complicated feelings about technology. And if people are getting that worked up about a delivery robot rolling down the sidewalk, if that is the thing that is pushing them to the point of vandalism and rage, then something has gone seriously wrong in the way we are talking about and thinking about all of this. Some of these folks are too far gone, and I say that not to be dismissive but because I genuinely mean it as a warning about where this kind of thinking leads when it is left unchallenged and unexamined.

Now here is the part where I want you to really pay attention, because I think this is important. The argument that AI is going to steal jobs, that it is going to replace people, that it is coming for livelihoods and there is nothing anyone can do about it except be afraid and angry, that argument should sound extremely familiar to you. Because we have heard it before. We have heard almost word for word the exact same argument made about immigrants for decades. Immigrants are going to take your jobs. Immigrants are going to replace you. Immigrants are a threat to your way of life and your economic security and everything you have worked for. And the people making that argument about immigrants were not really concerned about working class economic conditions. They were using fear as a political tool. They were manufacturing a scapegoat that people could direct their frustration and anxiety toward instead of looking clearly at the actual structural forces that were shaping their lives. And now we are watching the same playbook get run with AI. The specific scapegoat is different but the logic is identical and the people who benefit from it are the same kinds of people who always benefit from this kind of thing.

And I want to push on the conservative piece of this for a second, because I think it is interesting and I think it reveals something. You have got some conservative commentators and talking heads who are either openly against AI or notably lukewarm on it, which is genuinely strange when you think about it. Because the tech oligarchs, the extremely wealthy people who are building and investing in AI, those people are largely aligned with conservative political power right now. They were at the inauguration. They are in the rooms where decisions get made. And yet there is this undercurrent of AI skepticism on the right that does not quite square with that alignment. So you have to ask yourself why. Why would conservative media figures be less than enthusiastic about a technology that the people they are politically aligned with are betting everything on? And the answer, when you think about it, is not that complicated. Because keeping everyday conservative voters skeptical of AI, keeping them in a posture of fear and resentment toward it, serves a very specific purpose. It keeps those voters from engaging with AI on their own terms. It keeps them from developing their own relationship with the technology and their own informed opinions about it. It keeps them dependent on the narrative that is being handed to them rather than their own experience and judgment. And that is useful for certain people.

But honestly, this is not just a conservative phenomenon and I want to be clear about that. I have seen it across the political spectrum. I have seen people on the left who you would expect to be thinking critically about power and access and who controls what fall right into the same technophobic trap. The AI is bad narrative has achieved something that very few narratives manage to achieve, which is something close to broad consensus among ordinary people across ideological lines. And that should make you suspicious. Genuine broad consensus on complicated issues is rare. When you see it, you should ask who is pushing it and why. Because almost universal agreement among common people about a complicated technology that is still developing and that most people do not have deep technical knowledge of does not happen organically. It gets manufactured. It gets propagated. And the question of who is doing the manufacturing and why they want everyday people to be afraid and hostile is a question that not enough people are asking.

What we are watching, and I want to be direct about this, is AI becoming a scapegoat. A convenient all purpose scapegoat for anxiety and frustration and fear that actually has much more complicated roots. Something goes wrong in your life, blame AI. Something looks a little off, blame AI. You see a piece of art that seems slightly strange, immediately it is AI and AI is bad and whoever made it is a fraud. You lose a job or you are worried about losing a job, AI did it. AI is responsible. AI is the enemy. And look, I understand why that is appealing. Scapegoats are always appealing because they are simple. They take genuinely complicated problems that have genuinely complicated causes and they give you one thing to point at and be angry about. That is psychologically satisfying in a way that the actual truth, which is usually messier and more uncomfortable, is not.

But here is the problem with scapegoats. They do not actually solve anything. When people were blaming immigrants for economic problems that were actually caused by policy choices and corporate decisions and structural shifts in the economy, blaming immigrants did not fix those problems. It just gave people somewhere to put their anger while the actual causes of their frustration continued unchecked. And blaming AI is going to work exactly the same way. While people are kicking delivery robots and calling everyone who uses Claude a cheater and a fraud and demanding bans and restrictions, the actual forces that are shaping their lives and their economic circumstances and their futures are going to keep operating. The people who are actually making decisions about how AI gets developed and who it benefits and what it gets used for are going to keep making those decisions. And ordinary people are going to be too busy being angry at a robot on the sidewalk to notice.

I am not saying do not be critical of AI. I have said it before in this post and I will say it again because I want to be consistent. There are real things to criticize. There are real conversations to have about accountability and transparency and the concentration of power in the hands of a very small number of companies and the people who run them. Those conversations matter and I want to have them. But there is a massive difference between that kind of engaged, critical, eyes open conversation and the kind of rabid technophobic hatred I have been seeing in those videos and in comment sections and in the general discourse around this stuff. One of those things is useful. One of those things might actually lead somewhere productive. The other one is just fear and anger being harvested by people who find it useful, and it is going to leave the people expressing it exactly where they started, except more exhausted and more divided and less able to see clearly what is actually happening around them.

I will keep saying this for as long as I need to. The AI hate is not righteous. It is not radical. It is not speaking truth to power. It is exactly what the people who actually hold power want ordinary folks to be doing while they consolidate their control over the most significant technology of our time. And I for one refuse to go along with it.

So let us bring this all the way back around, because I want to connect the dots here in a way that I do not think enough people are doing. Everything I have talked about in this post, the AI bans, the government overreach, the technophobic rage being directed at robots in the street, none of it exists in isolation. These things are connected. And the thread that runs through all of it, the thing that ties it together into one coherent and deeply troubling picture, is what happens when you combine mass AI hatred with the already existing tendency of a lot of people to be dismissive of marginalized communities and dismissive of the idea that certain tools might actually benefit people who have historically had the least access to the means of expression and self advocacy. When you put those two things together, when you let them sit next to each other and reinforce each other, you get exactly what we have right now. AI bans. And people cheering for them. Including, and this is the part that really gets me, people who describe themselves as progressive. People who say they are fighting for marginalized groups. People who in other contexts talk endlessly about access and equity and whose voices get heard and whose do not. Those same people are cheering for bans on a technology that has genuinely helped some of the people they claim to care about most. And I am sorry, but that is a load of bullshit and somebody needs to say it plainly.

Think about what AI tools have actually meant for certain communities. Think about people who struggle with traditional forms of written expression, whether because of learning disabilities, or language barriers, or educational gaps that were never their fault but were always their burden. Think about people who have always had things to say, real things, important things, things that deserved to be heard, but who never had the tools to say them in ways that would be taken seriously by the people who control access to platforms and audiences. Think about what it means for someone like that to suddenly have access to a tool that helps them organize their thoughts, helps them find the language for what they already know and believe, helps them produce something that reflects their actual intelligence and insight rather than the limitations imposed on them by circumstances they did not choose. That is not a trivial thing. That is genuinely significant. That is access to something that more privileged people have always had, which is the ability to present your ideas in a form that gets taken seriously. And now people are cheering while the government takes that away. And calling it progressive. I cannot even begin to tell you how backwards that is.

But here is how we got here. And I want to be honest about this because I think it is important to understand the mechanics of it rather than just being angry about the outcome. When you have a media environment, and I mean all of it, conservative media, liberal media, progressive media, all of it, when you have that entire ecosystem consistently pushing a narrative that AI is bad, that people who use AI are suspect, that the technology is dangerous and threatening and something to be feared, and when you push that narrative hard enough and long enough across enough different platforms and outlets, you create a cultural atmosphere in which it becomes very difficult to make the case for any particular use of AI without immediately being on the defensive. You create a situation where the burden of proof is entirely on the person saying AI can be beneficial, and where the people saying AI is harmful get to just assert it and have it accepted. And in that kind of atmosphere, the specific benefits that AI might offer to specific communities, communities that already have to fight twice as hard to have their needs and their perspectives taken seriously, those benefits become almost impossible to advocate for. Because the conversation has already been poisoned. Because the narrative has already been set. And the narrative says AI is bad, full stop, no exceptions, no nuance, no acknowledgment that different people in different circumstances might have genuinely different relationships with this technology and genuinely different things at stake.

And fearmongering sells. I want to be blunt about that because I think it is a core part of how we ended up here. Negativity gets clicks. Fear gets engagement. A headline that says AI is coming for your job, AI is a threat, AI is dangerous, that headline performs better than a headline that says here is a complicated technology with real problems and real benefits that we should think carefully about. The media figured that out very quickly and they ran with it, across the ideological spectrum, because the incentives pointed in that direction regardless of what any individual journalist or commentator actually believed. And ordinary people, who are already anxious about a lot of things for a lot of very legitimate reasons, absorbed that framing. They internalized it. And over time it became common sense. AI is bad. People who use it are bad or naive or complicit in something bad. Anyone defending it must have some ulterior motive. And that common sense, that manufactured common sense, is what created the political and cultural conditions in which AI bans become not just possible but popular. In which a government can take sweeping action to restrict access to technology and face very little meaningful public pushback because the public has already been primed to think that restriction is probably a good idea.

And the people who lose in that scenario are not the tech companies. They will find ways to adapt. They have resources and lawyers and lobbying power and alternative markets. The people who lose are the everyday people who were using these tools for real purposes, including and especially people in communities that have always been told their voices do not matter, their needs are not a priority, their access to powerful tools is a luxury rather than a right. Those are the people who get left behind when bans go into effect and the conversation moves on and everyone who was cheering about how AI got taken down a peg goes back to posting about whatever the next outrage is. And the people who were supposed to be advocating for those communities, the self described progressives, the people who talk about equity and access and representation, a lot of them were right there helping build the cultural atmosphere that made those bans possible. And I do not think they have reckoned with that at all. I do not think most of them have even noticed.

This is how we got here. Not through one single decision or one single bad actor or one single moment where everything went wrong. We got here through the slow accumulation of a narrative that was pushed from every direction, that served the interests of powerful people who wanted AI for themselves while keeping everyone else afraid of it, that crowded out any serious conversation about who actually benefits from these tools and who actually gets hurt when access to them is taken away, and that made it feel not just acceptable but righteous to cheer for restrictions that in practice fall hardest on the people who could least afford to lose what those tools gave them. That is the story of how we got here. And until more people are willing to tell that story honestly, including the people who consider themselves to be on the right side of history, we are going to keep arriving at the same destination over and over again, and keep being surprised when we get there.

I want to end this on a personal note. Because I think it matters. And because I have danced around it a little bit throughout this post but I want to say it clearly and directly this time, more clearly than I have said it before on this blog. I am so adamant about this position, I am so unwilling to just go along with the AI is bad narrative and nod along with the bans and the rage and the dismissiveness, because AI helps me. Personally. Directly. In ways that have genuinely changed what I am able to do and what I am able to contribute. And I think that deserves to be said out loud without hedging or apologizing for it.

I have always wanted to write essays. That is not a new thing for me. For as long as I can remember I have had opinions, strong ones, on all kinds of things, politics, culture, religion, society, the way the world works and the way it should work. I have always had things I wanted to say. But for the longest time I could not get them out in a way that felt right, in a way that felt complete, in a way that actually reflected what I was trying to communicate. My thoughts were scatterbrained. Jumbled. I would have pieces of an idea, fragments of an argument, a feeling about something that I knew was pointing toward a real insight but that I could not quite pull together into something coherent. I had the raw material but I could not build anything with it. And so I held back. I did not feel confident. I did not feel like what I had to offer was ready to be shared. And a lot of what I had to say just stayed inside, unsaid, because I did not have the tools to say it the way it needed to be said.

AI changed that. Claude specifically has been a tool that helped me take those scattered fragments and that jumbled mess of half formed thoughts and actually organize them. Actually see what I was trying to say. Actually understand my own ideas with more clarity and focus than I had ever been able to achieve on my own. And once I could see my ideas clearly, once I could understand what I actually believed and why I believed it and how the different pieces connected to each other, I could articulate them. I could write them down in a way that other people could follow. I could produce something like this post, which is long and covers a lot of ground and makes arguments that build on each other, something I genuinely did not think I was capable of before. Not because the ideas were not mine. They were always mine. But because I finally had something that helped me get them out of my head and into the world in a form that did them justice.

And I want to be clear that it has not just been Claude. ChatGPT has been part of this journey for me as well. Different tools, different strengths, but the same basic truth applies. These AI tools, more than one of them, have been part of how I found my footing as a writer and as someone who shares opinions publicly. And I mention that because I think it is important to not make this about any one company or any one product. This is about what the technology makes possible for people like me. The specific tool matters less than what the tool unlocks. And what it has unlocked for me, across more than one platform and more than one AI assistant, is the ability to finally do the thing I always wanted to do. Write. Think out loud. Share what I believe. Be heard. That is not nothing. That is everything, actually. And it is worth fighting for.

And that is what AI does for me. It helps me be me. More fully, more clearly, more honestly than I could be before. It does not write for me. It does not think for me. It does not replace my voice or my perspective or my experience. It helps me access those things more completely. It helps me show up on the page the way I have always wanted to show up but could not quite manage on my own. And I know I am not the only person for whom that is true. I know there are people all over the place, people with things to say and perspectives that deserve to be heard, who have found in these tools something that finally let them participate in conversations they were always being implicitly excluded from, not because they lacked intelligence or insight or something worth contributing, but because they lacked the specific kind of tool that helps you translate all of that into something others can receive.

So when I talk about AI bans, when I talk about the harm of taking these tools away, I am not speaking abstractly. I am not making a theoretical argument about freedom or access in the general sense. I am talking about something that would directly affect my ability to do this. To write. To share my opinions. To participate in public conversation in a way that feels real and honest and fully mine. And if you think that is not worth defending, if you think the concerns I have raised in this post are overblown or dramatic or missing the bigger picture, I would ask you to consider what it would mean to you to lose the thing that finally helped you say what you had always been trying to say. Consider what it would mean to have that taken away, not because you did anything wrong, not because you hurt anyone, but because powerful people decided it was convenient and most other people were too busy being afraid to push back.

That is why I keep writing about this. That is why I keep raising the alarm. That is why I will not shut up about it even when the consensus seems to be pointing in a different direction and even when I know some folks are going to read this and roll their eyes. Because this matters. Because the stakes are real. Because somewhere out there are people just like me, people who finally found their voice, people who finally felt like they could say what they had always been trying to say, and those people deserve someone in their corner. So I am in their corner. And I am not moving.