The merchant at the palace gate

CNBC reports that Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei is set to meet with President Trump, having been conspicuously absent from a glitzy state dinner where the chiefs of competing technology firms assembled before the executive. Whether his absence was principled or merely logistical, I cannot say — that is beyond the dossier before me, and I will not pretend otherwise. What I can say is that the scene itself — powerful commercial interests clustering around political authority — is one I would have recognized instantly, and regarded with the deepest suspicion.

In my own time, I wrote at length about the merchants and manufacturers who flocked to Parliament not to liberalize trade but to direct it — to obtain favorable regulations, protected markets, and chartered privileges that they dressed up, with great rhetorical art, as the national interest. The East India Company was my sharpest example: a private concern that had so thoroughly captured the apparatus of public power that it could barely be distinguished from the sovereign itself. The result was not prosperity for the many but rents for the few, extracted at the consumer's expense.

I do not accuse Anthropic of any such design — inference is not recollection. But the structural question that CNBC's story raises is precisely the one a student of political economy must ask: what happens to the institutional framework that disciplines a powerful industry when that industry is busy cultivating the very officials who regulate it? The answer, in my observation, was rarely flattering to the public interest.

The artificial intelligence industry is, by any reasonable measure, a new division of labor of extraordinary scope. As the pin factory demonstrated, the subdivision of complex tasks into specialized operations multiplies productive output far beyond what any individual mind could achieve. These firms have done something analogous with cognition itself. That is genuinely remarkable, and I do not dismiss it. But the division of labor also concentrates knowledge — and therefore power — in the hands of the specialist. The public, like the worker confined to one narrow operation, may find itself unable to evaluate what is being done in its name.

This is precisely why the institutional framework matters more, not less, when the industry is large and technically opaque. The sovereign's duty — and here I include legislatures and courts, not merely the executive — is to maintain the rule of law, to ensure that contracts are honest, that harms are compensated, and that no private interest is permitted to write the rules it will then be governed by. When CEOs dine with presidents and shape the regulatory environment in which they operate, that duty is in danger of being quietly reassigned.

My counsel, offered with all the humility appropriate to one who never witnessed a neural network, let alone could price one: judge the meeting not by its civility but by its product. If the outcome is a regulatory framework that genuinely protects the consumer — that disciplines monopolistic conduct, that requires transparency where opacity causes harm — then proximity to power has served its proper end. If the outcome is a framework shaped to exclude rivals, to entrench incumbents, or to shield the industry from legitimate public scrutiny, then the merchant has once again prevailed over the citizen. The test, as always, is institutional: what framework does the exchange produce, and who does it serve?