In a Bloomberg interview Wednesday night in downtown San Francisco, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai pushed back against concerns that AI could eventually make half the company’s 180,000-person workforce redundant. Instead, Pichai stressed the company’s commitment to growth through at least next year. “I expect we will grow from our current engineering phase even into next year, because it allows us to do more,” Pichai said, adding that AI is making engineers more productive by eliminating tedious tasks and enabling them to focus on more impactful work. Rather than replacing workers, he referred to AI as “an accelerator” that will drive new product development, thereby creating demand for more employees. Alphabet has staged numerous layoffs in recent years, though so far, cuts in 2025 appear to be more targeted than in previous years. It reportedly parted ways with less than 100 people in Google’s cloud division earlier this year and, more recently, hundreds more in its platforms and devices unit. In 2024 and 2023, the cuts were far more severe, with 12,000 people dropped from the company in 2023 and at least another 1,000 employees laid off last year. Looking forward, Pichai pointed to Alphabet’s expanding ventures like Waymo autonomous vehicles, quantum computing initiatives, and YouTube’s explosive growth as evidence of innovation opportunities that continually bubble up. He noted YouTube’s scale in India alone, with 100 million channels and 15,000 channels boasting over one million subscribers. At one point, Pichai said trying to think too far ahead is “pointless.” But he also acknowledged the legitimacy of fears about job displacement, saying when asked about Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s recent comments that AI could erode half of entry-level white collar jobs within five years, “I respect that . . .I think it’s important to voice those concerns and debate them.” As the interview wrapped up, Pichai was asked about the limits of AI, and whether it’s possible that the world might never achieve artificial general intelligence, meaning AI that’s as smart as humans at everything. He quickly paused before answering. “There’s a lot of forward progress ahead with the paths we are on, not only the set of ideas we are working on today, [but] some of the newer ideas we are experimenting with,” he said. “I’m very optimistic on seeing a lot of progress. But you know,” he added, “you’ve always had these technology curves where you may hit a temporary plateau. So are we currently on an absolute path to AGI? I don’t think anyone can say for sure.” Techcrunch event Save now through June 4 for TechCrunch Sessions: AI Save $300 on your ticket to TC Sessions: AI—and get 50% off a second. Hear from leaders at OpenAI, Anthropic, Khosla Ventures, and more during a full day of expert insights, hands-on workshops, and high-impact networking. These low-rate deals disappear when the doors open on June 5. Exhibit at TechCrunch Sessions: AI Secure your spot at TC Sessions: AI and show 1,200+ decision-makers what you’ve built — without the big spend. Available through May 9 or while tables last. Berkeley, CA | June 5 REGISTER NOW

On Thursday evening, the Supreme Court handed down a brief order, which temporarily permits President Donald Trump to fire two federal officials who, by law, are shielded from being summarily terminated. That, in itself, is not particularly significant because, on April 9, Chief Justice John Roberts acted on his own authority to temporarily permit Trump to fire the same two officials. So the practical effect of Thursday’s order in Trump v. Wilcox is simply to maintain the status quo.That said, the Thursday order does contain some important new information from the Court’s Republican majority. While the Republican justices have signaled for quite some time that they are eager to give the president broad authority to fire officials that Congress intended to insulate from presidential control, the order includes a paragraph signaling that they will not allow Trump to fire members of the Federal Reserve.From a legal perspective, the paragraph is difficult to parse. And, as Justice Elena Kagan writes in a dissenting opinion, is not supported by the legal authority it cites. But it is likely to reassure investors that, while the Supreme Court does appear eager to expand Trump’s authority over previously independent parts of the federal government, it won’t permit him to disrupt the Fed’s ability to make technocratic decisions about interest rates. The immediate stakes in Wilcox involve a former member of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which enforces labor laws and adjudicates union-related disputes, along with a former member of the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), which hears disputes claiming that a civil servant’s employment protections were violated. Trump fired both shortly after taking office, despite the fact that federal law only permits them to be fired for some sort of neglect or malfeasance.The NLRB and the MSPB, moreover, are just two of an array of “independent” agencies led by multi-member boards, whose members all enjoy similar employment protections – agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Federal Reserve.For at least 15 years, when the Court handed down Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Board (2010), a majority of the justices have signaled that they are eager to strip Congress of its authority to create such independent agencies, and give the president full authority to fire these agencies’ leaders at will. Many economists and investors, meanwhile, have warned that it would be particularly dangerous to strip the Federal Reserve — which is supposed to set interest rates based on delicate economic calculations and not based on what will benefit the sitting president — of its independence, as doing so could throw the US economy into chaos.Thursday’s order is a clear signal that the Court has heard these concerns and does not intend to eliminate the Fed’s independence. It is unlikely to satisfy many constitutional scholars, as its explanation for why Federal Reserve leaders should be treated differently than the leaders of any other independent agency is so baffling that it appears contrived. Regardless of the underlying reasoning, however, the order does strongly suggest that this Court will not give Trump full control over the Fed.The “unitary executive,” briefly explainedTrump v. Wilcox is the culmination of a longstanding grudge many Republican legal elites hold against Humphrey’s Executor v. United States (1935), the Supreme Court case establishing that Congress may create independent agencies whose members may only be fired for cause. Though the leaders of these agencies are typically nominated by the president for a term of several years, and confirmed by the Senate, Humphrey’s Executor explained that laws protecting them from being fired while in office are supposed to ensure that they “act with entire impartiality,” and “exercise the trained judgment of a body of experts.”All six of the Court’s Republicans, however, have made it clear they believe in a theory known as the “unitary executive,” which is incompatible with Humphrey’s Executor.The Constitution provides that “the executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” In a 1988 dissenting opinion, which many legal conservatives now treat as if it were a holy text, Justice Antonin Scalia argued that “this does not mean some of the executive power, but all of the executive power.” And thus, if a federal official is charged with executing federal laws in some way, they must be fully subject to presidential control.If you take this unitary executive theory seriously, then there should be no doubt that Federal Reserve governors may be fired at will by the president. The Fed’s authority over interest rates, after all, derives from federal statutes instructing it to pursue the dual goals of “maximum employment” and “stable prices.” So the Fed is charged with executing federal laws.But the consequences of stripping the Fed of its independence could be catastrophic. In 1971, President Richard Nixon pressured Fed chair Arthur Burns to lower interest rates in advance of Nixon’s reelection race — the idea was to juice the economy right while voters were weighing Nixon’s record — and Burns complied. In the short term, this worked out great for Nixon. The economy boomed in 1972, and Nixon won reelection by a historic landslide. But Burns’s action is often blamed for years of “stagflation,” slow economic growth combined with high inflation, in the 1970s.The Fed, in other words, has the power to effectively inject cocaine into the US economy – giving it a temporary boost that can be timed to benefit incumbent presidents, at the cost of much greater economic turmoil down the road. It’s not hard to see how presidents could abuse their power if they can fire members of the Federal Reserve who refuse to give the economy such a temporary and costly high.One might think that these risks would be enough to caution the justices against overruling Humphrey’s Executor. But the Republican justices appear quite committed to the unitary executive theory, and they have been that way for quite some time. (If you want to know more about why they feel this way, I can refer you to three separate explainers I’ve written on this subject.)And so those justices spend the bulk of Thursday’s Wilcox order laying out the process they are likely to use to formally overrule Humphrey’s Executor. The order announces that the Trump administration is “likely” to prevail in its bid to fire NLRB and MSPB officials, and it temporarily blocks lower court decisions that reinstated the two officials at issue in this case. But the Court puts off the question of whether to formally repudiate Humphrey’s Executor until after the ordinary appeals process plays out and the justices receive full briefing and oral argument on whether to do so — which could happen as soon as the Court’s next term.The Wilcox order’s language protecting the Fed is gobbledygookEmbedded within all this language laying out the process to challenge Humphrey’s Executor is the paragraph indicating that the Fed is safe. While the two fired officials “contend that arguments in this case necessarily implicate the constitutionality of for-cause removal protections for members of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors or other members of the Federal Open Market Committee,” the order states, “we disagree.”The justices who joined the order then offer a single sentence explaining why: “The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.”It’s certainly possible to parse the components of this sentence. The description of the Fed as a “quasi-private entity,” for example, may refer to the fact that much of the Fed’s authority is wielded through regional entities, which are themselves controlled by board members who are mostly selected by commercial banks. But it is hardly unusual for members of the private sector to be given a formal role within government — just ask Elon Musk. Indeed, the Supreme Court heard at least two cases this spring involving the role experts from the private sector may play in setting government policy.The “First and Second Banks of the United States” are 18th- and early 19th-century predecessors to the Fed. The Supreme Court upheld Congress’s power to create national banks in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), but the nation abandoned national banking under President Andrew Jackson, setting off a period of economic turmoil, including an economic depression shortly after Jackson left office.But it’s unclear what any of this has to do with the president’s powers as outlined in the Constitution. If the theory of the unitary executive is correct, then no entity — regardless of whether it is “quasi-private” or is part of a “distinct historical tradition” involving banks — may execute federal laws, unless that entity is controlled by people who are themselves under presidential control. As a legal matter, the Court’s explanation of why the Fed is special is nothing more than word salad.The only legal authority that the Wilcox order cites to support its claim that the Fed is special is a footnote in its pro-unitary executive decision in Seila Law v. CFPB (2020). But nothing in that footnote provides any support for this claim.As Kagan points out in her dissent in Wilcox, the only relevant language in that footnote is a throwaway line responding to her partial dissent in Seila Law. Kagan had argued that “federal regulators” historically have enjoyed some insulation from the president. The footnote dismisses this argument, stating that even “assuming financial institutions like the Second Bank and the Federal Reserve can claim a special historical status,” the agency at issue in Seila Law does not qualify.The Court, in other words, waved away Kagan’s argument that institutions like the Fed should be shielded from presidential control in Seila Law. Now, however, the justices in the majority appear to be signaling they believe there is some merit to Kagan’s argument.If the Court does formally overrule Humphrey’s Executor in the coming months, the justices in the majority will likely elaborate on why a different rule should apply to the Fed. The best reading of the Wilcox order’s one paragraph about the Fed is that a majority of the justices have already decided that they want to protect it, and they would now like some smart lawyers to file briefs coming up with an argument for that position — one that uses terms like “quasi-private” and that refers to the early history of national banking.Of course, this is not how the law is supposed to work — judges are not supposed to start with the outcome that they want and then invite members of the bar to explain how to get there. But this also will hardly be the first time that the Roberts Court started with its intended outcome and reasoned backward to get there. It’s just being more transparent this time around.See More:

In May 2015, prominent right-wing intellectual Charles Murray published a book calling on the superrich to fund an American rebellion against their government.Titled By the People: Rebuilding Liberty Without Permission, the book argued that the growth of the regulatory state was worse than dangerous: It was an existential threat to the American way of life. For this reason, federal authority had become fundamentally illegitimate. The normal political process — most notably elections — was hopelessly compromised, to the point where no candidate promising to roll back the size of the state could hope to win.The best solution, in Murray’s eyes, was for wealthy donors to fund a legal defense designed to facilitate a mass campaign of civil disobedience against the regulatory state. This so-called Madison Fund would defend people accused of noncompliance in court and pay any assessed fines if they lose. With enough donations, the Madison Fund could ensure that nearly anyone could disobey regulations with impunity.By the People has largely been forgotten today. It was published one month before Donald Trump descended the golden escalator at Trump Tower, announcing a presidential bid that would alter the course of history. Trump’s rejection of old GOP orthodoxies, including its libertarian hostility to programs like Social Security, suggested that Murray’s anti-government radicalism might belong to an era of the past.But the events of the second Trump term, most notably DOGE’s lawless gutting of the federal government, suggest that the book deserves a second look. Its extreme hostility to the very idea of liberal governance, its skepticism of democracy, and its faith in the primacy of the wealthy over the law all prefigured the way that Trump and Elon Musk would assail key functions of government in 2025.Moreover, it helps us understand why mainstream conservatives — the sort who pledge unending fealty to the Constitution and the founders — have been so okay with all of this. It’s not only that people on the right fear crossing Trump; it’s also, in part, that they share his belief that the American government is no longer worthy of respect.For if the state has become too big to command legitimacy, to the point where ordinary citizens are justified in disobeying it, then why should anyone care if the duly elected government breaks laws in pursuit of shrinking itself?By the People, explainedCharles Murray has been a leading intellectual figure on the right for a very long time. Generally speaking, his work has focused on class and race inequality in the United States — and, more specifically, with the idea that welfare programs either do little to fix these problems or actually make them worse.His most (in)famous book, 1994’s The Bell Curve, argues that much of America’s class and racial stratification can be explained by gaps in IQ — suggesting, in one of its most provocative chapters, that white people have higher IQs than Black people due to their superior genes. The book made theorizing about genetic differences between the races acceptable among certain corners of the mainstream right, paving the way for scientific racism’s resurgence in the Trump era.By the People is, in some ways, a more ambitious book than The Bell Curve. Moving away from social policy, Murray strays into the realm of political theory — arguing not just that liberal policies have bad consequences, but that that they are fundamentally illegitimate uses of state power. The concept of “legitimacy,” generally speaking, refers to the principle used to assess whether a particular government is morally justified in exercising political power. In Murray’s view, the key principle is government non-interference in personal affairs. The modern regulatory state, and its involvement in life ranging from setting education policy to licensing barber shops, has become so corrosive of American liberty that it cannot be seen as legitimate.“It is part of our national catechism that government is instituted to protect our unalienable rights, and that when it becomes destructive of those rights, the reason for our allegiance is gone,” he writes. “At that point, revolution is not treason, but the people’s right.”Charles Murray speaking at the 2013 FreedomFest in Las Vegas. Gage Skidmore/Flickr Creative CommonsTo support this claim, he quotes a list of luminaries — ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville to Grover Cleveland — to argue that Americans have almost always believed in a state whose legitimacy is grounded in self-limitation.“The federal government lost its legitimacy in theory during the constitutional revolution of 1937-1942, lost its legitimacy in practice during the 1960s, and it has been downhill ever since,” he writes. “It is by that historical understanding that many of us who are devoted to limited government have thought of ourselves as living in a post-American country, governed by people who mouth the clichés about America as the land of the free without understanding what freedom means.”It may occur to you, at this point, that Murray has a democracy problem. Very few Americans actually agree with this libertarian vision of the American state, and they express that disagreement by electing non-libertarian politicians. In a democracy, the key principle of legitimacy is not libertarian theories of rights but rather popular sovereignty. It is the people, collectively, who decide on the limits of power — under conditions of free debate and exercised within constitutional constraints. If the people think the regulatory state is legitimate, why should Charles Murray and his libertarian friends get to ignore the laws that everyone else voted for?By the People offers two contradictory answers to this question. The first is that the people really have turned on the government, a big claim Murray supports with data showing a consistent decline in trust in government over the years. But this is measuring something different than basic legitimacy. Moreover, Murray once again has a democracy problem. If voters really were so furious about big government that they believed the entire state was illegitimate, then why aren’t radical anti-government politicians winning in landslides? To this, we have Murray’s second answer: that the people are bought off. They have become so dependent on government goodies that there is no hope for a return to pre-New Deal America.“The proportion of Americans who depend on the federal government to put food on the table, whether through welfare, Social Security, a government paycheck, or a paycheck financed by a federal contract, will continue to increase, and it will push the Republican Party to the center in all presidential elections,” he writes.Here Murray betrays himself: admitting, implicitly, that he does not really care about popular sovereignty. He admits that people routinely choose, in democratic elections, to authorize and reauthorize an expansive state — but dismisses their right to make a choice he personally finds antithetical to liberty. He is certain his libertarian view of legitimacy is true, regardless of what the people think, and thus is convinced that people like him are justified in ignoring the law.But how could anyone ever hope to win a fight against the federal leviathan when the people have been bought off by Social Security? This is where his “Madison Fund” financing civil disobedience comes in: Murray believes that successfully defending people who ignore regulations will help others realize that a better future without government interference could actually be possible.And it all starts, in his mind, with one good billionaire.“The Madison Fund could get started,” he writes, “if just one wealthy American cared enough to contribute, say, a few hundred million dollars.”By the People as Trumpist urtextMurray’s specific vision for a “Madison Fund” was certainly idiosyncratic. But his broader argument about legitimacy was widely shared on the 2010s right, heard often among the Tea Party types who dominated conservative politics for most of the Obama presidency.Indeed, By the People was received warmly among traditional conservatives, some of whom described its wild arguments as helpfully restrained. “If you want a book that will crisply outline what has happened to Madisonian America since the Great Depression, without scaring the neighbors, it’s your lucky day,” Charles C.W. Cooke writes in National Review. Some even suggested it didn’t go far enough. Writing in Law and Liberty, Lenore Ealy argued that Murray gave short shrift to the concerns of social conservatives. And that liberal America “created for itself a soft despotism” where people from various “identity groups” wield power to silence “men and women unwilling to subsume their identity in the will of the State.” Rolling back the state is not far enough, Ealy says — there needs to be a revolution in “cultural mores” that beats back identity liberalism.By the People remains useful as an unusually clear explanation of how widely shared premises on the establishment right led the country to Trumpist perdition.It is striking that, even before Trump, the idea that the modern American state was fundamentally illegitimate was such a prevalent view among conservative activists and intellectuals. The question was not whether the right must always defer to the democratic process, but how far it might have to go to get around it.In Trump’s second term, we are seeing the fruits of this vision. In many ways, you can draw a straight line between the basic premises of By the People and Trump’s assault on the federal government. The mechanisms are very different, but the ends are strikingly similar.During the 2024 election, Elon Musk became the billionaire anti-government donor Murray dreamed of, contributing “a few hundred million dollars” to the Trump campaign. His alignment with Trump got him appointed the head of a government-slashing committee that we now know as DOGE; once in power, he and his allies attempted to gut the functioning of various different federal agencies (to various degrees of success).Elon Musk at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February 2025 in Maryland. Andrew Harnik/Getty ImagesDOGE was not an effective cost-cutting mechanism. Nor has it turned up significant evidence of fraud. What it has accomplished, rather, is make federal agencies less capable of implementing duly authorized regulations. Effectively, it’s done what Murray wanted from the opposite end: decreasing the scope of the regulatory state not by resistance from the bottom, but a top-down effort to strip its capabilities. (Nor is Musk alone in this; look at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s firing of large chunks of America’s public health officials).The legal authority for all of this is dubious at best. Trump and DOGE have simply asserted the power to mass-fire employees and redirect congressionally appropriated funds, even though there are good reasons to believe that they do not have the legal authority to do either. Like Murray, they do not see the law as morally binding. These aren’t just simple parallels. The influence of ideas like By the People’s helps us understand why a conservative movement that once claimed to stand for the constitutional order has become comfortable with Trump wrecking it.The essential idea of Murray’s book, and much of pre-Trump conservatism, was that the federal government had become hostile to founding American ideals: that the administrative state represents an unconstitutional cancerous growth on a brilliant governing framework.“We have overseen and sanctioned the growth of an administrative system that concentrates the power to make laws and the power to enforce them in the hands of a vast and unaccountable administrative apparatus that finds no comfortable home in our constitutional structure,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a 2015 concurrence. “The end result may be trains that run on time (although I doubt it), but the cost is to our Constitution and the individual liberty it protects.”If you take this position, thinly veiled comparisons to fascism and all, then the fact that Trump and Musk have frequently exceeded legal boundaries starts to look a lot less problematic. Through this lens, the administration is trying to rescue the Constitution’s original design from a liberalism that has corrupted it. Any legal violations along the way are offenses against a political order that at present does not deserve citizens’ allegiance. In February, the news outlet NOTUS asked Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) about the lawfulness of the Trump/Musk agenda. Tillis conceded that it “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” However, he added, “nobody should bellyache about that” — because “it’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending.”Thom Tillis is not a firebreather: He’s a purple state senator widely seen as a moderate. That he would take such a permissive position on what even he admits is lawbreaking shows the corrosive influence of Murray-style thinking on the right today.By the People, on its own, may be a mostly forgotten book. But it remains useful as an unusually clear explanation of how widely shared premises on the establishment right led the country to Trumpist perdition.This story was adapted for the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.Correction, May 21, 9:20 am ET: A previous version of this story misdescribed Trump’s 2015 descent down the golden escalator at Trump Tower.See More:

Many students aren't allowed to use artificial intelligence to do their assignments — and when they catch their teachers doing so, they're often peeved.In an interview with the New York Times, one such student — Northeastern's Ella Stapleton — was shocked earlier this year when she began to suspect that her business professor had generated lecture notes with ChatGPT.When combing through those notes, the newly-matriculated student noticed a ChatGPT search citation, obvious misspellings, and images with extraneous limbs and digits — all hallmarks of AI use."He’s telling us not to use it," Stapleton said, "and then he’s using it himself."Alarmed, the senior brought up the professor's AI use with Northeastern's administration and demanded her tuition back. After a series of meetings that ran all the way up until her graduation earlier this month, the school gave its final verdict: that she would not be getting her $8,000 in tuition back.Most of the educators the NYT spoke to — who, like Stapleton's, had been caught by students using AI tools like ChatGPT — didn't think it was that big of a deal.To the mind of Paul Shovlin, an English teacher and AI fellow at Ohio University, there is no "one-size-fits-all" approach to using the burgeoning tech in the classroom. Students making their AI-using professors out to be "some kind of monster," as he put it, is "ridiculous."That take, which over-inflates the student's concerns to make her sound hystrionic, dismisses another burgeoning consensus: that others view the use of AI at work as lazy and look down upon people who use it.In a new study from Duke, business researchers found that people both anticipate and experience judgment from their colleagues for using AI at work.The study involved more than 4,400 people who, through a series of four experiments, indicated ample "evidence of a social evaluation penalty for using AI.""Our findings reveal a dilemma for people considering adopting AI tools," the researchers wrote. "Although AI can enhance productivity, its use carries social costs."For Stapleton's professor, Rick Arrowood, the Northeastern lecture notes scandal really drove that point home.Arrowood told the NYT that he used various AI tools — including ChatGPT, the Perplexity AI search engine, and an AI presentation generator called Gamma — to give his lectures a "fresh look." Though he claimed to have reviewed the outputs, he didn't catch the telltale AI signs that Stapleton saw."In hindsight," he told the newspaper, "I wish I would have looked at it more closely."Arrowood said he's now convinced professors should think harder about using AI and disclose to their students when and how it's used — a new stance indicating that the debacle was, for him, a teachable moment."If my experience can be something people can learn from," he told the NYT, "then, OK, that’s my happy spot."Share This Article