Time for another episode of Ask the Hatters! I was reading Jill Lepore’s New Yorker piece “ Does A.I. Need a Constitution? ” (March 23, 2026; archived ) when I found myself flummoxed by the quote at the end of this passage: A.I. companies’ democratic experiments quickly came to an end. This has made many people more rather than less anxious about A.I., especially in the past few months, owing not least to the newsworthy departures from leading A.I. companies of a number of high-profile safety and alignment researchers. “‘Shoot, the world is not paying enough attention to this’ is a way we all used to feel,” [Divya] Siddarth told me.…