Collin Hogue-Spears

AI:AM LIVE — September 10, 2026 — The Coxon Backlash Meets the Conspiracy Read, Collin Hogue-Spears on How China's AI Rules Actually Work, Baseten's Amir Haghighat on Sandboxes and the Blaxel Deal, and a Stream Failure That Ate the Interview

A show that ran nearly three hours and lost twelve minutes of itself. Nathan Labenz and Prakash Narayanan open on the second day of the Jacob Coxon story, now less a resignation than a fight over what the resignation was: Prakash walks through the right-wing read that it was a coordinated operation — a scrubbed account, a Wall Street Journal exclusive timed to the post, familiar amplifiers, familiar funders — and Nathan calls it a midwit conspiracy theory, explaining from personal experience how the Survival and Flourishing Fund's champion model actually distributes money and why the dollar figures being treated as suspicious are, next to METR's $75M or Geoffrey Irving's new organization's $150M, rounding errors. Prakash's counter is narrower and lands harder: AI safety hires the way elite universities graduate, and a Second Amendment conception of AI safety would never get a hearing inside a frontier lab. Collin Hogue-Spears, author of From Lab to Life: How AI Works in China, then spends forty-three minutes on the mechanics almost nobody reads — the algorithm-filing regime, the split between national-security and non-national-security model registries, what an MLPS audit actually asks of a cloud provider that legally cannot sell to its own customers — and argues the gap between the US and China is about fear rather than capability, that Beijing would know about a Chinese OpenFace-style breakout before the public did, and that he has low expectations for the coming Trump-Xi meeting because AI arms control is far harder to verify than the nuclear kind. Baseten co-founder and CTO Amir Haghighat comes on to talk about the Blaxel acquisition — five days old, and Baseten was a Blaxel customer before it was an owner — and draws the security line where a micro-VM vendor can actually draw it: Baseten can guarantee one customer's code cannot touch another's and can catch an agent trying to break out, but what a customer's agent does inside its own sandbox is the customer's problem. Seven and a half minutes in, mid-answer, the stream died. Amir never came back, twelve minutes of the interview exist on no recording anywhere, and the show's closing became its longest segment: Prakash's margin-stack reading of the GPU cloud business, Dan Hendrycks' new essay against utilitarianism at AI companies, whether AIs are moral patients at all, and Prakash's argument that the takeover people fear already happened — through financial markets, which have been removing heads of government for decades.