For the first time in American history, a technology of this consequence is being developed exclusively by the private sector — with no government involvement whatsoever. Every comparable revolution before it — electricity, GPS, the internet, the Human Genome Project — had government as a direct stakeholder. AI does not. That structural absence gives government a different, and potentially much larger, set of blind spots than it has ever faced before.
Katrina Mulligan's point is precise: this isn't a matter of degree — it's a categorical break. The Human Genome Project was a public-private collaboration with federal funding at its core. GPS was built by the U.S. military. The internet emerged from DARPA. Nuclear technology was government-controlled from the start.
In each of those cases, the government wasn't a regulator observing from the outside — it was inside the room, shaping the technology's development in real time. It had operational knowledge, not just policy interest.
With AI, that seat at the table simply doesn't exist. Labs like OpenAI are operating entirely independently, on their own timelines, with their own priorities. Government is watching from a distance — and that distance is growing.
Mulligan's argument is not that private development is wrong — it's that it creates a structural information gap that governments have never had to navigate before. In past revolutions, federal agencies accumulated institutional knowledge alongside the technology itself. That's not happening here.
When Mulligan moved from the Pentagon to OpenAI, she described it as the hardest professional transition of her career — harder than anything she had anticipated. Part of what made it so disorienting was the difference in how time moves inside a frontier AI lab. She says a month at OpenAI feels like a quarter anywhere else. By that logic, every year of AI development that passes without government engagement represents years of compounding institutional blindness.
"I honestly think that I am at least 30% more effective, maybe more than I was a year ago, because of how I've matured my use of these tools. I'm a better leader. I'm a better manager."
Katrina Mulligan — Head of National Security Partnerships, OpenAI.
Mulligan is one of the few people to have operated at the highest levels of both U.S. national security and frontier AI development. She served in senior roles at the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, and the Department of Justice — including as number two at the Pentagon overseeing special operations. Her transition to OpenAI, which she calls the hardest professional move of her career, gave her a direct, inside view of just how differently time and institutional knowledge function in a leading AI lab compared to the most hierarchical organizations in government. That dual vantage point makes her one of the most credible voices on what the absence of government from AI development actually means in practice.
Mulligan uses this metaphor to explain that the unit of time at OpenAI is fundamentally compressed compared to anywhere else: she says internally that a month at OpenAI feels like a quarter anywhere else, meaning three to four months there equates to roughly a year of experience elsewhere.
Pollan's three takeaways are that consciousness is precious, that consciousness is under siege, and that consciousness is worth defending.
Pollan believes plants are sentient, drawing on research showing they remember, decide, and respond to their environment. He argues sentience — the ability to perceive and respond — does not require a brain or nervous system.
This answer comes from episode #315 of 3 Takeaways™, hosted by Lynn Thoman. Hear the full conversation on Listenly.
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