What the AI Elite Is Developing in Secret

In this video, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald speaks with independent journalist and author Garrison Lovely about a question that is increasingly troubling leading AI researchers themselves: How far is the industry willing to go, even as insiders warn of risks whose potential consequences are difficult to comprehend?

At the center of the discussion are the power of a small number of AI corporations, the race to build increasingly powerful systems, and the question of what happens when machines take over human labor, political decision-making, surveillance, or even military applications. Greenwald and Lovely also discuss why these developments have so far faced so little public scrutiny – and whether they can still be stopped.

This video was produced by System Update and published on the Glenn Greenwald YouTube channel on the 9th of September, 2026. We have translated it into German and are republishing it today to help build opinion on this issue in Germany and beyond.

To read the transcript of the interview: What the AI Elite Is Developing in Secret

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VIDEO: What the AI Elite Is Developing in Secret

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ABOUT GARRISON LOVELY

Garrison Lovely is an independent journalist and author based in Brooklyn who focuses on the political economy of artificial intelligence and the intersection of money, power, and technology. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Nature, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review, BBC, TIME, The Guardian, The Verge, Vox, The Nation, and Jacobin. He is the author of Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Replace Us — and How to Stop It and was previously a Reporter in Residence at the Omidyar Network.

ABOUT GLENN GREENWALD

Glenn Greenwald is a former constitutional lawyer, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, and the author of several bestsellers, including No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State (2014) and Securing Democracy: My Fight for Press Freedom and Justice in Bolsonaro’s Brazil (2021).  Acclaimed as one of the 25 most influential political commentators by The Atlantic, one of America’s top 10 opinion writers by Newsweek, and one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013 by Foreign Policy, Greenwald is a former constitutional and civil rights litigator. He was a columnist for The Guardian until October 2013 and a co-founder and former editor at The Intercept, which he left in 2020 to launch his own show System Update on Rumble.