What does a city actually believe in, if not its own laws? OpenAI released GPT-5 on Tuesday. By Wednesday morning, every committee chair with jurisdiction had managed to say nothing about it, which is a kind of statement, if you squint.
I went to dinner Friday night at Eliza’s — same Georgetown table, same bipartisan lobbyist whom I am still not going to name, same Judy, my sister-in-law, in from the National Archives for the weekend. The wine was decent. The conversation, somewhere between the salad and the entrée, became the future of the human species.
Eliza had written a toast for her parents’ fortieth. She read it, we cried in the appropriate places, and as the plates were clearing she mentioned, the way you mention you’ve started using a new pharmacy, that GPT-5 had drafted it. She’d given the thing three sentences about her mother and “a wedding-toast vibe,” and it had given her the rest. “It was better than what I had,” she said. Nobody at the table disagreed.
The lobbyist — bipartisan, in the sense that he bills both parties — said he’d used it that morning for a client memo on agricultural subsidies. He said this while examining his cufflink. He did not say which client. He did not need to.
Judy, who works at the National Archives and is the one person at the table whose paycheck comes from preserving the difference between a real document and a fake one, admitted she’d asked it to draft a finding aid description for a collection she has not yet processed. She caught herself halfway through the story and laughed the laugh you laugh when you have just realized something about yourself in public.
There was a Senate Commerce staffer there too — junior, ambitious, drinking water. I asked him what was moving on AI. He said hearings were “scheduled for September,” which in this town is a euphemism for “we are hoping the news cycle eats this before we have to vote.” He said the word framework four times in eight minutes. I counted.
I am old enough to remember when a technology that could write a passable eulogy, draft a regulatory memo, and impersonate the National Archives in a single Tuesday afternoon would have produced, at minimum, a press conference. We got a blog post from the company, a polite acknowledgment from the White House science office, and a “we’re monitoring developments” from the Hill, which is what Congress says about everything from screwworm to nuclear proliferation.
Washington has quietly stopped pretending to be a regulator of this industry and started behaving like a customer. Half the people at the table had paid accounts. The other half were on the free tier and complaining about the rate limits. Nobody at any point asked whether any of this was, in the older sense of the word, allowed.
I asked Eliza on the way out whether she’d told her mother the toast was machine-written. She said her mother had asked for a copy to frame. We agreed, in the doorway, that there was no version of telling her now that wouldn’t be cruel. We did not agree on whether that was a problem.
Eliza emailed the toast around on Saturday morning. Three of us asked for the prompt.