19th March 2026

Lightbulb

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I have to admit: I’ve been using artificial intelligence a lot more lately. Specifically, I’ve become good friends with Claude. Don’t worry—I don’t want an insentient robot to write Lightbulb for me, for it couldn’t possibly replicate my trademark off-topic tangents and B-grade humour. But Claude Code and other “agential” AI bots are incredibly useful—instead of merely writing wooden prose, they can execute your least favourite tasks for you.

But with the increasing usefulness of AI products comes an increasing environmental footprint—enough to give me pause about my own usage. As our climate columnist Tim Smedley writes in today’s Lightbulb, the growing demand for energy from AI data centres is increasingly eating into the gains made from renewable energy. Maybe I should tell Claude to take a break?

“Such untrammelled growth isn’t just gobbling up renewables gains,” Smedley writes. “It is also reviving previously mothballed fossil fuel energy sites. Data centres have nearly tripled the demand for gas-fired power in the US in the past year alone… Are we really going to fry the world for AI slop?”

One man embracing AI is United States secretary of war Pete Hegseth—well, he’s a fan of OpenAI. Anthropic (owner of Claude) not so much. After falling out with Anthropic’s executives over their insistence on ethical safeguards for the military’s use of Claude, Hegseth has said that the Pentagon and military contractors will gradually stop using it over the next six-months.

He’s increasingly playing favourites with the traditional media too, telling a CNN reporter that he looks forward to the broadcaster being taken over by the right-leaning Ellison family. On the latest episode of Media Confidential, Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber take Hegseth to task.

Such moves, as Sasha Mudd has written, threaten to undermine the US’s soft power. But thankfully for Hegseth, China is not exactly moving to fill the void—at least when it comes to big production films. As James Oliver writes, China hasn’t received an Academy Award nomination since 2002, despite other nations racking up Oscar nods. So far, their biggest films have been rather inward looking. Send your thoughts on today’s news to ben.clark@prospectmagazine.co.uk—I promise it is I who will reply, not Claude.

Benjamin Clark

Head of digital audience