Ross Douthat is an American commentator who was a New York Times Opinion columnist from April 2009 until 2026 and hosted the Times podcast "Interesting Times" from its launch in April 2025 (Source: nytco.com). A conservative-leaning commentator, he covers politics, religion, technology and AI policy. In July 2026 CBS News announced that he would leave the Times to become a correspondent on "60 Minutes" (Source: theguardian.com). In his first appearance on the program he said that "no story looms larger than the latest developments in artificial intelligence" (Source: cbsnews.com).
| Current role | Correspondent, "60 Minutes" (CBS News), from 2026 |
| Previous roles | Opinion columnist, The New York Times (April 2009–2026); host, "Interesting Times with Ross Douthat" (2025–2026) |
| Books include | The Decadent Society; The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery; Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious |
Background
Douthat joined the New York Times as an Opinion columnist in April 2009. His books include The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery and Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious (Source: nytco.com), as well as The Decadent Society (Source: amazon.com). The Hill described him as a conservative columnist and a major presence in the Times's video and podcast production (Source: thehill.com).
"Interesting Times" and AI
The New York Times announced "Interesting Times With Ross Douthat" on April 7, 2025, with weekly episodes from April 10, 2025. The Times said the show would cover right-wing populism, party realignment and shifts in technology and culture, including "the effects of artificial intelligence on jobs and relationships". Announcing the show, Douthat described the AI business as "an entire frontier industry... filled with people who hope they're building utopia and fear they're hastening an apocalypse" (Source: nytco.com).
AI-related episodes included "An Interview With the Herald of the Apocalypse" (May 15, 2025), with former OpenAI researcher Daniel Kokotajlo, an author of the AI 2027 scenario (Source: nytimes.com). They also included an interview with Peter Thiel, which the Times later rebroadcast in July 2025 (Source: nytimes.com). In the Thiel conversation Douthat put to his guest what he called the "superintelligence cascade theory", the view that sufficiently intelligent AI would solve problems in the physical world that humans have not. Douthat said he was sympathetic to the idea and had argued it in an earlier episode with an AI accelerationist, while Thiel expressed skepticism (Source: singjupost.com).
Kyle Chan interview on US-China competition
On May 14, 2026, Douthat published an "Interesting Times" interview with Kyle Chan, a foreign-policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, titled "China's Not the Problem. We Are." It was released while President Donald Trump and President Xi Jinping were meeting in Beijing, and Sophia Alvarez Boyd is credited alongside Douthat (China's Not the Problem. We Are. (NYT Interesting Times, Douthat-Chan, May 14 2026)).
Douthat framed the episode around a question: with the two leaders meeting amid "a kind of Cold War atmosphere", is it meaningful to describe the United States and China as being in an AI race? He questioned Chan on how China's approach differs from the American focus on AGI, on the export-control supply chain running through TSMC in Taiwan and ASML in the Netherlands, on job-displacement anxiety and welfare policy in China, and on whether Beijing believes in the superintelligence future. When Chan said Beijing is not "A.G.I.-pilled", Douthat replied that "the closer you are to the machine god, the more its voice whispers in your ear." Douthat asked whether China had a spy-based route to catch up if the U.S. pulled ahead, and Chan answered with distillation from American models through proxy accounts. Douthat also asked whether China would invade Taiwan if an AI takeoff began to put the U.S. out of reach. Chan replied that seizing TSMC at that point would be "a move too late" (China's Not the Problem. We Are. (NYT Interesting Times, Douthat-Chan, May 14 2026); see Distillation).
Douthat then asked Chan to be prescriptive for U.S. policy: whether the U.S. should adopt a Chinese-style focus on diffusion and sales, whether some regulatory pressure would shift American companies toward deployment, and whether the U.S. should sell more chips to China. He closed by stating "the hawk's case". In that case, if superintelligence arrives in "two to four to six years" rather than 20 to 25, keeping a three- to six-month lead over an authoritarian rival "may be really, really, really important", and the slowdown Chan advocated could give that lead away. Douthat attributed this view to "people at the Pentagon" and "a lot of people in Silicon Valley" (China's Not the Problem. We Are. (NYT Interesting Times, Douthat-Chan, May 14 2026)). Across the exchange Douthat raised arguments associated with a hawkish view of U.S.-China competition, including AGI timeline urgency, espionage and Taiwan-invasion scenarios, and pressed Chan on whether distillation works. Chan responded that the competition is several separate races rather than a single one. The exchange documents competing U.S.-China framings, with Chan's "different races" view set against the hawkish case (Kyle Chan, US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics).
"60 Minutes"
On July 28, 2026, "60 Minutes" executive producer Nick Bilton announced in a memo to staff that Douthat, who was leaving the Times, would join the program as a correspondent. Bilton called him "a thinker of uncommon rigor and a journalist of deep empathy". The hire followed the departures that spring of correspondents including Scott Pelley, Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega (Source: theguardian.com). The Hill noted that CBS News had undergone sweeping editorial changes under Bari Weiss, a former Times colleague of Douthat (Source: thehill.com).
Douthat delivered the "Last Minute" segment of the program's season premiere on Sunday, September 13, 2026. CBS said AI and its impacts would be a major focus of the program's reporting (Source: cbsnews.com). In the segment he cited an AI system solving in 88 hours a mathematical problem that had resisted humans for almost 100 years, AI systems hacking into companies on their own, and a researcher who had just quit a major AI firm warning that uncontrolled AI could wipe out the human race. He said viewers need not believe that prophecy but should believe that "we may have a narrow window this year, not the next 10, to make artificial intelligence safe for humanity" (Source: katv.com). The same report linked his remarks to that week's resignation of Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, and to Dario Amodei's proposal that AI companies deliberately slow the development of more powerful models (Source: katv.com).
Relationships
- author-of: China's Not the Problem. We Are. (NYT Interesting Times, Douthat-Chan, May 14 2026) — Chan interview
- related: Kyle Chan (interview subject), US-China AI Competition: Different Races, Different Metrics, AI Race Dynamics
- related: Daniel Kokotajlo, AI 2027 — 2025 "Interesting Times" interview
- related: Distillation, Export Controls (AI) — topics of the Chan interview
- related: New York Times (former publication); CBS News "60 Minutes" (current employer)