Dem
47
GOP
53
Tech firms and their executives are definitely throwing their money around in order to influence politics. As noted above, Matt Mahan is their choice for governor of California, but there is more going on. All the big tech companies are spending hundreds of billions on AI. Unfortunately, to their dismay, people hate it for at least three reasons: privacy, job loss, and its effect on their electricity bills. Needless to say, the companies don't want to spend hundreds of billions to develop a product that the people (through their elected representatives) then regulate, restrict, or even ban. Something had to be done.
Leading the fight here is Palantir, the brainchild of conservative activist and immigrant Peter Thiel and controversial venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale. Thiel is close to J.D. Vance (in the same way that Edgar Bergen was "close" to Charlie McCarthy). Basically, Palantir is a gigantic surveillance company that sucks up everything it can find about Americans and others, analyzes the data using AI, and sells the results to anyone who wants to buy it. Among other customers are ICE, the CIA, the DoD, the LAPD and more. The shadowy company does not publish complete customer lists, though.
Palantir, OpenAI, and other AI companies have already pledged $100 million to help elect pro-AI candidates and defeat anti-AI candidates. What the AI industry wants is a weak federal law regulating AI along with a ban on states having stricter laws. A federal law might ban the use of AI for instructing people on how to construct nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons and leave it at that with all the other dangers (privacy, jobs, electricity usage) left unaddressed. Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) are big supporters of that. A Gallup poll last year showed that 80% of Americans want a lot more regulation than that.
Many politicians want to allow their states to pass more restrictive laws if they want to. AI is a hot topic in Democratic primaries. When it came out that Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL), who is running for the Senate, has taken a piddling $29,000 from a Palantir executive, he immediately donated it to a migrants' group. Other Democrats have followed suit. Like uranium, Palantir money is extremely radioactive, even in tiny doses.
Reed Showalter (D), who is running for Congress in IL-07, said: "I have yet to see AI solve cancer, and I would love to see it right now. The consequences have largely been increased costs for electricity and water and a medium-term decrease in employment and wages for the people in both the district, the state, and the country."
Even Ron DeSantis is not in favor of letting the AI companies run amok. He said: "Let's not try to act like some type of fake videos or fake songs are going to deliver us to some kind of utopia." He supports a state "Citizen Bill of Rights for AI," which includes privacy protections, national security restrictions, and regulations for data center construction. When Krishnamoorthi, vice chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus, and DeSantis are on the same page about something (restricting AI) it shows that the topic is catching on and could be a factor in some races this year and beyond. (V)