How Silicon Valley turned Trump into a fellow broligarch
Hello and welcome to the final issue of 2025 of Regulator. If you are not one Edge subscriber, get off the naughty list 2026 in register here. And if you are one Edge subscriber – well, geez, that’s really nice of you.
Last week I appeared on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC to talk about my reporting on President Donald Trump’s attempt to ban states from developing their own AI laws. I don’t often get the opportunity to appear on the radio, but I enjoy doing it for a unique reason. On cable news you have 90 seconds to make your point and that’s all you get. On podcasts, you get into a rhythm in a room with peers for an hour and while it can be fun, it risks becoming too insider. But on the radio, regular listeners can call you, ask questions, and tell you exactly how what you’re talking about impacts their lives. It makes you start thinking about what’s going on outside of the weird little Washington bubble where your reporting comes from.
In this case, a woman called to ask whether Congress had started working on laws regarding “digital twins,” a generative AI model that mimics human behavior and used by businesses for customer interactions, and more broadly, agentic AI, which performs — at lower cost — work that was once done by human employees. I had to quickly rack my brain to see if I had come across any state or federal laws, bills, or anything directly addressing the use of digital twins, and I couldn’t. (Colorado’s anti-bias laws come closest, but deal with the use of AI in employment decisions — not what happens afterward.)
Over the past year, I’ve written a lot about the tech industry’s version of Washingtonian political drama: companies circumventing lobbying restrictions by “donating” to Trump’s “nonprofits,” MAGA internet influencers driving White House policy decisions, Elon Musk getting caught up in the soap opera-style power plays of Trumpworld, billionaires winning favor with Trump one gold statue at a time. But the story I keep coming back to is the politics of artificial intelligence — particularly the industry’s attempts to quickly turn policy in its favor, in ways that challenge the precious norms that hold the American government together. To be sure, tech companies have written massive checks to elected officials, promising to keep them in office, and created their own AI super PACs, preparing to spend unlimited sums targeting candidates promising unfavorable AI regulations. But it’s a normal a way of playing the political game.
What is unusual is their aggressive and rapid attempt to completely reshape the law – or rather to eliminate any law that would impose limits on them. They tried to get Congress to prohibit states from writing their own AI laws, without suggesting any federal laws to replace them; When those attempts failed, they convinced the president to sign an executive order that would punish states attempting to enforce their own laws. They attempted to take control of the Library of Congress in order to change copyright enforcement and intellectual property protection and floated several theories in favor of a federal takeover: Perhaps the Federal Communications Commission’s authority over telecommunications could give the federal government the power to regulate AI? And they convinced enough people in Washington that they needed to remove these laws in order to compete with China in the AI race.
Very rarely do they suggest anything that proactively addresses the immediate, real, and growing human cost of artificial intelligence. Multiple polls show bipartisan nervousness about AI, jobs are being lost at a rapid rate, and every day it seems like a new story comes to light about how generative AI has psychologically harmed its users, especially younger ones. This is to say nothing of the environmental impact of data centers, the weaponization of AI by adversarial actors (yes, China is one of them), and, for those who look even further, the “catastrophic” position that AI represents an existential risk.
When I first arrived in February — a month after CEOs of major tech companies saw Trump sworn in and weeks after Elon Musk began decimating the federal workforce — I presented my thesis for The edgePolitics coverage of: Technology transforms human behavior, and human behavior shapes politics. At the time, I predicted that Trump would represent the wave of populist discontent, largely directed against big tech, that had brought him back to power, and that he would represent their interests.
But less than a year later, it appears the situation has changed: Trump voters are confronting the abstract, faceless, unbridled force of artificial intelligence influencing their lives in dimensions they could never have imagined — and the president is only too happy to help its billionaire creators take over.
- “Power the machine», Josh Dzieza and Hayden Field: Pioneering labs like OpenAI and Anthropic need large amounts of data in the race to AGI. It costs a pretty penny – billions of dollars – and little-known companies like Mercor and Handshake are cleaning up this AI hype cycle.
- “Stack Overflow users don’t trust AI. They use it anyway», Decoder: CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar speaks with The edge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel explains how ChatGPT became an “existential moment” for Stack Overflow.
- “What 1,000 pages of documents tell us about DOGE“, Lauren Feiner: As Brendan Carr heads to Capitol Hill, the newly released documents still don’t say much about what DOGE did at the FCC.
- “The ‘mad rush’ to install solar panels before tax credits run out» Justine Calma: The solar industry is pivoting to survive Donald Trump’s attacks on clean energy.
- “Parents call on New York governor to sign landmark AI safety bill», Hayden Field: They called it “minimalist guardrails” that should set a standard.
- “AI chip racks are too heavy», Elisa Weille: Legacy data centers physically cannot support rows and rows of GPUs, which is one of the reasons for the massive construction of AI data centers.
And now, even more holiday playtime.
Regulator will be off for the next two weeks for the holidays and, fittingly, will return on January 6th. In the meantime, here is a canonical position on The Discourse of Die hard writer Steven de Souza:
In the spirit of Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year: Happy Slop-mas and Happy New Year Slop.
