The Democrats’ Strategy As I reported, venture capitalist David Sacks and other AI “accelerationists” close to the White House have adopted a new strategy: Attack a preemption of state AI laws piecemeal, instead of shooting for a blanket moratorium that doesn’t have the requisite support in Congress. “From our side, the fear is that the piecemeal approach of doing this preemption little by little on these various bills [has] the ultimate goal… to string these things together and claim that there is a federal framework in place that now justifies full-scale preemption across the board,” the Senate Democratic aide told me. “For us, the concern has always been: Is the federal standard strong enough to justify a preemption of the states?” the aide said. “We don’t think that’s going to be the case for a number of these areas.” According to the aide, Democrats are prepping amendments to either strengthen the federal safeguards in the bills or water down the subject matter preemption associated with them. (For example, Cruz and Schatz’s chatbot bill would preempt associated state laws regulating chatbots.) The supporting coalition: A group of children and parent advocacy groups wrote a letter to Cruz and the top Democrat on the committee, ranking member Maria Cantwell (Washington), on Monday rejecting the House’s proposed alternative to children’s online safety legislation. The coalition, which includes ParentsTogether Action, Common Sense Media and the Children’s Alliance, said it was concerned that the GOP’s legislation would create a “backdoor AI immunity shield.” “Even the strongest of the proposed federal chatbot safety bills would leave meaningful gaps, and none has earned the broad consensus that should displace state protections,” the letter says. By way of explaining what Democrats are instead looking to do on frontier AI regulation, the Democratic aide noted that AI models have demonstrated that they’re capable of developing sophisticated cyberweapons and pose unprecedented national security risks. “We need a strong federal framework to address these risks to national security,” the aide said. The political fight: Senate Democrats also plan on turning up the political heat in this markup — highlighting a series of deals involving the Trump administration and AI and tech companies that the Democrats will argue have directly benefited administration officials and, particularly, the families of Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, according to the aide. “It’s hard to do an AI markup without talking about the elephant in the room,” the aide said. “A number of administration officials, a number of family members of administration officials, even Trump’s own family members, are benefiting from AI and emerging tech policies.” Democrats will highlight that Cantor Fitzgerald, which is led by Lutnick’s sons, led the private offering for USA Rare Earth’s stock in connection with the Commerce Department’s $1.6 billion investment into the company. Democrats will also discuss reports that a firm backed by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump took a stake in a company shortly after it won $1.6 billion in federal financing to develop a tungsten mine in Kazakhstan. There’s another influential figure that won’t be escaping the scrutiny of Democrats here: Sacks. Democrats will point out that Sacks has steered AI policy at the White House while maintaining a significant portfolio of AI-related companies (449 investments as of last fall, according to a review by the New York Times). “As Secretary Lutnick discussed during his Congressional hearing, he nor anyone at the department has interacted with or had any discussions whatsoever with Cantor Fitzgerald regarding the rare earth minerals industry or any of the companies mentioned in this inquiry,” said a spokesperson for the Department of Commerce in response to a request for comment. “Cantor Fitzgerald played no role in the award with the Department.” Anna Kelly, a spokesperson for the White House, said that all of Trump’s assets are managed by an independent third-party financial institution. “President Trump only acts in the best interests of the American public – which is why they overwhelmingly re-elected him to this office, despite years of lies and false accusations against him and his businesses from the fake news media," Kelly said. “There are no conflicts of interest.” Sacks did not respond to requests for comment. AI’s big intellectual raid The big AI companies are raiding the economics, philosophy and public policy academic departments of leading universities. There’s a big question surrounding whether it will produce better — or distorted — research on the social and economic effects of AI, as Nitasha Tiku reports for The Post. Since May, Google and Anthropic have poached three top economists from Stanford University and the Universities of Chicago and Virginia who have pioneered research on the economic impacts of advanced AI. As Nitasha points out, the high salaries and stock options offered by these AI companies can be difficult for academics to turn down. The researchers are also often promised exclusive access to internal data to conduct novel research to present to policymakers. But the trend also raises the question of whether these academics, once they become private employees, can speak freely and independently about their thoughts on the future. The frontier labs, in many ways, are leaving a vacuum of independent intellectual work and scholarship on the social and economic implications of AI. “I don’t really blame the companies for that because they’re not in the business of truth-telling, but it is a loss to the broader society,” said Brad Carson, the former president of the University of Tulsa and now the chair of the AI super PAC network Public First. “If you go to work for Exxon, they’re not going to let you write whatever you want about climate change. They just won’t,” Carson said. The outlook: It’s not just academia. From my perch in Washington, D.C., it also feels like the big AI companies are vacuuming up public relations professionals, former journalists and respected think tank scholars who work on AI policy. The most notable hire happened in June, when OpenAI brought on Dean Ball, formerly an AI policy analyst for the Foundation for American Innovation, to chair its new strategic futures department. “I’m simultaneously very happy for Dean, but also sad to have another extremely bright, independent voice join the labs,” wrote machine learning researcher and AI policy commentator Nathan Lambert on X. “At least OpenAI is more willing to let people speak freely. I hope that can continue.” Academics and think tank leaders might also artificially restrict policy recommendations or lines of research knowing that they could later land a job at an AI lab, as Stephen Casper, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, told The Post. “Most of the people on this floor have some potential idea in their mind about a future in which they work for Anthropic,” Casper said from his former office at MIT. 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