Hello and welcome to the last issue of 2025 regulatorIf you are not the verge Customer, get off the 2026 naughty list Sign up hereAnd if you are the one the verge Customer – Well, dang, that’s really nice of you.
last week, i attended brian lehrer show on WNYC To talk about my reporting on President Donald Trump’s effort to prohibit states from creating their own AI laws. I don’t get a chance to be on radio very often, but for a strange reason I love doing so. On cable news, you have 90 seconds to make your point and that’s all you get. On a podcast, you get into a groove with a room of mates for an hour and while that can be fun, there’s a risk of giving in too much insider information. But on radio, regular everyday listeners call in, ask questions, and tell you how what you’re reporting impacts their lives. It makes you think about what happens outside the weird little bubble of Washington where your reporting comes from.
In this case, a woman called to ask if Congress had started working on any legislation “Digital Twin,” a generic AI model that mimics human behavior and is used by corporations for customer-facing interactions, and more broadly, agentic AI, which is – rather cheaply – filling work that was once done by human employees. I had to quickly rack my brain to see if I could find any state or federal laws, drafts, or whatever directly addressing the use of digital twins, and I couldn’t. (Colorado’s anti-bias laws come closest, but address the use of AI in employment decisions — not what happens after that.)
Over the past year, I’ve written a lot about the tech industry’s version of Washington political drama: companies avoiding lobbying restrictions by “donating” to Trump’s “nonprofits,” MAGA internet influencers driving White House policy decisions, Elon Musk being dragged into the soap opera-esque power play of Trumpworld, billionaires winning Trump’s favor one gold statue at a time. But the story I find myself returning to again and again is the politics of artificial intelligence — specifically, the industry’s efforts to increasingly sway politics to its own ends, in a way that challenges the precious norms that hold the American government together. True, tech companies have signed massive checks to elected officials, promising to keep them in office, and have created their own AI super PACs, preparing to spend unlimited amounts of money targeting candidates who promise unfavorable AI regulations. but she is the one General How to play the political game.
What is unusual is his aggressive and swift effort to completely reshape the laws – or, rather, to eliminate any laws that would impose a limit on them. He has tried to get Congress to ban states from writing their own AI laws, without suggesting any federal legislation to replace them; When those efforts failed, he convinced the President to sign an executive order that would punish states that tried to enforce their own laws. He has tried to take over the Library of Congress to change copyright enforcement and IP protection and has offered several theories for a federal takeover: Federal Communications Commission authority over telecommunications Could the Fed get the power to regulate AI? And they’ve convinced enough people in Washington that they need to remove those laws to compete against China in the AI race.
Very rarely do they suggest anything that proactively addresses the immediate, real, and growing human costs of artificial intelligence. many surveys show A bipartisan panic around AI, Jobs are disappearing rapidly due to AIAnd every day, it seems like a new story comes out about how generic AI has psychologically harmed its users – especially its youngest users. nothing to say about it Environmental impact of data centersThe Weaponization of AI by adversarial actors (yes, China is one of them), and for those thinking even further, The “catastrophic” situation is that AI poses an existential risk,
When I first came on board in February — a month after Big Tech CEOs saw Trump sworn into office, and a few weeks after Elon Musk began dismantling the federal workforce — I laid out my thesis for The VergePolitical coverage of: Technology is changing 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 office, and that he would represent their interests.
But less than a year later, it seems the tables have turned: Trump’s voters are confronting the intangible, faceless and uncontrolled power of artificial intelligence, which is impacting their lives in dimensions they never imagined — and the president is more than happy to help its billionaire creators take power.
- ,feed the machine,, Josh Dziedza and Hayden Fields: Leading labs like OpenAI and Anthropic need massive amounts of data in the race to achieve AGI. This comes with a lot of money – billions of dollars – and little-known companies like Mercor and Handshake are cleaning up in this AI hype cycle.
- ,StackOverflow users don’t trust AI. they’re using it anyway,, Decoder: Talk to CEO Prashant Chandrashekhar The Verge Editor-in-Chief Nilay Patel explains how ChatGPT became an “existential moment” for StackOverflow.
- ,What 1,000 pages of documents tell us about DOGE, Lauren Finer: As Brendan Carr heads to Capitol Hill, 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 expire, Justin Calma: The solar energy industry is trying to avoid Donald Trump’s attacks on clean energy.
- ,Parents call on New York governor to sign historic AI safety bill,, Hayden Field: He called it “minimum guardrails” that should establish a standard.
- ,The racks of AI chips are too heavy,, Alyssa Weil: Older data centers cannot physically support rows and rows of GPUs, which is one reason for large-scale AI data center construction.
And now, even more holidays during the holiday season.
regulator Will be away for the next two weeks for the holidays, and quite appropriately, will be back on January 6th. In the meantime, here is a canon position on the discourse from die Hard Author: Steven D’Souza
in the spirit of Merriam-Webster’s word of the year:Blissful slope-months and blissful slope years.
