Reported by The Verge AI
AI companies have a new threat: a wave of Democrats who campaigned against them.
Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.
On Tuesday night, Democrats made history as they took control of the House and the Senate, and a blue wave swept through traditionally red and swing states — with the nation’s first Black woman governor elected in Georgia, the country’s first Native American woman governor elected in New Mexico, and a Maine Senator ceding to a Democrat after 30 years in office. In these and other campaigns, one theme kept coming up : holding AI companies accountable to the American people. Now, the AI industry is left considering the prospect of regulation, data center construction slowdowns, and more.
More from the original report
Publicly, most major AI company CEOs have remained silent. OpenAI and Anthropic did not provide comments to The Verge; Elon Musk’s call on X to vote “red” for the midterms — the SpaceX CEO had spent close to $450 million backing Republican campaigns for the election — vanished after results poured in.
Privately, CEOs have discussed significant compute capacity constraints for their companies after Tuesday’s results, particularly OpenAI, per The Wall Street Journal . Meta’s platforms president, Dina Powell McCormick, says many are considering moving data center construction abroad . AI executives are reportedly privately nervous about the results but may also be able to blame them for not delivering as much revenue to investors. Many of the incoming leaders have promised to drag CEOs to testify . On X, a popular post by former X product lead Nikita Bier warned that “This is going to be like the Nuremberg Trials but for AI researchers.” (On Tuesday night, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman did post about how “people should always be in control of the future,” but he spent other parts of the evening talking about RAM .)
Tuesday’s results were a “total repudiation” of the AI field, says Wes McEnany, the former Deputy Labor Policy Director of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions, who now works with the nonprofit…