Hello and welcome to 2025’s last issue of Regulator. If you’re not a Verge subscriber, get off 2026's naughty list in advance by signing up here. And if you’re a Verge subscriber — well, dang, 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 making their own AI laws. I don’t often get to appear on radio, but I love doing it for one unique reason. On cable news, you have 90 seconds to make your point and that’s all you get. On podcasts, you fall into a rhythm in a room of peers for an hour and even though it can be fun, it runs the risk of getting too insider-y. But on radio, regular everyday listeners get to call in, ask questions, and tell you exactly how the thing you’re reporting on impacts their lives. It makes you start thinking about what happens outside the weird little Washington bubble where your reporting comes from.
In this case, a woman called in to ask whether Congress had started working on any laws addressing “digital twins,” a generative AI model that mimics human behavior and is used by corporations for customer-facing interactions, and broadly, agentic AI, which is filling in — rather cheaply — the work that was once done by human employees. I had to quickly rack my brain to see if I’d run into any state or federal laws, drafts, or whatever that directly addressed the use of digital twins, and I couldn’t. (Colorado’s anti-bias laws come the closest, but address AI’s usage 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 skirting lobbying restrictions by “donating” to Trump’s “nonprofits,” MAGA internet influencers steering the White House’s policy decisions, Elon Musk getting dragged into Trumpworld’s soap opera-esque power plays, billionaires winning Trump’s favor one gold statue at a time. But the story I keep finding myself coming back to, again and again, is the politics of artificial intelligence — specifically, the industry’s attempts to swiftly turn politics in their favor, in a way that challenges the precious norms that’s kept the US government together. True, tech companies have signed massive checks for elected officials, promising to keep them in office, and created their own AI super PACs, preparing to spend unlimited amounts of money on targeting candidates promising unfavorable AI regulations. But that’s a normal way to play the political game.
What’s unusual is their aggressive and swift attempt to reshape the law altogether — or, rather, eliminate any law that would place a boundary on them. They’ve tried to get Congress to ban states from writing their own AI laws, without suggesting any federal law to replace them; when those attempts failed, they convinced the president to sign an executive order that would punish the states trying to enforce their own laws. They’ve tried taking over the Library of Congress in order to change copyright enforcement and IP protection and floated several theories for a federal takeover: Mayhaps the Federal Communications Commission’s authority over telecoms could give the feds the power to regulate AI? And they’ve convinced enough people in Washington that they need those laws removed in order to compete against China in the AI race.
Very rarely do they suggest anything that proactively addresses the immediate, real, and growing human cost of artificial intelligence. Several polls show a bipartisan nervousness around AI, jobs are being lost to AI at a rapid pace, and every day, it seems like a new story comes out about how generative AI has psychologically harmed its users — particularly its youngest ones. That’s to say nothing about the environmental impact of data centers, the weaponization of AI by adversarial actors (yes, China is one of those), and to those looking even further ahead, the “doomer” position that AI poses an existential risk.
When I first came on board in February — one month after Big Tech CEOs watched Trump get sworn into office, and weeks after Elon Musk began decimating the federal workforce — I laid out my thesis for The Verge’s political coverage: Technology is transforming human behavior, and human behavior shapes politics. At the time, I’d anticipated that Trump would represent the wave of populist discontent, largely targeted against Big Tech, that had swept him back into office, and that he’d represent their interests.
But less than a year later, it seems like the tables have turned: Trump’s voters are confronting the abstract, faceless, and unrestrained force of artificial intelligence influencing their lives in dimensions they could have never imagined — and the president is all too happy to help its billionaire creators take over.
