The future of AI regulation is courting the strangest, most anxious bedfellows

Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge subscribers about tech politics, tech influence, and tech shenanigans in Washington, DC. (If you’re not a subscriber, you can get on board here.) We’re back after a two-week hiatus, during most of which I was gallivanting in the Netherlands for a family wedding, and a trip to the Heineken Experience, which is, truly, an ~experience~.

Before I left, I asked everyone in Washington to please chill out while I was gone. This clearly did not happen, and I have returned to a political landscape that can be best described as that meme from Community where the room is on fire. Let’s get into that.

If you wanted to get a good sense of how Washington insiders viewed the release of Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical laying out Catholic doctrine on artificial intelligence, let me take you inside an actual room of Washington insiders.

Here’s the scene: a black-tie gala last week at the Waldorf Astoria, which used to be the Trump hotel, held by the Washington AI Network. In attendance, spotted among the dancers dressed like robots on stilts: AI lobbyists, AI safety nonprofits, tech industry representatives, tech journalists, Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, senior administration officials — Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Mehmet Oz, Department of Energy Under Secretary Darío Gil — and me. Papal nuncio Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, the Vatican’s top diplomat to the United States, is also there, making his surprise debut to deliver remarks to the assembled, who expected to celebrate the breakout power players of artificial intelligence. (Yeah, Kevin O’Leary was receiving an award. It was that broad of a celebration.)

The nuncio is trying to relay the pope’s message of safeguarding humans and the human condition before innovation and profit. But I can barely hear him. The salad course has come out, and Caccia is being drowned out by the sound of cutlery on plates and people murmuring to their tablemates, because this is prime networking time.

Even if the general public is excited about Magnifica Humanitas, the pope doesn’t carry the force of law, nor can he impose onerous regulations, and therefore the pope does not immediately matter to Washington. For all the dinner talk chatter, the AI industry seems to be experiencing some tunnel vision. Generally, corporate lobbyists try to befriend everybody, Democrat and Republican alike, and cultivate those relationships for as many years as possible without pissing off either side. But that’s not a possibility in Donald Trump’s Washington, where supporting a Democrat in the past could be viewed as disloyalty, even for tech oligarchs. (Billionaire and commercial astronaut Jared Isaacman’s nomination for NASA administrator, for instance, was iced for several months after Trump learned he’d once donated to a Democrat.)

On the other hand, if they give him money and make him look good, Trump can be convinced to give those oligarchs every regulatory ask they want and force the Republicans to do what he says. But even that control is tenuous. Here’s the incredibly brief recap of Trump’s most recent AI-focused executive order:

But although Washington can be chaotic and unpredictable, especially when Trump is president, there are two fixed points in time that everyone can plan around: once every two years, a federal election will take place in November, and the winners of those races will be sworn into Congress the following January. There will, inevitably, be some change in the balance of power. But no one can safely anticipate who will hold that power or what it will look like, leading to an infinite series of unknowns for tech companies: What happens if the Republicans lose the House? What happens if they lose the House majority by one member, or 10, or 20? What does this scenario look like, but in the Senate? Which Democrats will take control of what committees? What if Alex Bores gets elected? What if a Trump loyalist pushes out a Republican ally of ours? What happens if a friendly Democrat gets pushed out by a progressive for something we have no control over, like their support of Israel? And so forth.

But the tech industry’s own interests may be a key issue in the upcoming midterms. It’s easy for a voter to grasp the consequences of famous, instantly recognizable Big Tech CEOs standing behind Trump during the inauguration, or a gold statue from Tim Cook changing the anticipated price of an iPhone, or a check from a tech giant funding a gaudy ballroom (of all things). In this cycle, it’s even easier for voters to draw a straight line from those visible moments to the increasing and often unwanted presence of AI in every aspect of their everyday lives. Those voters complain to their representatives, those representatives respond, and if they don’t, the voters push them out of office in November.

A related light reading recommendation: One of the resources I’ll certainly be drawing on a lot during that time is journalist Molly White’s new project, Tech Influence Watch, which is tracking all the AI industry political spending in the coming midterms. White had begun the project as a way to track crypto spending in the 2024 election, but in the post announcing its expansion, pointed out that crypto and AI politics were inextricably linked — so linked, in fact, that the donors and strategists driving the AI super PACs were the exact same people. “The PACs may look different from the outside, but they’re increasingly the same operation with aligned goals: deregulate the tech sector, slash consumer protections, and allow tech companies to capture even more enormous profits at the expense of everyday people.”