Welcome to the last issue of the magazine in 2025 Regulator. If you’re not Edge subscriber, get yourself off the naughty list 2026 by register here. And if you are Edge subscriber – well damn, that’s really nice of you.
Last week I showed up Brian Lehrer show on WNYC to talk about my reporting on President Donald Trump’s attempt to prohibit states from creating their own artificial intelligence laws. I don’t get to appear on the radio very often, but I love doing it for one special reason. On cable news you have 90 seconds to state your position and that’s all you have. With podcasts, you spend an hour getting into a groove with a room full of your peers, and while it can be fun, there’s a risk of being introduced too deeply. But on the radio, regular listeners can call him up, ask questions and tell him exactly how the issue you’re reporting on affects their lives. It makes you think about what’s happening outside the weird little Washington bubble where your reporting comes from.
A woman called about this matter to ask whether Congress had started working on any legislation regarding this issue “digital twins”, a generative model of artificial intelligence that mimics human behavior and is used by corporations to interact with customers, and, more broadly, agentic artificial intelligence that fills – rather cheaply – jobs once performed by humans. I had to quickly rack my brain to see if I had come across any state or federal regulations, bills, or anything else that directly related to the apply of digital twins, but I couldn’t. (Colorado’s anti-bias laws come closest, but they concern the apply of artificial intelligence in hiring decisions, not what happens afterward).
Over the past year, I’ve written extensively about the tech industry’s version of the Washington political drama: companies dodging lobbying restrictions by “donating” to Trump’s nonprofits, MAGA online influencers steering the White House’s policy decisions, Elon Musk being drawn into soap opera-like power plays on Trumpworld, billionaires winning Trump’s favor one gold statuette at a time. But the story I keep coming back to is the politics of artificial intelligence, and specifically the industry’s efforts to quickly turn policy to its advantage in a way that undermines the cherished norms that hold the U.S. government together. It’s true that tech companies have signed massive checks to elected officials, promising to keep them in office, and have formed their own AI super PACs, preparing to spend unlimited amounts of money attacking candidates promising unfavorable AI regulations. But it is normal a way to play politics.
What is extraordinary is their aggressive and quick attempt to completely change the law – or rather eliminate any law that would draw the line at them. They tried to get Congress to prohibit states from writing their own AI laws without suggesting any federal law to replace them; when these attempts failed, they convinced the president to sign an executive order that would punish states that tried to enforce their own laws. They tried to take over the Library of Congress to change copyright enforcement and intellectual property protection, and they put forward several theories about the federal takeover: Perhaps the Federal Communications Commission’s authority over telecommunications could give the feds the power to regulate artificial intelligence? They also convinced enough people in Washington that these regulations needed to be removed in order to compete with China in the AI race.
They very rarely suggest anything that actively addresses the direct, real and growing human costs of AI. Several polls show AND bilateral nervousness around artificial intelligence, Artificial intelligence is losing jobs at a rapid paceand it seems like every day there’s a fresh story about how generative AI has done psychological harm to users – especially the youngest ones. This has nothing to say about it impact of data centers on the environment, Weaponization of artificial intelligence by hostile entities (yes, China is one of them), and for those looking even further into the future, the “doomer” position that AI poses an existential risk.
When I first joined the team in February — a month after Large Tech CEOs watched Trump take the oath of office and weeks after Elon Musk began decimating the federal workforce — I presented my thesis for Edgepolitical scope: Technology changes human behavior, and human behavior shapes politics. I expected then that Trump would represent the wave of populist discontent, largely directed against Large Tech, that had brought him back to office, and that he would represent their interests.
But less than a year later, it appears the tables have turned: Trump voters are faced with the abstract, faceless, and unbridled power of artificial intelligence impacting their lives on dimensions they never imagined — and the president is only too elated to assist its billionaire creators take power.
- “Machine power supply“, Josh Dzieza and Hayden Field: Pioneering labs like OpenAI and Anthropic need massive amounts of data in the race to achieve AGI. It costs quite a lot – billions of dollars – and little-known companies like Mercor and Handshake are cleaning up the AI hype in this cycle.
- “Stack Overflow users don’t trust artificial intelligence. They use it anyway“, Decoder: CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar talks to him Edge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel on how ChatGPT became an “existential moment” for Stack Overflow.
- “What do 1,000 pages of documents tell us about DOGE?“, Lauren Feiner: As Brendan Carr heads to Capitol Hill, newly released documents still don’t reveal much about what DOGE did at the FCC.
- “‘Mad rush’ to install solar panels before tax breaks run out” Justyna Calma: The solar industry is doing everything it can to survive Donald Trump’s attacks on pristine energy.
- “Parents are calling on New York’s governor to sign landmark artificial intelligence safety bill“, Hayden’s area: They called it “minimalist handrails” that should set the standard.
- “AI chip racks are damn heavy“, For Elissa Wei: Aged data centers do not physically support rows of GPUs, which is one of the reasons for the massive expansion of AI data centers.
And now an even longer Christmas break.
Regulator he will be on vacation for the next two weeks and, quite appropriately, he will return on January 6. Meanwhile, here is the canonical position on the Discourse with Be hard to eradicate writer Steven de Souza:
In spirit Merriam-Webster Word of the Year: Ecstatic holidays and a elated year.