The AI industry is pouring millions into US elections
bloodinthemachine.com102 points by speckx 4 hours ago
102 points by speckx 4 hours ago
Probably a sign that it is past time to tightly regulate all AI-aligned companies and their products to set up guard rails to prevent this level of corruption. I am a person who lives in a state where it is totally legal for lobbyists to walk the floor of the state legislature handing out envelopes of cash to any representative who will line up behind their proposed legislation. Bribery buys state laws here and it buys pretty much anything else that those with deep pockets desire.
One day people in this state will wake up and burn it all down by electing representatives who serve the people, not the corporate entities that desire a low drag place to do business. There are active anti-AI and data center groups now in the state. Once they get enough traction this bullshit will end.
Anyone at any of these AI companies that attempts to influence elections should be held accountable and should suffer the harshest consequences including confiscation of all personal assets. Multi-generational enforced poverty should be their reward.
Just my two cents.
Hahaha... regulation lol. That aint happening in the US. If you do see regulation it will be so crippled as to be meaningless but it'll give something politicians can talk about as "for the people". All regulations are written by industry insiders.
Regulation is not possible with today's politics. But it can become possible as soon as January 2027 politics, which is largely determined by the 2026 November election.
For decades people have proclaimed that we can fix things in the next election...but that has never happened in all of my existence and do not expected to happen in my life time. It's pure carrot chasing
But we were fixing things under Biden. The frozen potato cartel was defeated in court and Google was defeated in court as an illegal monopoly.
Then the Trump Administration came in (likely after donations from Google, and other tech bros) and suddenly that Google case was dropped.
Regulating against awful behaviors was happening under Biden, and no longer is happening under Trump. It's about as simple as night and day if you are paying attention.
What changes now is that historically, tech firms were largely apolitical. Today they are hard right support, so Democrats weren't used to memes or lack of free viral marketing (etc etc.)
Today, Democrats are finally waking up to the fact that they are being suppressed by both national media and tech media (Twitter and Facebook) and have begun gaining alternative means of getting their messaging out.
Things have gotten worse, but that causes the strategies to shift and the overall political fight to grow stronger.
Nothing of substance will change in 2026. That goose is cooked already after all the gerry mandering
Gerrymandering only affects House and the House is overwhelmingly looking like a Democrat victory.
Senate is statewide so it's innately immune to Gerrymandering. Like.... Do you even know what that word means?
Democrats aren't winning the Senate. They are not lock ins for the House either.
I dont know what is so difficult about this for you.
Are you proposing a different solution? Or are you content to be a cynic that does nothing?
Democrats have a disadvantage in this years Senate race yes. But polls have become so anti Trump these days that today, Senate races are looking 50/50 odds. Which is a huge benefit to Democrats when this years Senate race should be a Republican blowout (a lot of Texas, Georgia, Alaska kinda states up for Senate this year so Republicans should be winning. The fact that it's 50/50 in these states is down right crazy and shows how crap the Republican support is right now).
The House is a hilarious mix of terrible Gerrymandering (ex: Florida assuming that Latinos will vote Republican) or defeated Gerrymandering (Texas gerrymandering effect being defeated in court).
All in all, it's a hilarious self own where Republicans couldn't even be trusted to Gerrymander correctly and may have made the House a worse situation for themselves. So if anything, the Gerrymandering is seemingly leading to Democrat advantage because of how incompetent Republicans have been.
So as I said before: we are looking at House blowout for Democrats and even a surprise 50/50 odds for Senate. That is a huge change of that happens.
Your invocation of corruption/Gerrymandering doesn't mean anything if you actually look at what has happened. It only matters if Republicans Gerrymandered correctly.
Tech Influence Watch site: https://influence.citationneeded.news/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48632474)
(Blog post: https://www.citationneeded.news/tech-influence-watch/)
Yeah, this is amazing and should be submitted here on its own if it hasn't already.
I just found that one of my reps got an absurd amount of money from some shadowy group called "Think Big". Which is in turn part of a larger org called "Leading the Future" [0], which is:
> A coordinated network of AI-industry super PACs working to head off stricter AI regulation, chiefly by pushing a single federal framework that would override stronger state-level rules on issues like consumer protection and liability. Leading the Future is the lead committee, channeling money to the Democratic-facing Think Big and the Republican-facing American Mission. All draw on the same core backers — chiefly Andreessen Horowitz, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman and his wife.
[0]: https://influence.citationneeded.news/2026/networks/leading-...
First it was Search (mostly Google), then Social (mostly Facebook) now AI turning the global internet into their own unregulated playground due to pay to play on US soil.
All of which together will make algorithmic bias, data harvesting, and hyper-realistic misinformation flourish.
I really wonder when US citizens had enough. Third time is the proverbial charm?
Millions? Makes me think of https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
Comparing almonds to elections might be my new favorite way of saying "comparing apples to oranges".
A decade or so ago I participated in a (data-centric) hackathon having to do with water shortages in California. The acknowledged problem was data, or lack thereof. Most of the groups whistled past the graveyard and presented woulda-coulda "if we had the data / we can get the data by" proposals / findings.
We kept looking for the pony for most of the day. We found some pony exhaust, but we didn't find the pony. The rest of the group presented a plan for future research. I chose to give the minority report: based on the information we were able to obtain, California could solve its water shortage if every household ate 16 less almonds a day; an almond taking roughly one gallon of water to produce.
A couple years later the almond industry ran some ads that the "gallon of water" meme was somehow wrong, because other useful products were produced from almond trees besides almonds... so they said. Of course, it could have been a coincidence.
One of my team members (from Montana) shared a quote from Samuel Clemens: "whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over". That hasn't changed with data centers.
So they want a bailout when the inevitable happens.
This is interesting. I wonder how this might affect laws and regulations.
We aren't even getting a kiss.
If it's for sale, someone will buy
So about the same amount as the spend on a single row in a datacenter?
how long before “AI agents have voting rights too” becomes real
No need for that. People will ask their favorite AI who to vote for anyway.
This will actually dovetail perfectly with candidates using AI to write up their policy stances and work it into dynamic, emotionally appealing stump speeches.
I got mine to build me an interactive quiz for the UK elections, unsure if that's better or worse... It felt not so biased but who knows right?
The bias will come from your prompt. Asking AI - If voting for Reform UK is a good/bad idea? - shows AI where you at and what sycophantic it needs to give. AI is certainly not biased :)
Making it hard for politically inconvenient humans to vote is more straightforward than granting AI agents the right to vote.
Never? Even the whole "corporations are people too" meme where this sentiment presumably originated from is often misunderstood. It doesn't mean corporations have the same rights as people, it just means they can conduct transactions and can sue/be used. It doesn't mean they can vote.
I thought that the "corporations are people" meme was the actual rationale for why corpos "should" be allowed to spend money on elections: spending money for political purposes is free speech, and people have the right to free speech, and corpos are people, so corpos have the right to spend money for political purposes.
>spending money for political purposes is free speech, and people have the right to free speech, and corpos are people, so corpos have the right to spend money for political purposes.
From wikipedia:
>The majority also held that the First Amendment's free press clause protects associations of individuals in addition to individual speakers, and further that the First Amendment does not allow prohibitions of speech based on the speaker's identity. Corporations, as associations of individuals, therefore have free speech rights under the First Amendment.
In other words, corporations have the right to spend money for political purposes not because of corporate personhood or "corporations are people too", it's because first amendment protections apply to associations of people. This covers corporations, but also includes other groups like trade unions.
The flaw in this reasoning is that corporations are not merely associations of people; they are a special kind of association of people, which can be regulated specially. Hence, I think, why some have stripped away this motivated language and reduced it to the more honest and obviously absurd "corporations are people too."
>The flaw in this reasoning is that corporations are not merely associations of people; they are a special kind of association of people, which can be regulated specially.
You realize republicans can make the same argument to bash unions?
Sure, I don't have a problem with unions being restricted from political donations either.
Just like corporations can be regulated for monopoly (which by the logic that "corporations, as mere groups of people, have all the same rights as people" should be unregulatable because individuals have the right to assemble), we can regulate them for other things, without contradiction.
They already have. Unions generally can't donate to political campaigns, and can't do things like strike in solidarity with other unions which would be pretty clearly be speech if we're counting corporate donations to political campaigns as speech.
> Unions generally can't donate to political campaigns
???
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/carpenters-joiners-union/su...
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/service-employees-internati...
>and can't do things like strike in solidarity with other unions which would be pretty clearly be speech if we're counting corporate donations to political campaigns as speech.
Seems like a stretch to lump industrial action with political donations.
> ???
It's complex, but those are not donations to a candidate, even more so than the normal PAC and Super PAC song and dance. You have to give up your non profit status to donate more directly to a candidates campaign.
> Seems like a stretch to lump industrial action with political donations.
Seems like a stretch to say that political donations are speech and should be protected, but literal picketing isn't.