Indeed, it seems that the debate over AI has really, truly broken through to the mainstream this year: According to an NBC exit poll, 56% of voters called AI and data centers a “crucial or major factor” in their votes for Congress. Amid the free-for-all of President Trump’s first two years back in office, AI companies have been allowed to develop their technology largely free of regulatory oversight, but they may now be forced to pump the brakes.
In a lengthy interview with Ross Douthat on CBS’s 60 Minutes, Trump said he was open to working with Democrats to implement some AI guardrails. Still, no one I spoke to this week told me they expect to see sweeping AI legislation—unless, as two different tech Democrats suggested, there is an AI-caused catastrophe that “scares the shit out of us.”
In the absence of such an event, “we expect [new AI laws] to be narrow and bipartisan. Child safety, AI agent liability, and predeployment testing, for example, all have Republican cosponsors,” said Christina Ho, an executive at the financial auditing firm Oath Verified.
Meanwhile, even more explicitly MAGA-coded industries could see more concrete crackdowns. Those in “the crypto world,” who spent the first year of Trump 2.0 flying high, now “realize they’re screwed,” said an executive at a conservative think tank—especially as famed crypto critic Sherrod Brown makes his big return to the Senate with, as one Democratic strategist put it, an “axe to grind.”
