Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly building a C.E.O. agent to help ease the demands of his job. Perhaps—as former interim C.E.O. of OpenAI Emmett Shear said a few years ago—“most of the C.E.O.’s job (and the majority of most executive jobs) are very automatable.” I wonder if ZuckGPT would’ve approved spending tens of billions on the metaverse…

And now for the main event…

New York Governor Kathy Hochul sounds like many politicians on A.I. these days—impressed, maybe a little worried, and trying to be practical about the unstoppable technological freight train headed our way. When I called her late last week, she waxed poetic about ensuring A.I. is “compatible with the public good” before ticking off the various trade-offs she’s now trying to navigate: bringing high-paying tech jobs to the state without driving white-collar work to extinction, solving society’s “most-pressing problems” without jacking up constituents’ electric bills, etcetera. In short, she wants the best of all possible worlds. “I do not want to be alarmist,” she told me. “I see the upside, I see the downside.”

Hochul’s middle-of-the-road mentality is not unique—California Gov. Gavin Newsom is as focused on regulating A.I. as on ensuring the industry continues to thrive, and former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin talked up  “responsible governance” without “stifling” the A.I. industry. Likewise, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis wants to “protect consumers and support innovation” while Rep. Sam Liccardo, the congressman representing Palo Alto and Atherton, told my Puck partner Leigh Ann Caldwell this week that Democrats need to get over their anxiety and embrace the future. (No surprise there…)

But as the technology accelerates and the specter of widespread job displacement begins to appear slightly less hypothetical, a populist backlash is building at both ends of the political spectrum. Hochul told me she’s bracing for a “seismic impact,” and worries about “students who took on debt to get degrees in fields that may be evaporating because of A.I.” Other politicians have gone further: Sen. Bernie Sanders recently called for a national moratorium on all data center construction—not just to keep electric bills low, he says, but to prevent “a catastrophic impact on the lives of working-class Americans, eliminating tens of millions of blue- and white-collar jobs in every sector of our economy.” Republican Sen. Josh Hawley has sounded similar notes, declaring that “these companies cannot be trusted with this power.”

Hochul, for her part, is trying to thread the centrist needle of responding to popular alarm while also courting the tech industry. She and Newsom are the two most prominent governors to sign state-level A.I. regulations—though she’s arguably been more cautious about overreach. (She lobbied, with some success, to make New York’s signature A.I. legislation, the RAISE Act, more industry-friendly.) Yet she also reflected on the fate of the steel industry where she grew up, when a combination of trade and automation wiped out an entire workforce in the 1970s. “Everyone said, ‘The last one out, turn off the lights,’” she said. “I don’t want that to happen.”

Of course, voters aren’t salivating over the idea of replacing themselves with bots either. Hochul cited recent polls showing that “almost 80 percent of voters don’t think government has a plan to protect them from A.I. job losses.” More broadly, people simply don’t trust A.I. or the companies promoting it: For years, large bipartisan majorities of American voters have said they want the government to regulate A.I., even at the cost of slowing down progress.

Asad Ramzanali, the director of A.I. and tech policy at Vanderbilt University’s Policy Accelerator, agreed that the potential impact to employment is one of the main reasons why voters worry about the technology. But he also pointed to two others: data centers, which are driving up electricity costs, and the effects that A.I. might have on kids. “All of that is part of the milieu of rising inequality and people seeing a chumminess between Big Tech and politicians,” he said. “That’s all the social cost. What’s the social benefit? For most people, I don’t think it feels that transformative, but it does feel that socially costly.”

In the short term, data centers are likely to be the most obvious targets of community dissatisfaction. Local opposition began to reach new heights last year, seemingly playing a major role in the postponements and cancellations of at least 25 data center projects—a four-fold increase from 2024. And the backlash is only accelerating: In January, 34 data centers were canceled or postponed; in February, that number rose to 71. Last year, the political relevance of data centers was enough to help John McAuliff win a seat in the Virginia legislature, and it was certainly an aspect of Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s successful campaign. (Spanberger embraced the centrist message of having data centers “pay their fair share” while praising their potential to create jobs and raise tax revenue.)

The midterms will provide another test of A.I. politics, though candidates are still fumbling for the right framing. In Connecticut, U.S. House hopeful Luke Bronin is pushing the standard innovation-with-guardrails message; Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow of Michigan wants to protect kids from chatbots; and the House campaign of New York’s Alex Bores is basically ground zero for the dark-money battle between Leading the Future, a pro-A.I. group backed by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and a pro-regulation, Anthropic-backed entity.

Unlike most issues in politics today, the A.I. fight hasn’t yet coalesced along partisan lines: For now, the industry finds itself in the unlikely position of fighting both Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon. “All these politicians are trying to weigh the practical drawbacks of the policy and the political impact of who has money,” said one source who works on House and Senate campaigns. In other words, influence over the emerging anti-A.I. bloc is still up for grabs. Meanwhile, both Democrats and Republicans are offering up variations on the Sanders aria without really answering the harder question: What happens if the jobs disappear?

None of this is likely to determine who will control Congress after the midterms—as Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer told me, this election will be more about Iran, affordability, immigration, and possibly Jeffrey Epstein. “I think A.I. will be interesting in a couple of races, but I think it’s 2028, not 2026, in part because lots and lots of different candidates have an angle,” he said. “It’s not a thing. It’s a bunch of things. And when it’s a bunch of things, it’s very hard to coalesce a national message.”

But a source who works with one of the major A.I. super PACs told me that the technology is definitely “going to be a kitchen-table issue at some point—maybe not this cycle, but definitely next cycle.” Bremmer went on to stress to me “just how uncertain we all are about where this is going to play. There are 20 different ways this could play out meaningfully over the next couple of years, and they’re all happening.” According to a recent poll from the Rainey Center, 43 percent of voters said it is “essential” that a presidential candidate in the 2028 election have a “clear, detailed plan on A.I. regulation and job protection.” By then, of course, it should be much more obvious whether the best- or worst-case scenarios for A.I. are coming to pass.

Back in New York, Hochul hadn’t worked out the “clear, detailed” part of this either—indeed, figuring it out is part of the purpose of the commission on worker resiliency she launched last week. “Does this mean we only need A.I. teaching our students? Are robotics and A.I. going to be providing healthcare?” she wondered, then admitted: “I don’t know these answers.” But she certainly sees the political opportunity. “I don’t want to capitalize on people’s pain, but to the extent you have leaders who are not tone-deaf—who are seeing it, understanding it, feeling it, empathetic to the anxiety that residents are feeling, and talking about having plans for it—I think that gives people a higher level of comfort than leaders who are just ignoring it or trying to monetize it for their own benefit.”

That’s all for today. I’ll see you on Thursday.

Ian

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