Hello and welcome to 2025’s last issue of Regulator. If you’re not a Verge subscriber, get off the 2026 naughty list by signing up here. And if you’re a Verge subscriber — well, dang, that’s really nice of you.
Last week, I appeared on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC to talk about my reporting on President Donald Trump’s attempt to ban states from making their own AI laws. I don’t often get to appear on radio, but I love doing it for one unique reason. On cable news, you have 90 seconds to make your point and that’s all you get. On podcasts, you fall into a rhythm in a room of peers for an hour and even though it can be fun, it runs the risk of getting too insider-y. But on radio, regular everyday listeners get to call in, ask questions, and tell you exactly how the thing you’re reporting on impacts their lives. It makes you start thinking about what happens outside the weird little Washington bubble where your reporting comes from.
In this case, a woman called in to ask whether Congress had started working on any laws addressing “digital twins,” a generative AI model that mimics human behavior and is used by corporations for customer-facing interactions, and broadly, agentic AI, which is filling in — rather cheaply — the work that was once done by human employees. I had to quickly rack my brain to see if I’d run into any state or federal laws, drafts, or whatever that directly addressed the use of digital twins, and I couldn’t. (Colorado’s anti-bias laws come the closest, but address AI’s usage in employment decisions — not what happens afterward.)
Over the past year, I’ve written a lot about the tech industry’s version of Washingtonian political drama: companies skirting lobbying restrictions by “donating” to Trump’s “nonprofits,” MAGA internet influencers steering the White House’s policy decisions, Elon Musk getting dragged into Trumpworld’s soap opera-esque power plays, billionaires winning Trump’s favor one gold statue at a time. But the story I keep finding myself coming back to, again and again, is the politics of artificial intelligence — specifically, the industry’s attempts to swiftly turn politics in their favor, in a way that challenges the precious norms that’s kept the US government together. True, tech companies have signed massive checks for elected officials, promising to keep them in office, and created their own AI super PACs, preparing to spend unlimited amounts of money on targeting candidates promising unfavorable AI regulations. But that’s a normal way to play the political game.
When I first came on board in February — one month after Big Tech CEOs watched Trump get sworn into office, and weeks after Elon Musk began decimating the federal workforce — I laid out my thesis for The Verge’s political coverage: Technology is transforming human behavior, and human behavior shapes politics. At the time, I’d anticipated that Trump would represent the wave of populist discontent, largely targeted against Big Tech, that had swept him back into office, and that he’d represent their interests.
But less than a year later, it seems like the tables have turned: Trump’s voters are confronting the abstract, faceless, and unrestrained force of artificial intelligence influencing their lives in dimensions they could have never imagined — and the president is all too happy to help its billionaire creators take over.
This week at The Verge:
And now, even more Holiday Season Recess.
Regulator will be off for the next two weeks for the holidays, and quite fittingly, will return on January 6th. In the meantime, here is a canon position on The Discourse from Die Hard writer Steven de Souza:
Image via @StevenEdeSouza/X.
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