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I was taking Friday off in Maine when two major pieces of tech news dropped: first, the White House released its framework for a comprehensive national AI bill with the intent of passing it through Congress. (Hayden Field, our AI reporter, has a thorough analysis of it here.) Second (and clearly more important), Polymarket opened the Situation Room, a pop-up bar in Mount Vernon Triangle that was supposed to be a room for “monitoring the situation” on, literally, a wall of television screens.
According to a report from NBC Washington’s Gary Grumbach, it did not go well at all. Friday apparently got off to a poor start, closing at 9PM due the giant wall of situation-monitoring television screens —the very point of the bar — not working. (The screens were still on the fritz on Saturday afternoon, and according to Wired reporter Makena Kelly, Polymarket provided guests free Champagne as an apology.)
A colleague of mine attended for a bit on Friday before everything shut down, and described it as full of young professionals still with their work badges and backpacks, “honestly not much different from any other kind of work mixer or happy hour.” Apart from a jazz band, a giant light-up globe and one working television screen — “a long table that looked like shuffleboard but was actually a screen that people looked down on” — my colleague spotted Josh Tucker, Polymarket’s head of growth, in the VIP area on an outdoor seating patio, though it was rather sparse. “It was also raining so [I don’t think] anyone wanted to be out there,” he suggested. The entire event, in his estimation, was “monumentally stupid.”
(As someone who’s covered blockchain-based restaurants and utter shitshows, I deeply regret that I could not attend. But please send all tips for the next restaurant opening, or anything perhaps of greater political and societal consequence, to [email protected].)
Red on red violence, AI edition
For months, I’ve written about the growing rift inside the MAGA coalition between the tech right that’s become deeply influential in Donald Trump’s White House, and the conservative movement, an activist coalition of influence groups driven more by family values and Christian ideology than simple loyalty to Trump. But what was once a simmering tension has now erupted into visibility and formality. On Monday, just days after the White House announced the AI legislative framework, a group of Republicans and conservative activists announced the launch of the Alliance for a Better Future (ABF), with the goal of taking a right-wing approach to fight the AI and tech industry’s growing political influence. The members are pretty high-powered in conservative circles: Michael Toscano from the Institute for Family Studies, Brad Littlejohn, the president of programming at American Compass, and longtime conservative political operator Tim Estes.
But within hours, it drew fire from another high-powered Republican: Nathan Leamer, an alumnus of the GOP-aligned digital agency Targeted Victory, a former policy adviser to FCC chairman Ajit Pai, and the executive director of Build American AI, an advocacy group connected to the pro-AI industry super PAC Leading the Future. (Major donors to the $100 million committee include Andreessen-Horowitz, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, and Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale.) He specifically took issue with the fact that Max Tegmark, a prominent AI safety advocate and the founder of the influential Future of Life Institute (FLI), had retweeted ABF’s announcement and positioned the group as a counter to the equally-influential Andreessen Horowitz crowd.
Screenshot via @NathanLeamerDC/X.
Let’s set aside the issue of who’s funding what for now and talk about the Alliance for a Better Future itself. I used to cover right-wing politics at a pretty in-depth level, and I can definitively say that the backgrounds of members of this AI skeptical think tank are a big deal:
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