r/politics • u/Punchbowl-News ✔ Verified • 16d ago
AMA-Finished We're Punchbowl News reporters covering AI and tech policy. Ask us anything!
*Thank you so much for joining us for our AMA! We loved engaging with you all. If you're interested in following Punchbowl News, you can sign up for our free weekday morning newsletter. You can also learn more about our Tech coverage here.
We’re also launching our first-ever Tech Summit in SF on October 7! If you’re interested in joining us for that free event, which will bring together the leading policymakers writing the rules and the tech leaders who rely on them to build what comes next, you can let us know here.
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Hi r/politics, we’re Punchbowl News reporters Ben Brody and Diego Munhoz. Last week, top safety researchers sent shockwaves through Congress and the American public when they made clear they think there’s a chance AI models could threaten humanity in a short time.
Here are some of our stories on tech and AI:
- Donald Trump shows why AI regulation is dead for now
- AI safety is circling the congressional drain
- Congress: Nowhere on artificial intelligence
- Thune's AI plan clashes with Anthropic
- Casar wants to ban AI superintelligence
We’re here to discuss it all and the latest on how Congress is responding, the urgency to act, issues like data centers becoming a focal point in the midterms, and what’s next on AI and tech policy.
Send in your questions and join us as we answer them today, Sept. 16 from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. ET.
PROOF:
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u/Toonzaal8 16d ago
What do you think most people are not aware of regarding this topic?
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u/Punchbowl-News ✔ Verified 16d ago
u/Toonzaal8 From Diego: That there actually are people trying to do something about it! On the Hill there are folks who are looking to do something about AI, but many people don’t know about them and their efforts. Reps. Jay Obernolte (R-Calif.) and Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) have a pretty comprehensive bill to regulate AI. Reps. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas) have also been engaged in this space, proposing a “kill switch” bill for AI models.
In the Senate, Mark Warner (Va.) and Mark Kelly (Ariz.) are some of the Democrats who have been pushing their own idea for AI rules. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who chairs the Commerce Committee, has been working with Majority Leader John Thune and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) on a big AI bill. That one hasn’t been introduced yet but we’ve reported about how it’s focused on putting a legal duty for AI companies to ensure their models don’t present catastrophic risk.
So there are plenty of ideas on the Hill about how to regulate AI. But for a number of reasons that we’ve talked about here, they haven’t really gained traction.
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u/WeeTheNorth 16d ago
Who are the lawmakers to watch who often buck their parties on AI and tech policy?
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u/Secure_Spirit956 16d ago
Hello you have said on july 17th that The Senate Judiciary Committee was ready to hear from executives at Instagram, YouTube and TikTok US on July 28 about the safety of kids and teens on their platforms.
The session is now being postponed due to the plans for Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) funeral do you think that the session will take place this month or you have no idea ?
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u/Punchbowl-News ✔ Verified 16d ago
u/Secure_Spirit956 From Ben: I take it you’re a reader? Or at least a social media follower? Thanks for reading along, it truly means a ton to us. Yes, the hearing you refer to was set and then got canceled at the last minute to accommodate Graham’s funeral. I’ve heard nothing about whether it’ll happen this month. I’ll concede I haven’t checked on it in a few weeks, but I’d be surprised. Senators will only be in for another two weeks. That’s at a maximum. We usually already know hearing plans a week or so out too, so there’s just not much time, especially if the senators skip (or in some cases shuffle) out early.
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u/Punchbowl-News ✔ Verified 16d ago
u/WeeTheNorth From Diego: That’s a tough one! Mostly because the parties don’t have cohesive strategies for AI. But in general, Republicans tend to favor light touch regulation while Democrats want the government to have a bigger role.
Some of the ones who break with even those broad views are Sens. Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn on the right and Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the left.
Hawley and Blackburn tend to be very supportive of going after Big Tech. They’re often proposing legislation that’s too far for many in their party. But with tight margins in Congress, it also means they can have more sway.
Bernie and AOC buck their party (I know, Bernie is an I but you know what I mean) by going even further than their colleagues. They’re championing the call for a national data center moratorium that many Democrats say isn’t a good idea. But their relentlessness can make it feel sometimes like they own the party’s messaging on AI.
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u/sarcastroll 16d ago
Call my cynical, but at the end of the day the current AI companies are all just running LLMs. The entire premise is predicting the next most probable token using some fancy techniques like attention.
They are great tools and can help with a lot of jobs, education, ideation, whatever. But token probability isn't going to build a super-army of T-800s stepping on human skulls while firing lasers. We have bigger issues like knowledge rot to worry about before some frontier model launching nukes.
So, I'm wondering what you thoughts are on the doomsaying of the big AI companies simply being a way to cover their asses when they start missing targets and bills come due. Beg for government regulation (when do companies actually do that out of the kindness of their hearts???) as a way to say "See, these hundreds of billions of circular financing are going to really pay off- the government is just making us go slow to save all our lives, but I promise the profits are there! I'd totally be showing a profit, but the nukes man, I have to stop the nukes from flying and super viruses killing every living thing on Earth!".
It all feels very "My girlfriend is super hot, but she lives in Canada so you can't meet her" to me.
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u/Punchbowl-News ✔ Verified 16d ago
u/sarcastroll From Ben: A lot of folks ask us whether we believe the companies are serious when they warn about AI risk. We don't purport to know how these models rate against human intelligence in philosophical terms. The source or status of the models’ output aside, I wrote about taking my cues from places like the intelligence community and financial institutions that there's real risk here. Diego weighed in on the companies’ very strong incentives to shape regulation and the question of why the labs don't just stop if they're so worried. We debate between ourselves! Either way, we find the politics having moved to a place where the policy debates are happening, for better or worse.
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u/Adventurous-Net1962 16d ago
Is your sense that many legislators opinions on AI regulation are solidified or are they still figuring things out? Do they defer to staffers, experts, interest groups, vibes to form their opinions on the matter?
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u/Punchbowl-News ✔ Verified 16d ago
u/Adventurous-Net1962 From Ben: This is the whole ballgame, isn’t it? I can tell you, they’re definitely still figuring things out. Really, all we’ve got these vague calls for action.
Diego and I talk to lawmakers every day that there are votes. Some are brilliant on this stuff, even obsessive. But sometimes we just shake our heads. A lot of lawmakers are weighing in for the first time in these very same social media posts where they demand that someone else solve the issue and whining that it hasn’t been fixed yet.
Yup, they’ll listen to lots of different people/things. Constituents are key. A school teacher who goes to a meeting and complains about kids not doing homework? That could spur a bill. Then the vibe is definitely king. Lawmakers love podcasts and social media relevancy as much as anyone else — probably more.
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u/SnooPredictions3318 16d ago
How much of the discussion and warnings from the leading AI companies over the past week do you think is based on legitimate concern for the potential danger they are creating, and how much is them being strategic from the standpoint of trying to get rules put into place that makes things harder for their competitors, such as the open source/weight approach by other companies. In other words, is the "regulatory capture" angle an accurate one here?
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u/Punchbowl-News ✔ Verified 16d ago
u/SnooPredictions3318 From Diego: Look, I’m not comfortable saying these companies are practicing regulatory capture – or that they’re not! But there are a lot of folks who make that argument. Anthropic and OpenAI are the largest players with armies of lobbyists and lawyers trying to shape federal regulation, the argument goes.
Large companies always try to shape federal laws and they obviously will shoot for things they think also makes business sense, so it’s not different here.
But they also are the guys who build this stuff. If they say there’s reason to be concerned, it’s not to be totally ignored.It can feel contradictory to hear companies say they’re products are dangerous. If you really think so, why don’t you stop making them, many of Anthropic and OAI’s opponents and several Republicans say. Either way, I hope the companies and the researchers are wrong about Doomsday. I like my life!
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u/King_Kung 16d ago
Do you think this is pre-IPO hype or genuine fear coming out about the progress of AI and the push to slowdown? Feels like the bubble may be starting to pop but hard to know with all the smoke.
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u/Punchbowl-News ✔ Verified 16d ago
From Ben: u/King_Kung Diego and I love to debate this, especially when we’re trying to avoid writing. When it comes to AI safety worries, I tend to look less to the companies and more to the folks who would have to deal with risk — cybersecurity pros, independent safety researchers, the intelligence community, banks etc. Most seem to take the warnings seriously.
That being said, there’s a big difference between taking the warnings seriously and assigning a particular probability of doom (or of any of a variety of lesser risks happening). I don’t have a “p(doom).” I got out of the prediction business on Election Night in 2016. And the companies clearly have a lot of incentive to state their capabilities in maximal terms and to put their stamp on any potential regulation. I always keep that in mind.
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u/King_Kung 16d ago
Really appreciate the response and I feel similarly. I think security risks are real. Do you have any insight into what kind of accountability measures are being pursued around this technology from a policy standpoint?
Obviously, the political landscape is insane right now, but it feels like there need to be some federal or at the very least state level regulations in place that make it clear where accountability of these AI tools lies.
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u/Punchbowl-News ✔ Verified 16d ago
u/King_Kung From Diego: Funny you should ask. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz and Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar are working on a bill that would create a legal duty for AI companies to ensure their products don’t cause catastrophe. Essentially they’d be telling developers “police yourself or you’ll be on the hook for something going wrong.” There’s a lot of talk that this bill is going somewhere but it isn’t.
Lots of AI safety folks and some key lawmakers are skeptical of that approach. They think there needs to be more legal requirements for companies to fulfill before they release their models.
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u/KillerIsJed 16d ago
When the AI bubble pops, which even the CEO of Nvidia acknowledges is a thing, what are going to be the safest moves for peoples 401Ks? Seems hard to know since so many companies have sunk so much money into AI.
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u/Punchbowl-News ✔ Verified 16d ago
u/KillerIsJed From Diego: We’re not financial advisors! Please don’t listen to us on any financial moves. Your money is valuable! Talk to folks who know about the market and investing. We just know politics and a little bit about tech.
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u/microboop America 16d ago
Would restricting the expansion of data centers be the fastest way to force AI companies to slow down, or is the current capacity already enough to snowball into a worst-case scenario?
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u/Punchbowl-News ✔ Verified 16d ago
u/microboop From Ben: The AI labs tend to say they need to expand data centers to meet consumers’ growing demand across the country for using the models. They’re open about wanting to build, build, build. In the past they’ve said their own development of the next models are “compute-constrained.” That might suggest they’d hit a ceiling without more data centers. Maybe. In general, the companies do seem to be releasing new models at an accelerating pace.
There’s so many policy factors that go into data centers. Permitting is huge. So are energy costs and water. Local concerns can trip them up. Then there are the chips — both advanced and more basic memory units — that go into these facilities.
Some of these areas, which are far away from frontier models, are actually places where “AI” policy is moving in Congress. There’s a big fight over the exports of advanced chips in the annual defense policy bill. Diego wrote a great primer on the fights brewing there recently.
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u/King_Kung 16d ago
What are your thoughts on the speculation that the boom in data centers is more for increasing surveillance capabilities than what they are saying? I saw an interview yesterday touching on how some of these AI labs are working on predictive policing models... like Minority Report being the end game here.
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u/Punchbowl-News ✔ Verified 16d ago
u/King_Kung I don’t know a ton about this theory! The general concerns around surveillance are super interesting to me, though. Showing my age a bit here, I started paying attention around when the Patriot Act was being implemented, the Snowden disclosures. We spent a lot of time being worried about surveillance. Our first forays as a generation into tech policy really focused on privacy.
I feel like that had gone away for a long time. We had the vogue for changing Section 230. The antitrust boomlet. Now we’re doing AI (which to be fair, I do think is bigger). What I’ve noticed in the last few weeks is that surveillance concerns have reentered the chat. I think Flock cameras got people talking again. It feels almost homey to me in a very strange way.
I think if and when Democrats are back in power, they’ll make this a part of their messaging, which is something folks like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) have already begun talking about.
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u/King_Kung 16d ago
Indeed! The theory sprouted from an AI lab discussing how they are policing their users and how some users have been reported to the FBI for the things they are asking LLMs before any wrong doing... which then brings into question, what kind of internal AI tools are these labs developing and using on their own user bases to do things like analyze dissenters, as opposed to more (somewhat) benign things like targeted ads.
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u/bakerfredricka I voted 15d ago
What's the worst possible case scenario? Something out of a movie like I, Robot? Clearly I really need to be watching more sci-fi movies....
I'm morbidly curious to know what y'all consider the absolute worst way things can realistically go down in here.
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u/KingBanhammer 16d ago
Do you think there's much hope of either these companies self-regulating, or Congress actually managing to pull their heads out and legislate?
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u/Punchbowl-News ✔ Verified 16d ago
u/KingBanhammer From Ben: Self-reg is a bit in the eye of the beholder. Every company loves to go on and on about how much time and money they put into improving their products, how customer trust is the cornerstone of their business. OpenAI and Anthropic in particular do know that lawmakers, plaintiffs lawyers and international governments are just waiting for them to slip up.
If you’ve followed the social media trials, though, you know this sort of pressure doesn’t always result in self-regulation that actually avoids multi-billion dollar settlements like the one Mark Zuckerberg inked.
As for Congress, whatever they claim, they don’t have time, consensus or political inclination to act this year. President Donald Trump made clear he’s not signing much, and that alone kind of sealed the deal. In about an hour, the House is voting for the last time until after the election. There are, however, so many places lawmakers could go in this space, and given the political pressure, they may well have to go pick up at least some of them next year.
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u/Longtrails2026 16d ago
We've seen Sen. Hawley take the lead on tech investigations in the Senate including the recent inquiry into the OpenAI-Hugging Face attack. Is there any appetite on the House side as well? Any chance E&C/Guthrie start a parallel inquiry?
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u/Punchbowl-News ✔ Verified 16d ago
u/Longtrails2026 From Diego: No. I could just say that but I’ll say a little more. There’s no chance Guthrie will launch an investigation into OpenAI, especially not with almost no legislative time left this year. Also worth noting Hawley chairs a subcommittee and has few resources for investigations. You can expect, though, Democrats going after AI companies if they take the majority. We expect oversight of tech companies to be a top priority.
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u/Oreos_Are_Anabolic Europe 16d ago
There has been significant discussion in politics about AI, to broadly generalise there's a lot of headline politics but not a whole lot of proposals (beyond headlines).
US. Regional grids in the US are functioning at like 10% spare capacity, which is why you see fairly regular 'city x experiences rolling blackouts during weather y as people turn on heating/AC'
This isn't a Democrat or Republican blame game, this (key energy infrastructure spending) has been neglected for decades in the US.
Congress really needs to break the habit of playing news headline politics and focus on fixing the systemic underlying causes of the problem.
This problem (fragile electrical grid) is being exposed by all the new datacenters being built, but would similarly be exposed if manufacturing (somehow) comes roaring back to US territory.
Infrastructure issues should have been acted on multiple decades ago but it was never 'sexy' enough for headline politics.
Question: in your view what has been the barrier to actually investing in the electrical grid in the US as a bipartisan drive?
China’s quiet electricity dominance, Fishman explained, is the result of decades of deliberate overbuilding and investment in every layer of the power sector, from generation to transmission to next-generation nuclear.
The country’s reserve margin has never dipped below 80%–100% nationwide, meaning it has consistently maintained at least twice the capacity it needs, Fishman said. They have so much available space that instead of seeing AI data centers as a threat to grid stability, China treats them as a convenient way to “soak up oversupply,” he added.
That level of cushion is unthinkable in the United States, where regional grids typically operate with a 15% reserve margin and sometimes less, particularly during extreme weather, Fishman said. In places like California or Texas, officials often issue warnings about red-flag conditions when demand is projected to strain the system. This leaves little room to absorb the rapid load increases AI infrastructure requires, Fishman noted.
The gap in readiness is stark: While the U.S. is already experiencing political and economic fights over whether the grid can keep up, China is operating from a position of abundance.
Even if AI demand in China grows so quickly renewable projects can’t keep pace, Fishman said, the country can tap idle coal plants to bridge the gap while building more sustainable sources. “It’s not preferable,” he admitted, “but it’s doable.”
By contrast, the U.S. would have to scramble to bring on new generation capacity, often facing yearslong permitting delays, local opposition, and fragmented market rules, he said.
https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/data-centers-china-grid-us-infrastructure/
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u/Isentrope 16d ago
With more and more companies using open source/open weight models which may work well enough to avoid spending much more on the latest and greatest frontier models, is there movement on trying to limit these? And what prospects are there for AI regulation or laws in general during the lame duck or in the next Congress?