Smart Ass Take:
Our career politicians don’t have the interest or the brainpower to understand modern technology. That’s not an insult — it’s just arithmetic. The people writing AI policy can barely operate their phones without a staffer nearby. So greedy, megalomaniacal tech execs and venture capitalists have free rein and deep pockets to run roughshod over the whole system and basically make our republic respond to their whims. The scary part isn’t that billionaires are trying to buy influence — that’s a Tuesday. The scary part is how cheap it apparently is, and how few people with actual standing are willing to say so out loud. John O’Farrell, to his credit, is saying it out loud.
Article Excerpt:
Some of the most powerful players in A.I. — led by some of my friends and former partners, to my great sadness — have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to forestall a more serious and meaningful debate about how A.I. should be governed.
Article Summary:
John O’Farrell spent four decades at the heart of Silicon Valley — three startups, first general partner at Andreessen Horowitz — and he’s now watching his former colleagues try to purchase the regulatory environment they want. His op-ed in the Times is a rare thing: an insider willing to name names and say this is wrong.
The mechanism is straightforward. The crypto industry figured out in 2024 that you don’t have to win a policy argument — you just have to make it expensive for politicians to have one. Spend enough money defeating pro-regulation candidates and the rest of the legislature gets the message. The AI industry, led by a PAC called Leading the Future (backed by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI’s Greg Brockman, Palantir’s Joe Lonsdale, and others), has raised over $125 million to run the same play. Their first target: a New York assemblyman who co-sponsored AI regulation. The attack ads barely mention AI.
O’Farrell’s core argument is that bad regulation doesn’t get fixed by silencing debate — it gets fixed by engaging seriously and earning trust. He proposes that the hundreds of millions currently funding opposition research and negative ads could instead fund education boot camps for legislators, AI-powered public services, cancer research moonshots, and serious policy institutes. Radical concept: spend the money on the actual problem.
He believes the backlash will come regardless, and that candidates who take AI lobby money will eventually pay for it politically. He may be right. He may also be naive about how long ‘eventually’ takes when the other side has nine figures to spend.