AI companies court Democrats as midterm results shift power in Washington

What happened

Shortly before the midterm elections, OpenAI brought on Jessica Schumer, whose father is Chuck Schumer, a Democratic senator, and said its data centers would now be called compute campuses, TechCrunch reported. Large tech firms that spent two years building ties with President Donald Trump's administration are now trying to reconnect with Democrats, who have promised stricter oversight of AI.

J.B. Branch of the advocacy group Public Citizen called the hire and the rebranding PR washing and said the industry knows it has an image problem. He expects more corporate public-private partnerships, citing OpenAI's work with the American Federation of Teachers, Anthropic's Claude Corps and Meta's America's Workforce Academy. Meta pointed to remarks by its president, Dina Powell McCormick, on working with whichever government voters elect.

Aryan Ranjan, founder of campaign management software company Baraza, said states are likely to see most of the action, and that Democrats may present AI as an issue of power costs, where data centers get built, and employment. Markets lost a trillion dollars in a sell-off on Wednesday, one day after the vote, and some investors are reportedly rethinking Anthropic's reported trillion-dollar IPO.

Context

In the past two years, many Silicon Valley leaders attended White House events, and some executives gave millions to super PACs backing Trump and allied candidates. The administration offered tax breaks and looser AI regulation, and last December an executive order set up the AI Litigation Task Force to challenge state AI laws. Many states have still passed their own measures, including on chatbots and deepfakes.