Trump’s victory has set Californian lawmakers on a collision court with Big Tech
For a state that hasn’t turned red since 1988, Donald Trump was propelled to a second stint in the White House on Californian money.
From venture capitalists Marc Andreesen and David Sacks to Peter Thiel, the so-called ‘kingmaker’ of the New Right, the President-elect pulled an eclectic team of California-based backers behind his campaign. It’s part of a well-documented ‘Silicon shift’ that has seen the political views of the Valley’s top tech chiefs move steadily away from their traditionally liberal home.
But Trump’s election has set the stage for the second round of a bout has pitted California’s legislators against a now emboldened clique of techno-libertarians.
The ring will be the regulation of artificial intelligence, as it was in September, when landmark legislation mandating a range of safety requirements for advanced AI systems was controversially vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom.
Prior to his decision, eminent Valley voices such as Fei Fei Li and Andrew Ng turned to the pages of Fortune and Time Magazine to heap pressure on the Governor.
Enacting the bill, to cite the latter, would be a ‘grave mistake’, stifling innovation on a ‘nascent technology that will benefit billions of people’.
It was part of a campaign that saw tech titans Meta and OpenAI team up with venture capital firms Y Combinator and Andressen Horowitz – co-founded by the very same Marc Andressen – to oppose a bill that would have required models costing more than $100 million to develop safety protocols against ‘critical harm’.
In the aftermath of the bill’s failure, its architect, State Senator Scott Wiener, told TechCrunch he’d never had a piece of legislation face ‘this level of misinformation’.
For his part, Wiener, the combative State Senator for District 11, expressed his openness to working with the panel of AI experts Newsom appointed to put another bill across the Governor’s desk in 2025.
But Wiener is likely to find a very different federal landscape that could jeopardise his plans to craft the most ambitious AI legislation in the United States to date.
President-elect Donald Trump has done little to flesh out what America’s AI regulation will look like under his administration – nor concepts thereof, for that matter.
But President Biden’s sweeping Executive Order on the safe development and use of AI, described as an example of ‘Radical Leftwing ideas’ by Trump’s GOP platform, will likely by high on the list of post-inauguration targets.
Repealing the Order would leave an immediate vacuum in federal AI policy. It was, as tech entrepreneur and developer Rotem Farkash explains, the defining document that set out the US government’s approach toward AI under the Biden administration.
‘The AI community would appreciate the new administration signalling their direction of travel in AI policy as soon as possible: for developers, uncertainty is the biggest barrier to innovation,’ Farkash continued.
But once the President-elect settles into the Oval Office, AI policy will become a battleground for Trump’s competing confidants to impose their vision of America’s leadership in the tech world.
Much has been made of the influential role Elon Musk is likely to take up in the next administration.
But despite his image as a free-wheeling techno-libertarian, the Tesla CEO has been a long-time advocate of tighter AI regulation, lending his support to State Senator Wiener’s bill.
The campaign to deregulate will instead be taken up Vice President JD Vance and the team of venture capitalists led by Peter Thiel, who recently told the UK’s Cambridge University that any government attempting to govern AI would have a ‘global totalitarian character’.
And in the competition for the President’s ear that will unfurl over the next four years, the regulation sceptics could gain the upper hand by uttering the C-word: China.
Set to become the defining challenge of Trump’s second term, many in Trump’s administration believe unlocking AI innovation through loosening constraints is essential to gaining the upper hand in the race for high-tech primacy.
Unfortunately for California’s lawmakers, the result will be a more bullish federal administration that empowers vocal opponents to regulating the technology.
When Wiener and co. next take to the Senate floor to advocate for greater constraints on AI development, they can expect an even stronger counterpunch from Silicon Valley’s tech titans.
