Big Tech’s top races to watch, PM Mark Carney on AI

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Calder McHugh (0:33)

Hello and welcome to Decoded by POLITICO. I'm Calder McHugh.

Christine Mui (0:37)

And I'm Christine Mui.

Christine Mui (0:38)

Today on the show, we'll take a look at how midterm candidates are talking about tech just days before the election. Plus, we'll discuss Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's comments on the AI industry.

Calder, what did you get up to for Halloween?

Calder McHugh (0:53)

Yeah, I had a great weekend, a lot of fun. My oldest friend Theo turned 30 this weekend and he had a party. The theme was 30 going on 13, so it was what you would wear when you were 13 years old for Halloween. We were friends, of course, when we were 13 We were both goth at 13, so we were that again. Not sharing photos on this podcast, of course, but if any really eager listeners would like to see one of their co-hosts as a goth man, you know where to find me.

Christine Mui (1:23)

Yeah, maybe it's a good thing, Calder, that this is in a video podcast.

Calder McHugh (1:27)

That's right. That's right. Although, you know, all of the nail polish is off now. More importantly, for our purposes, maybe. Christine, it's officially one day until the 2026 midterms. And of course, we'll be covering everything you need to know about tech policy in the midterms today and also for the rest of the week, as long as votes continue to be counted. What are some of the things, again, a day out that you're noticing candidates talk about in this final stretch of the campaign?

Christine Mui (1:51)

Yeah, one thing we've been noticing, Calder, is this trend, right? As we've looked for contests that are referendums on AI development and policy to watch and hopefully have the results tell us something over these coming days about the politics of this issue, we're noticing that there are just fewer of those compared to even the primaries earlier this year. So you don't have a lot of midterm contests where one candidate's enthusiastically pro-AI or pro-data center, and the other one is campaigning on regulations to rein those industries in. And instead, as candidates have been looking to channel anti-AI sentiment ahead of tomorrow's elections, they across the board are just starting to sound a lot more alike on AI and especially on data centers than they probably care to admit. We have a lot of contests where, as a voter, I might be pretty confused. You have candidates attacking each other for being too close to big tech, whether that's because of their billionaire donors, their ties to the data center industry or their past support for tech-friendly policies. But then when you actually look at the policies they're each proposing, it's not always clear how far apart they are. There tends to be a lot of overlap where candidates are both promising to protect communities. They want to keep right electricity costs down. They want to make sure ordinary Americans aren't subsidizing the AI boom. And so we wanted to highlight a couple of races where we do see a meaningful split still. And a lot of those differences are showing up more clearly around data centers than around AI regulation itself.

Calder McHugh (3:16)

It's a very odd situation because you have, of course, we talk a lot about how AI politics are kind of a live ball, I think, for the parties and who will be trusted more on AI.

This continues to be an open question between Democrats and Republicans. At the same time, you also have a lot of candidates who are kind of mirroring each other on these issues in a way that for other issues, they certainly are not or they're further apart. At the same time, you have all of these super PACs that are funded by a lot of AI donations that have really been just beating up on each other mostly throughout this cycle. I'm curious if there are any PACs in particular you're keeping your eye on in the final stretch, or just in general, how you think that spending has affected this cycle.

Christine Mui (4:01)

I think a common strategy that journalists and voters use is following the money. But in this case, following the money hasn't really made it easier to tell where candidates stand on AI always. You do have these AI super PACs that are spending millions of dollars, usually just to support a candidate, but they're not necessarily seeing those destinations as a reflection of the other candidate in the race having a fundamentally different position on AI. We saw this during the primaries, and what's probably the most high-profile example was when this pro-AI industry-backed group leading the future was spending millions of dollars to attack Alex Borres, and then you had this rival group, Public First, which positioned itself as more safety-oriented, advocating for stronger guardrails, and other tech-backed allied groups were spending millions of dollars to defend Borres. But then the candidate who will tell me why, Michael Asher, was a strong advocate for AI regulation. He was cosponsoring the same New York AI safety legislation that Borres championed, which is the RAISE Act, and he even supported a data center moratorium. And so, we haven't really seen another direct showdown between those two packs since that primary.