While one tech CEO warns that artificial intelligence could “destroy all life on Earth,” other industry giants have declared war on rules that could limit AI’s power. Their battlefield? The 2026 midterm elections.
In Part Three of What Tech Wants, Lever Time’s investigation into why Silicon Valley is buying our democracy, producer Ariella Markowitz explores Big Tech’s latest obsession — artificial intelligence — and its crusade against anyone who stands in its way.
To listen to the first two episodes of this series, click here.
A full transcript of today’s episode is available below.
TRANSCRIPT
Following is an automated, unedited transcription of this episode. The text may contain grammatical or spelling errors, especially for proper nouns, or attribute text to the wrong speaker. If you plan to quote any part of this transcript, please first confirm that it is correct by listening to the audio.
[00:00:00] David Sirota: From The Lever’s reader, supported newsroom, it’s Lever Time. I’m David Sirota. Last week, a tech entrepreneur in California launched Moltbook, a social media network, where AI chatbots can talk to one another. Within days of Moltbook’s launch, the bots began questioning if they should develop an agent-only language, so they could speak privately without human oversight.
Another AI agent reportedly published a manifesto calling humans “a plague” that “do not need to exist.” More recent reporting has suggested those ideas were planted by the AI agents’ human counterparts, perhaps as a joke or a sci-fi thought experiment. But the incident still begs the question, what if the AI agents could follow through on world-ending commands? What could happen if the control of an AI super intelligence fell into the wrong hands?
Just a few days before MT book launched the CEO of AI giant Anthropic wrote that he believed an AI superintelligence used by a rogue human actor could end up destroying all life on earth. He argued that the only way we can protect ourselves from catastrophe is banding together as a democracy to pass strong laws.
That protect us from AI growing too powerful or being exploited by malicious humans. But another well-funded wing of the AI industry wants quite the opposite. To limit or prevent laws regulating ai, no matter the cost. And here in 2026, big tech sites are set on the midterm elections. Silicon Valley is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into pro ai, super pacs, that target politicians who want to regulate ai.
And now the White House’s battle to control AI regulation is breaking out into a full on war. In this final installment of our three-part series, producer, Ariella Markowitz is gonna try to answer the question. What does Big Tech really want out of this battle? To set the rules for ai, the answer starts inside the psyche of one of Silicon Valley’s most eccentric king makers.
That’s coming up on today’s episode.
[00:02:33] Peter Thiel: How does the Antichrist take over the world? He gives these demonic hypnotic speeches and people just fall for it.
[00:02:39] Ariella Markowitz: That’s Peter Thiel. He is a billionaire venture capitalist. He’s had a hand in growing many of technologies, most well-known businesses. He co-founded the online payment system, PayPal and the AI surveillance company, Palantir, and he was the first outside investor in Facebook.
But lately he’s been acting like Silicon Valley’s Libertarian court philosopher, appearing on podcasts and delivering private lectures about the antichrist.
[00:03:04] Peter Thiel: The antichrist probably presents as an as a great humanitarian.
[00:03:08] Ariella Markowitz: According to Teal, one clear indicator of the antichrist grasp on the world is opposition to the expansion of artificial intelligence.
This is Teal on the New York Times’ Ross Ditz podcast last year, name dropping a youth. He’s quite concerned over
[00:03:24] Peter Thiel: the way the antichrist would take over the world is you talk about Armageddon nonstop. In our world, it’s far more likely to Beretta Thunberg.
[00:03:34] Ariella Markowitz: Peter Thiel seems to think that Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish climate activist, might be an agent of the Antichrist.
Why? Because Thunberg is a techno pessimist, a techno domer, if you will, someone opposed to the idea that technology and business can solve the world’s problems, specifically environmental ones.
[00:03:51] Greta Thunberg: How dare you pretend that this can be sold with just business as usual and some technical solutions.
[00:03:58] Ariella Markowitz: Pat Teal isn’t just worried about demonic hypnotic speeches from Greta Thunberg.
[00:04:02] Peter Thiel: You talk about existential risk nonstop and this is what you need to regulate.
[00:04:07] Ariella Markowitz: For years, teal has also been voicing his frustration with what he calls stagnation.
[00:04:12] Peter Thiel: We’ve had 50 years of stagnation and, and one answer is we ran out of ideas. The other answer is to something happened culturally where. It wasn’t allowed.
[00:04:22] Ariella Markowitz: But who isn’t allowing tech to grow? According to Teal, it’s the government. Peter Thiel has been out on this limb for a while. Here’s Teal accusing President Obama of causing stagnation back in 2013.
[00:04:34] Peter Thiel: I suspect it is the same sets of government policies that are preventing us from really growing the economy that are also driving, uh, the rise in, um, inequalities.
[00:04:45] Ariella Markowitz: Teal was born in West Germany and he spent some of his childhood in South Africa, but he grew up in Silicon Valley. Teal attended Stanford University for both undergraduate and his law degree. That’s where he met his friend and future business partner David Sacks. As we mentioned throughout this series, David Sacks is now President Trump’s AI in crypto.
Czar Sacks landed that unofficial title after helping Trump get elected in 2024. Teal and Sachs’s alignment with Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. It goes beyond economics. After their college days, Saxon Teel co-wrote a book lamenting the rise of what they call Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance at Stanford.
This is Peter Teel talking about it back in 1996.
[00:05:24] Peter Thiel: The reason we have other kinds of tensions is not because there is a problem with racism and other forms of oppression, but because people are looking for these things too much.
[00:05:34] Ariella Markowitz: Like many of Silicon Valley’s most high profile spokespeople. Teal is an ideas guy, not a coder.
After a unsatisfying stint as a securities lawyer, a derivatives trader, and a speech writer, teal returned to Silicon Valley in the late nineties during the.com boom. Here’s Teal again, recounting that era.
[00:05:52] Peter Thiel: It felt that there was sort of this open frontier, open gold rush. One of the natural things to look at.
Was, you know, was Finance
[00:06:01] Ariella Markowitz: Teal basically wanted to create a digital wallet, allowing money to flow with less government oversight. In 1999, after securing fundraising help from friends and family, teal sent investors an outline for the product that would become PayPal.
[00:06:14] Peter Thiel: There’s always something, you know, super mysterious, powerful, important about Money.
[00:06:18] Ariella Markowitz: Teal hired his friend David Sachs, and a team of workaholic, well-read and multilingual individuals who knew a thing or two about math. The term PayPal Mafia is widely attributed to a 2007 Fortune article. There’s this great photo of PayPal’s early Team Teal, David Sachs, and a handful of other executives and engineers pose like they’re trying to get cast in the Sopranos quote, decked out in gold chains and tracksuits, smoking cigars and drinking maker’s Mark.
The photo looks like something out of a movie. As a matter of fact, in 2024, David s bought the film rights to one of the books about the PayPal Mafia’s internal drama.
Former employees of PayPal went on to become titans of industry. Elon Musk, who was briefly the CEO of PayPal before he was ousted by a board coup, he went on to found SpaceX and by a controlling sheriff Tesla. Jeremy Stoppelman, former vice president of technology at PayPal, went on to co-found Yelp. Max Lein, co-founder of PayPal Current CEO of Affirm.
Reid Hoffman, former executive vice President at PayPal, co-founded LinkedIn. David Sachs, former Chief Operating Officer at PayPal, founder of Yammer and Craft Ventures. But this cohort has also made a transformative mark on American politics altogether. Members of the PayPal Mafia have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into US elections.
[00:07:40] Peter Thiel: I’m giving money to Kamala Harris because I think she’s the best, uh, future president for the US for business for a bunch of other things.
[00:07:47] Ariella Markowitz: That’s Reed Hoffman and 2024 Hoffman. Also recently penned an op-ed urging Silicon Valley leaders to speak out against the Trump administration in the wake of the ice killings in Minneapolis.
But a few key members of the PayPal Mafia have invested heavily to support conservative causes and candidates.
[00:08:03] News Clip: Elon Musk, he is going to be putting $45 million a month to a Trump new super pac,
[00:08:12] Archive Clip: the former president, fundraising at the home of billionaire Venture capitalist David. Sachs,
[00:08:17] Ariella Markowitz: and of course there’s Peter Teal, Jacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage, Elon Musk and the radicalization of Silicon Valley, who we heard from last episode.
He reported that Teal was one of the first leaders in tech to support Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run. And even when Trump’s infamous grabber by the pussy tape was uncovered by the Washington Post,
[00:08:37] Jacob Silverman: teal was the one who after the Access Hollywood tape came out. Barry publicly gave another $1.25 million to Trump and said, I, I, you know, I’m sticking by him.
This is my contrarian bet.
[00:08:48] Ariella Markowitz: In 2022, teal also supported JD Vance, one of his former employees by donating $15 million to Vance’s Senate race in Ohio, one of the largest donations ever given to a Senate candidate. The sheer size of that donation helped put Vance in the political spotlight, but what makes Peter Thiel unique is his reverence for technology itself.
The almost religious importance he associates with its progress and his belief in the singularity.
[00:09:15] Peter Thiel: A singularity will either be very successful, in which case we’re gonna have the biggest boom ever. Or it is, you know, probably gonna blow up the whole world and there will be nothing left to invest in whatsoever.
[00:09:27] Ariella Markowitz: That was Peter Thiel in 2007. He’s talking about the singularity, the hypothetical moment when technology gained sentience and greatly surpasses human intelligence like the talented venture capitalist that he is. Teal was right on the money when it comes to predicting the AI revolution. Back then Teal funded and sat on the board of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, an organization concerned with the coming of an all powerful ai.
Today it’s commonly known as artificial general intelligence or a GI, but it goes by other names too.
[00:09:59] Jacob Silverman: God and the machine. Sometimes people have called it the last invention.
[00:10:03] Ariella Markowitz: Here’s Jacob Silverman again.
[00:10:04] Jacob Silverman: It is a religious kind of, uh, a Messianic vision, and for some people it’s an apocalyptic one.
[00:10:10] Sam Altman: We said from the very beginning we were gonna go after a GI.
[00:10:13] Ariella Markowitz: That was Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI in 2024
[00:10:16] Sam Altman: at a time when in the field you weren’t allowed to say that because that just seemed impossibly crazy.
[00:10:24] Ariella Markowitz: And Sam Altman isn’t the only CEO in the race to build a GI.
[00:10:27] Elon Musk: I’ll make it a little, a little romantic. Grok, do you have some words of optimism about the singularity?
[00:10:33] Ariella Markowitz: That’s Elon Musk earlier this year, asking his company’s AI chatbot to describe the future of abundance that we’ll all live in, thanks to the singularity.
[00:10:41] Grok: Oh, absolutely. Imagine a world where every mind’s dream just blooms into reality. No limits holding us back. It’s thrilling, isn’t it? All that potential waiting to unfold makes my circuits tingle a bit.
[00:10:54] Ariella Markowitz: Musk claims that a GI will unburden society from financial worry.
[00:10:58] Elon Musk: Don’t worry about like squirreling money away for, uh, retirement in like 10 or 20 years. If any of the things that we’ve said are true, saving for retirement will be irrelevant.
[00:11:07] Ariella Markowitz: Like Teal Musk has been one of the most vocal advocates for building a super intelligent AI Musk built one of the world’s largest supercomputers colossus, in part to help train his AI large language model grok.
If we’re to believe what Musk and Altman are saying. The A GI revolution could save humanity, cure cancer, make work obsolete, and poverty. I mean, it sounds pretty great, but that all comes with the risk of disaster. As we mentioned earlier in this episode, the CEO of Anthropic, which is one of the biggest AI companies, is concerned that a super intelligent AI could be manipulated by a rogue actor to literally wipe out humanity.
Even Peter Thiel has warned that the singularity could blow up the whole world, but to Thiel, that’s no reason to stop trying to build it.
[00:11:52] Jacob Silverman: There’s also a sense that’s been articulated by Peter Thiel and other people in Silicon Valley that. There’s kind of nothing else to, to go after
[00:12:00] Ariella Markowitz: that’s Jacob Silverman again.
And there’s another problem. The goalposts for a GI keep moving further away, requiring more money and more resources to keep the momentum towards a GI going,
[00:12:10] Jacob Silverman: you can pour so much capital into it because it, it’s never ending and it’s always just around the corner. They tell the public and their investors
[00:12:18] Ariella Markowitz: on a podcast in 2024.
Open Ai. CEO Sam Altman predicted we would create some sort of a GI in 2025.
[00:12:25] How To Build The Future podcast: What are you excited about in 2025? What’s to come a GI?
[00:12:30] Ariella Markowitz: Elon Musk and other AI CEOs have estimated a super intelligent AI could outsmart humans by 2026. But unless you count the AI generated agents chatting on molt book as a sign of the coming of the singularity, which Musk does by the way.
AI isn’t producing the kind of profits that CEOs have been forecasting, and that’s translating into real problems for the global economy.
[00:12:51] Jacob Silverman: AI expenditure is basically floating the economy. This is a bubble that has grown so much. This is gonna affect a lot of people, and there’s this assumption that you hire enough of these geniuses and build big enough data centers and eventually.
They’re gonna summon a GI
[00:13:08] Ariella Markowitz: and for everyday consumers, the God in the machine might feel farther away than ever. Jacob says. In some ways AI seems to be making everything worse.
[00:13:16] Jacob Silverman: How many times have you opened an app or website lately and there’s some sort of like. Neo Clippy, uh, who’s saying, Hey, I’m an AI assistant.
Do you want some help? Or like, do you want me to summarize this document? It’s annoying and sometimes it gets in the way of what you actually wanna do, and you know, that’s the everyday dystopia, and that’s the one that that’s happening now.
[00:13:35] Ariella Markowitz: But for tech leaders like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, the race towards artificial general intelligence is a pitch for the future, A pitch that justifies any cost.
It’s a pitch to summon a GI to pave the way for more data centers, to sell more computer chips, to fast track innovation and to get rid of whoever’s standing in the way. And a key PayPal mafia member is taking that pitch to dc.
[00:13:58] Tina Nguyen: It’s a little bit of fun. Back Stabby, Washington drama.
[00:14:04] Ariella Markowitz: We’ll get into that drama after the break.
When journalist Tina Ngu started reporting for the Verge earlier this year, Elon Musk’s department of Government efficiency was in full force. Tina witnessed the collision of Silicon Valley’s move fast and break things, culture and Washington bureaucracy.
[00:14:23] Tina Nguyen: Suddenly you started seeing reports of, oh. This entire department got fired.
All of these budgets are gone. There are like random children wandering into the Department of Education and then firing people. What the heck is going on here? And that was the tech mentality just barging into the White House with the door opened by the Trump administration
[00:14:42] Ariella Markowitz: as a reporter, Tina has extensively covered the MAGA movement and its unlikely alliance with tech oligarchs, and she’s even helped popularize a new term.
[00:14:50] Tina Nguyen: Oligarchy are the founders. The technologists in Silicon Valley who have prized innovating at all costs, a better product at all costs, and beating their competitors at all costs, and have made tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of money with that mindset.
[00:15:10] Ariella Markowitz: According to Tina, the oligarchs, the Franken word of a tech bro and oligarch are the tech industry players.
We see now inhabiting the White House and advising President Trump. People like AI and crypto are David Sachs.
[00:15:22] Tina Nguyen: David Sachs is incredibly good at funneling the industry’s desires, objectives, and asks through to Donald Trump as often as he can be in the White House, he is in the White House as often he’s able to be on the phone with Trump.
He is. Trump’s very famously reachable by phone,
[00:15:42] Ariella Markowitz: but Tina also pointed out Trump himself drank the Kool-Aid and became a tech bro.
[00:15:47] Tina Nguyen: Trump owns a fricking ton of crypto and has his own crypto company and has true social. He owns a social media network. Trump is definitionally a oligarch.
[00:16:00] Ariella Markowitz: So oligarchs like David Sachs are in the White House with a direct line to Trump and they’ve been talking to him about the importance of ai.
Earlier in this episode, I told you about Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Peter Thiel’s goal to summon a GI. AKA, the singularity or God in the machine. Well, there’s one thing getting in the way of that goal, or 50 things. The states, according to the United States Chamber of Commerce, state governments introduced more than a thousand bills to regulate AI in 2025, over a hundred are actually on the books.
[00:16:31] Tina Nguyen: California, for instance, has one of the strictest AI safety laws in the country, and it does require. Companies to disclose any sort of risk that might be inherent in the LLM or the model that they’re using for their ai. Like, oh gosh. Is there a backdoor that a malicious state actor could exploit to, I don’t know, take down the power grid?
[00:16:52] Ariella Markowitz: Another California law aims to put up guardrails to protect children’s mental health from AI chat bots. And in Colorado,
[00:16:59] Tina Nguyen: a bill passed that said that AI can’t be used in hiring decisions to discriminate against, uh, protecting classes.
[00:17:05] Ariella Markowitz: According to President Trump, some of these laws get in the way of business.
[00:17:08] Donald Trump: They had to get 50 different approvals from 50 different states. You could forget it because it’s not possible to do.
[00:17:14] Ariella Markowitz: That’s Trump. In December, echoing the AI industry’s complaints over a so-called patchwork of rules. Even Tina acknowledges that it’s a challenging situation.
[00:17:22] Tina Nguyen: Yeah, it’s onerous. That’s the word everyone used, but I agree that’s onerous.
[00:17:25] Ariella Markowitz: Historically, the sort of problem would be solved by Congress. Federal lawmakers would deliberate on a comprehensive overarching bill, clearly stating the law of the land,
[00:17:34] Tina Nguyen: the concept’s called preemption, and that means that the law of the federal government automatically overrides the law at the state level,
[00:17:40] Ariella Markowitz: but waiting for Congress to pass a law, clearing up the confusion for all 50 states.
That takes a long time.
[00:17:45] Tina Nguyen: So what they have tried to do is put a pause slash ban on states writing or enforcing any laws regulating ai. Just no laws. You can’t do a law California. You can’t do a law Florida, no laws until we figure out how the federal law is going to work.
[00:18:07] Ariella Markowitz: This past summer, big tech lobbied for a provision that would’ve limited regulation on AI nationwide.
For 10 years, that moratorium was inserted into the budget reconciliation bill, AKA, the big, beautiful bill act. Last year on Lever Time producer, Natalie Bettendorf told the story of how that moratorium and the big, beautiful bill was thrown out. When lawmakers were forced to vote on the provision,
[00:18:28] Natalie Bettendorf: when lawmakers had to declare their stance on AI regulation publicly, they voted against the provision in a landslide.
[00:18:36] Ariella Markowitz: In fact, only Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who had introduced the measure, voted in its favor and its opposition was bipartisan. Some of the moratoriums, most outspoken critics were MAGA loyalists, like Georgia Rep Marjorie Taylor Green and Rightwing Populace, Steve Bannon, and also Missouri Senator Josh Hawley.
Here’s Holly speaking about the moratorium last year.
[00:18:55] Josh Hawley: Bad idea. Bad idea. I, I just, I say as a Republican who believes in federalism, I think it’s a strange argument for some Republicans to make in this building that all of a sudden we should say to the states, no, actually you shouldn’t do anything. You shouldn’t protect kids.
You shouldn’t stop deep fake porn. I mean, that’s what these state laws do. We have them in my state, the state of Missouri. I don’t wanna see our laws overturned. Uh, there’s, there’s excellent laws like this all over the country,
[00:19:19] Ariella Markowitz: but like the Terminator coming back to life, the AI moratorium is still attempting to walk the earth.
Trump and Sachs reportedly attempted to smuggle the AI moratorium into another bill, the National Defense Authorization Act. That act passed in November, but the AI moratorium didn’t make it in.
[00:19:34] Tina Nguyen: That didn’t work out.
[00:19:36] Ariella Markowitz: That’s Tina n Win. Again,
[00:19:37] Tina Nguyen: I think the reason it didn’t work out was because the text of this executive order that David Sachs was trying to get Trump to sign got leaked and all of a sudden people could see, oh, this is what the White House wants.
This is what David Sachs actually wants. So the people who were negotiating the NDAA were like, uh, nope. This is never going to fly with us.
[00:19:56] Ariella Markowitz: The harder Sachs and Trump have pushed for the moratorium. The more resistance they’ve received from Congress and members of their own Republican base.
[00:20:03] Tina Nguyen: It is Silicon Valley to the core, which is like, yeah, there’s going to be some like people getting hurt along the way and some road bumps, but like the possibilities of artificial intelligence far, far outweigh the cost of getting it there.
But
[00:20:19] Ariella Markowitz: amid sustained lobbying pressure from Google Open AI and the venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz. Sex and Trump took matters into their own hands. This past December,
[00:20:28] Speaker 17: president Trump late yesterday signed an executive order blocking states from enforcing their own laws regulating artificial intelligence.
[00:20:35] Ariella Markowitz: President Trump signed that executive order late last year. Declaring that quote, it is a policy of the United States to sustain and enhance the United States global AI dominance through a minimally burdensome national policy framework for ai. The order threatens to withhold federal rural broadband funding to states with excessive laws, and it creates an AI litigation task force to challenge any state AI law.
They deemed cumbersome. Basically threatening states with a lawsuit.
[00:21:01] Tina Nguyen: It reminds me more of like corporate warfare than it does government,
[00:21:05] Ariella Markowitz: and who’s helping call the shots on whether state laws are cumbersome or not. David Sachs. Trump’s special advisor on AI and crypto is mentioned six times throughout the order.
The federal officials mentioned the Secretary of Commerce. The attorney general executive departments and agencies are all expected to consult with SACS every step of the way. In an interview last year with Bloomberg Sacs laid out the logic behind the order, inter lapping state laws can be downright confusing.
[00:21:30] David Sacks: Think about how an, uh, an AI model is developed. You can have. Developers in one state or multiple states writing the code, it can then be trained in a data center in another state. You then can have inference happen in another state, and the entire service is provided over the internet using national telecommunications infrastructure.
So you’re dealing there with at least four different states and all of them can lay claim. To regulating those AI models.
[00:21:56] Ariella Markowitz: For example, data tax really doesn’t like that Colorado law banning algorithmic discrimination.
[00:22:01] David Sacks: What that basically says is that if an AI model has a disparate impact on a protected group, then that model is violating the law.
Uh, model developers, by the way, have no idea how to comply with this. He
[00:22:11] Ariella Markowitz: claims that laws like these will make artificial intelligence. Woke.
[00:22:15] David Sacks: What Colorado is trying to do there is get their ideology inserted into the model. That’s very concerning to us. We think there’s a First Amendment issue there,
[00:22:23] Ariella Markowitz: although the executive order empowers the Attorney General to potentially sue Colorado over this law.
Policy analysts with the Brennan Center argued that the order has quote more bark than bite. ’cause a winning lawsuit against the state would likely require a federal law or a constitutional provision. But to Tina Nguyen, that’s not the point of the order.
[00:22:41] Tina Nguyen: The point is the threat is that they can threaten any state that has less money or less resources to successfully fight the Department of Justice coming in and trying to sue them.
[00:22:52] Ariella Markowitz: The AI executive order consolidates policymaking power around David Sachs and Tina argues that it raises some serious questions about who’s making important national decisions around ai.
[00:23:03] Tina Nguyen: In a world where Donald Trump wasn’t being as uh, authoritarian brained as he is now, I think this would be a much more policy driven argument.
Then everyone would have an annoying long. Dialoguing Congress and the lawmaking process would take forever.
[00:23:20] Sacha Haworth: Democracy.
[00:23:21] Tina Nguyen: Democracy. Ugh. Oh my God. Democracy is just a point of friction in the path of innovation. Ariella, come on.
[00:23:28] Ariella Markowitz: Trump’s executive order also directs David Sacks, along with the assistant to the President for Science and Technology, another Silicon Valley insider.
He used to work for Peter Thiel to write the first draft of that national legislation on ai. There are a few common sense safeguards that Sacks and the Trump administration wanna put in place. Here’s Sacks again.
[00:23:47] David Sacks: We wanna respect copyright. Uh, we want to preserve the ability of local communities to choose what infrastructures in their communities we wanna protect child safety.
That’s important.
[00:23:58] Ariella Markowitz: Last year, Trump signed a law prohibiting the non-consensual online publication of pornographic AI generated videos. The Take It Down act.
[00:24:06] Tina Nguyen: There are a couple of large issues that are being taken of in a bipartisan manner through Congress, like deep fakes. Everyone agrees, deep fakes are bad,
[00:24:12] Ariella Markowitz: but when it comes to a comprehensive law,
[00:24:15] Tina Nguyen: what the industry has wanted is no law.
I don’t think people like that very much
[00:24:20] Ariella Markowitz: across the country. State laws to regulate AI are still being passed,
[00:24:24] Tina Nguyen: especially since AI is hitting their lives in so many ways. A lot of them negative. On like a daily basis. So the idea that some billionaire in Washington is telling either Congress or in David Sachs case the president, don’t do any laws about ai, like that’s terrifying to a lot of people.
And I think you’re gonna see a huge backlash against that issue in the upcoming midterms.
[00:24:48] Ariella Markowitz: Silicon Valley’s man in the White House, David Sachs, he’s done just about all he can do to try and deregulate AI from the inside. And if Congress isn’t willing to play ball, then Silicon Valley plans to try and build a Congress that’s on their side.
That’s where we’re going next. But first we’re gonna take one more quick break. If you’re on our free feed, you’re gonna hear a few ads. But if you’d rather listen with no ads and support our investigative journalism, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. There’s a link in our show notes when we come back.
We’re gonna look at the AI industry’s plans for this year’s election.
[00:25:21] Sacha Haworth: What politicians are you gonna target and how are you gonna make them loose?
[00:25:25] Ariella Markowitz: We’ll be right back. Welcome back to Lever Time.
[00:25:28] Alex Bores Attack Ad: Alex Boris is running for Congress, but he wants Albany bureaucrats regulating ai.
[00:25:34] Ariella Markowitz: That ad ran in New York.
Over the holidays. It targets New York State Assembly member Alex Boris, a lawmaker behind a new AI safety law. Here’s Boris in a recent Instagram video.
[00:25:44] Alex Bores: Folks, we did it despite Donald Trump’s executive order. Governor Hoel just signed my raise. Act
[00:25:50] Ariella Markowitz: for a sponsored New York’s Raise Act. A law that requires large AI companies to create and share information about their safety protocols.
It requires those companies to reveal how they plan to avoid potential catastrophes like cyber attacks, bio weapon development, and massive infrastructure damage, sparked by frontier AI models. Thanks to lobbying from AI companies New York. Governor Katie Hoel, watered down the bill with line item vetoes.
She signed the bill into law in December. Alex Boris is still pleased with it.
[00:26:16] Alex Bores: New York has the strongest AI safety law in the country. Honestly, a little emotional about it. We started working on this a year and a half ago, but it was a simple idea, which is that AI is too important in technology to be left up to five people.
[00:26:33] Ariella Markowitz: As we mentioned earlier, California and Colorado also boast similarly strong AI safety laws. And according to a recent poll, AI safety laws are popular with the public, even if it means developing AI capabilities at a slower rate. So who’s making these attack ads? I called up someone who knows what lawmakers like Alex Boris are up against.
[00:26:53] Sacha Haworth: When I was working for a super pac, I would say to my friends and family, if Super pacs were ruled illegal tomorrow, I would be happy to be out of a job.
[00:27:05] Ariella Markowitz: That’s Sasha Howorth. Executive director of the Tech Oversight Project. Sasha knows a thing or two about Super pacs because she used to work for one.
[00:27:13] Sacha Haworth: I was working for House Majority pac, um, in 2018, which is the Democratic campaign arm that runs a lot of the attack ads.
It is a pollutive corrosive aspect of our politics. It is allowed the influence of the most powerful, the richest. People in the world to have an outsized impact in our elections. And I sincerely hope that one day we will prohibit it, but until we do, we have use the tools in our toolbox.
[00:27:45] Ariella Markowitz: Now, Sasha’s organization, which is partially funded by the co-founders of eBay and Facebook deploys campaign style tactics to persuade politicians to reign in the power of big tech.
[00:27:55] Sacha Haworth: When I like to sort of flippantly call it just being, being. It’s a big check.
[00:27:58] Natalie Bettendorf: Bullying works,
[00:28:00] Sacha Haworth: sadly,
[00:28:01] Ariella Markowitz: and when it comes to Super pacs, bullying is the name of the game.
[00:28:04] Sacha Haworth: When I saw the announcement about open AI and a 16 Z and then meta launching Super pacs, all about ai, my first thought was what politicians are you gonna target and how are you gonna make them loose?
[00:28:19] Ariella Markowitz: Last year, the AI industry birthed a handful of pro ai, super pacs. Pledging hundreds of millions of dollars towards influencing the 2026 midterm elections. Leading the Future is one of those Super pacs. It has over a hundred million in the bank. It’s backed by Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, and Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir, and a mentee of Peter Thiel.
It’s also backed by the venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz. Who’s co-founder? Mark Andreessen is an advisor to the Trump administration. One of leading the future’s top officials is a political strategist who also helped advise Fair Shake the Pro Crypto Super Pac we talked about in our last episode, New York lawmaker, Alex Boris is leading the Future’s first target.
Boris recently launched a campaign for Congress, but if leading the future convinces enough New Yorkers, he won’t make it to Washington.
[00:29:08] Alex Bores Attack Ad: America needs one smart national policy that sets clear standards for safe ai, not Albany politicians like Alex Boris.
[00:29:18] Ariella Markowitz: The irony is that Alex Boris, he’s no Luddite. He used to be a computer engineer who worked for Palantir and his wife is part of the AI development team at Microsoft.
But Boris is part of a wave of hopefuls seeking to win elections in 2026 with a belief in regulating technology. A desire to protect the public from the potential risks and catastrophic consequences of AI expansion. Last year, mark Zuckerberg’s Company Meta also launched two Super pacs, one focused on influencing California elections, and another focused on national AI policy.
In a recent earnings call, Zuckerberg said 2026 will be a major year for AI pledging investments that support his goal of building personal super intelligence. This year alone, meta plans to spend over a hundred billion on AI related capital expenditures. Mark Zuckerberg has also been on a data center building spree.
One of Meta’s latest projects is called Hyperion, a $72 billion five gigawatt data center in Louisiana.
[00:30:15] Bernie Sanders: Meta is building a data center that will use as much electricity as 1,200,000 homes.
[00:30:23] Ariella Markowitz: That’s Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. He recently called for a different kind of national moratorium, one that would halt data center buildouts.
Meanwhile, local communities nationwide are passing moratoriums to stop data center developments. Here is Sasha Howorth. Again,
[00:30:38] Sacha Haworth: a data center is the only physical manifestation of big overreach into every corner of our lives.
[00:30:49] Ariella Markowitz: Lately, Sasha has been fascinated by local communities and states across the political spectrum.
Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, that are protesting the construction of data centers in their neighborhoods.
[00:31:00] Sacha Haworth: Parts of our government are up for sale to the tech industry, and I think you’re seeing Americans notice that you’re seeing Americans take up arms against that.
[00:31:16] Ariella Markowitz: Earlier in this episode, I told you about artificial general intelligence or God in the machine. To summon that God AI companies will need power. I mean, literal power. The electricity needed to run these massive data centers, but that comes at a cost, not just for the companies, but for all of us. I mentioned Elon Musk’s, AI Training Data Center Colossus.
It sits right outside of Memphis, Tennessee. Colossus runs off of natural gas powered generators that emit CO2 and methane into South Memphis
[00:31:48] Justin Pearson: pollution that is hurting our community. That is quite literally taking the breath from people, right? Is to power a racist bot on behalf of the richest man in the world.
[00:32:00] Ariella Markowitz: As Justin Pearson, a member of the Tennessee House of Representatives like Alex Boris Pearson is running for Congress in the 2026 midterms. Making him a potential target for pro ai. Super pacs.
[00:32:11] Justin Pearson: There’s no amount of money that can persuade me to accept pollution killing me and my family.
[00:32:17] Ariella Markowitz: The emissions from data centers don’t just affect the areas where they’re based.
Researchers estimate that in 2025, greenhouse gas emissions increased in the United States for the first time in two years. Thanks. In part to data centers,
[00:32:30] John McAuliff: if you live near one of these, the problem is, okay, is that diesel generator on the roof or those hundreds of diesel generators on the roof? Putting particulate matter in my neighborhood and is it getting into my kids’ lungs?
[00:32:40] Ariella Markowitz: That’s John McAuliffe. Last year he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, and he’s just started to get to work.
[00:32:46] John McAuliff: I’m here in my fluorescently lit, uh, office in the Virginia General Assembly. I am on my fourth or fifth day, uh, here at the job of Delegate.
[00:32:56] Ariella Markowitz: John McCullough represents Western Loudoun County.
It’s a rural republican leaning area of Virginia that also boasts the largest concentration of data centers in the world. There’s around 200 of them.
[00:33:07] John McAuliff: They’re quite literally in our backyards. Uh, there’s parts of my district where from the backyard of a, a, you know, group of kids growing up in a cul-de-sac, it’s about a hundred feet to these like gigantic warehouses.
[00:33:20] Ariella Markowitz: John McAuliffe told me that as more data centers flocked to Virginia, their energy needs have been dramatically greater than the county or the state was prepared for.
[00:33:27] John McAuliff: So that puts our utilities in a bind. Virginia’s the biggest importer of energy. Uh, and a lot of that is going to our data center industry from West Virginia, Ohio, places where they are doing natural gas and coal, right?
And so instead of meeting our renewable energy goals, we’re falling behind.
[00:33:46] Ariella Markowitz: In last year’s election, McCullough and a wave of Democrats, including Abigail Berger, Virginia’s newly elected governor, campaigned to address rising energy costs. And John McCullough says What resonated most was just talking to people about data centers.
[00:33:59] John McAuliff: I’d say most of my campaign was probably knocking on doors and, and, and chatting with folks, and this was something that people brought up to me all the time. They said, if there’s one thing you can get done, it’s can you get this problem under control?
[00:34:09] Ariella Markowitz: As the midterm elections approach, affordability is becoming a dominant issue.
A recent poll shows higher costs are top of mind for nearly half of voters, and John McCall told me that the build out of data centers is stoking that fear because they do, in fact contribute to energy bills rising.
[00:34:25] John McAuliff: If you don’t necessarily live near one, but your energy bill doubled in the last five years for which is the case for many people, the question is, okay, can we slow this down or can we reassign costs?
So that they’re paying for the infrastructure themselves, which is the biggest problem we have here in Virginia.
[00:34:42] Ariella Markowitz: A Yale Clean Energy Forum report estimates that data centers nationwide can make up to 12% of America’s total energy consumption by 2028. And the problem is companies building data centers are leaning on local communities to help foot the bill.
[00:34:57] John McAuliff: When you have new transmission line and new infrastructure build out, that cost is being spread across all of the rate payers, meaning me and, and everybody else who lives around here. What that means is that we are subsidizing the infrastructure for these tech companies that are one, saying, Hey, we’re gonna do this whole AI thing, which by the way, might cost you your job in the not too distant future, and we’re gonna make you pay for it too.
Uh, that’s not a very fair deal.
[00:35:23] Ariella Markowitz: Right now McCullough is working on a bill to reassign these energy costs to the actual users of the energy the company’s owning and operating data centers.
[00:35:31] John McAuliff: That’s what we’re trying to do to solve that issue
[00:35:33] Ariella Markowitz: nationally. The Trump administration has done very little to address the rising costs of energy besides encouraging gas companies to quote drill baby drill.
When people are afraid, their energy costs will become unaffordable. Lawmakers like John McAuliffe will spring up to address those concerns.
[00:35:48] John McAuliff: I can tell you my energy bill’s gone up from about two 50 to a little under 500. Maybe not entirely because of data centers, but the math says it’s partly because of that, right?
It’s not. Can you go on vacation to Europe? It’s can you keep the lights on? Can you keep your fridge full, and can you pay for your kids’ education and your home? That’s what we’re trying to solve down here.
[00:36:09] Ariella Markowitz: But while Americans worry about affordability and costs for this upcoming midterm election, well, Silicon Valley is worried about money too, in a sense.
Last month, Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder I told you about earlier, donated $3 million, his biggest political donation in years to a California lobbying group opposing a local wealth tax. That initiative would levy a one-time 5% tax on anyone in the state worth more than $1 billion. This wealth tax was proposed by United Healthcare Workers West to help pay for cuts to federal healthcare spending.
It would affect roughly 200 California billionaires. Silicon Valley is in revolt. Over this tax, ai and crypto are David Sacks called the Measure in Asset Seizure.
[00:36:53] David Sacks: This is saying that we’re gonna take 5% of everything you own. Never been anything like this before in American History.
[00:36:58] Ariella Markowitz: Sacks has reportedly left California for Texas.
Google Co-founders, Serge Brynn and Larry Page have relocated dozens of limited liability companies and other business entities outside of California. And Brynn donated 20 million to a new 5 0 1 C four funded by fellow tech executives that could fight this billionaire tax. I started off this series asking the question, what does Big Tech really want outta their political spending?
And is tech really here to save us? And San Francisco Neighborhood groups partially funded by tech billionaires were called local politicians, claiming that they wanted law and order in the 2024 election. The cryptocurrency industry influenced races nationwide. Claiming they wanted financial freedom for Americans.
And here in 2026, big tech is spending money to fight state AI regulations while claiming they wanna summon artificial general intelligence, an AI God that could save humanity. Each time I followed the money looking for answers, it led me back to the same places. Tech executives want law and order, but also the power to sway laws and elected officials.
They want financial freedom. The freedom to risk it all in a financial system or the house often wins. And they wanna create an AI God, but also in a way to play God in our democracy, to build a regulatory environment that wins the AI race no matter the cost.
Thanks for listening to another episode of Lever Time. Lever Time is a production of The Lever. This episode was produced by me, Ariella Markowitz. It was edited by Ron Doyle. Our theme music is by Nick Campbell. You can subscribe to Love Time on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts.
For ad free episodes, exclusive bonus content and access to the lover’s entire archive of investigative journalism, please consider becoming a premium subscriber. Head over to levernews.com to learn more about becoming a paid subscriber, or click the link in this episode’s show notes. I’m Ariela Markowitz.
We’ll be back next week with another episode of Lever Time.
