Notes

Magliabechi’s: The Wolves of K Street. Last Sunday, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, vetoed a bill that would have introduced stricter regulation of large AI systems. The bill proposed that systems costing more than $100 million to build—more than any current systems—had to meet heightened safety requirements. For example, companies would have had to program a “kill switch” to prevent potentially calamitous harm.

Newsom said the bill would have stifled innovation in the state that’s home to most of America’s large tech companies; its sponsors said it would have ensured safety in a rapidly expanding but little-regulated industry. And tech companies fiercely lobbied both sides—Google, Meta, and OpenAI, heavily against the bill; the Amazon-backed firm Anthropic and Elon Musk, for it.

From lawmakers’ perspective, the question is how to regulate AI companies. But from the AI companies’, it becomes: How to influence lawmakers?

And there’s been a marked rise in AI companies lobbying American politicians. The Financial Times reports that OpenAI, which owns ChatGPT, has expanded its international lobbying team from three in early 2023 to 35 this summer, with the aim of reaching 50 by the end of 2024. But OpenAI is running behind its competitors when it comes to lobbying the U.S. government—while it spent $340,000 in the first quarter of this year, Google spent $3.1 million and Meta, $7.6 million.

It’s part of a larger trend, too. The non-governmental organization OpenSecrets, which tracks money in politics, reports that AI lobbying has “skyrocketed” this year. Back in 2015, there was only one organization in America lobbying on AI issues. By 2022, the number was 158. Last year it reached 460. And only in the first quarter of this year, OpenSecrets identified more than 90 organizations that lobbied on AI issues for the first time.

More money than ever is spent lobbying American politicians—on AI as well as other issues. And as Brody Mullins and Luke Mullins show in The Wolves of K Street, that money is spent on increasingly involuted lobbying campaigns. If in the past, lobbyists bought political leverage in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms, today, they orchestrate “shadow lobbying” campaigns that engineer seemingly spontaneous public outcries, which in turn pressure politicians to kill or promote bills that would harm or favor the client’s corporate interests.

As the AI industry grows, and public concerns over it grow in tandem, the industry’s lobbying efforts are expanding with them—in both size and complexity. Which is apt to make Newsom’s veto just one victory in one early battle over AI regulation.

—Gustav Jönsson