What’s Next For AI Regulation After Dems Sweep? Reps. Casar and Liccardo Weigh In

0:00I've heard from zero voters that they think Democrats are too strong and you get too much stuff done too quick. Nobody says that ever. And what people are asking is for us to act. And so we have to learn from our failures during the housing bubble. We have to learn from our failures on social media. And this is our shot. Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. Call it a blue wave, a tsunami, a Republican bloodbath, Democrats had an extraordinary night last Tuesday. They've won comfortable majorities in both the House and the Senate, taking seats they hadn't won in decades, and in one case, almost a century. The results exceeded even

0:50the party's rosiest predictions, and they have huge implications for the next two years. Democrats will have subpoena power and be able to investigate areas where they think the Trump administration has gone off the rails. There may even be an opportunity to work with Republicans on passing legislation, especially around issues like AI, where there is some bipartisan agreement on the need for regulation. Joining me today are two House Democrats who will be key to this. Greg Kassar of Texas chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and he's one of the leading advocates in Congress for an AI slowdown. He's introduced a handful of bills to rein in AI platforms. One of them calls for a wholesale ban on AI superintelligence. And Sam

1:31Liccardo's Bay Area district includes a slice of Silicon Valley. In the past, he's warned against an impulse to overregulate AI. But in September, he helped lead a push by House Democrats to demand action to create AI safeguards. He's also pushed legislation calling for more coordination between the U.S. and China on frontier models. I think this is critical right now to think about what AI regulation and tech regulation in general looks like because there hasn't been any. opportunity to have bipartisan support for bills the voters are demanding around safety, around jobs, around all kinds of guardrails, and about reining in our out-of-control tech billionaires. If Congress doesn't act, it's going to be really problematic. You've seen what's happened with

2:17social media platforms, and by the way, we can still go back and regulate those, and you've seen the damage they've done, and we need to do something now. It's something I've been pushing for years, and I hope the time has come. All right, let's get to my conversation with Representatives Greg Kassar and Sam Liccardo. Our expert question comes from New York Democratic Assemblyman Alex Boris. He ran for Congress on an AI safety platform but lost the Democratic primary. Now he's launching a political advocacy group called Who Decides, aimed at shaping the ways Democrats talk about AI. A note to listeners, we spoke the day after election day, so some things may have changed by the time you're listening to this. Stick around. Black Friday is around the corner.

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4:59Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at enjin.com slash Vox. Representative Kassar and Liccardo, thanks for coming on on. What a day to be here. I'm so glad we scheduled it. What a day. Yeah. So the blue wave seems an understatement now. I'm not sure the tsunami, whatever. There's all manner of metaphors, but Democrats saw their wildest dreams come true on Tuesday night. When did you told it's going to be our year over and over and over again. And so you protect your heart by not having high expectations. And then it was the night before election night where I realized I was like, we're going to sweep these guys. What we've been out there telling people we can do is going to happen.

6:00And then it was crazy to see it happen. I got to hug James Tallarico when Ken Paxton conceded. And the only room I'd rather have been in that than that is with Ken Paxton or Greg Abbott conceding or with Elon Musk, like watching his hundreds of millions of dollars just burn in front of him. It is going to make such a difference in so many people's lives. It's just really special. Yeah. And kudos to Greg and a lot of great leaders in Texas who have finally vanquished Lucy in the football down there. We were all hoping and praying, and it's great to see what's happened down there, particularly after the redistricting effort from the Trump administration, obviously from very blue California. It's a very different perspective, but we're just so thrilled to see what's happening

6:43throughout the rest of the country. And did you have a sense it was going to happen or is it just, we were shocked, Scott and I were shocked. And I had said, I thought that it would probably happen. But of course, as you said, you don't get your hopes up. Yeah. I was thinking maybe a 50-50 shot at the Senate. I certainly didn't anticipate a blue NAMI. What about you, Gray? I just protected my little heart, but I'm, you know, but I know here's the thing, you know, I've known Gina since I've got all these workers rights posters behind us. We were working in like little community rooms when she was suing employers to win workers wages back. And I was a labor organizer and she was, you know, a pregnant mom, new lawyer, known James since he was coming out of grad school. And like, they were always ready for this

7:26and Texans were ready. And I'll tell you what I really knew what was happening is every restaurant I walk into all, everybody would come out of the kitchens and show me their, I voted stickers. It was like nothing I'd seen before. And these guys who thought they could send ice into our communities and send us into endless wars and get in bed with billionaires and have no consequences, like, I think they are the most deeply surprised right now. And the mood among your fellow Texas Democrats is shock and awe, essentially, correct? I mean, there were parties in the streets. I mean, all night, people just screaming out their cars. I mean, it's like winning the Super Bowl and the NBA finals and like all of it all at once that we've been waiting for my entire life. I mean, I was born in 89.

8:13We haven't won a U.S. Senate seat since 88. Right, exactly. And the last governor, I think, was Ann Richards, right? Ann Richards, yeah, I remember that defeat. Yeah. So, Sam, Republicans are in serious blame game mode. Vice President J.D. Vance on Wednesday blamed the loss on the Iran war and the economy. It's pretty clear repudiation of President Trump, who he had been supporting up until then, and notable because he's expected to run for president in 2028. Talk about the opportunity for Republicans to work with Democrats in the coming years. Or do remaining Republicans become more obstinate as they try to position the party for a presidential election? Because Trump was the most, yeah, I'll work with Democrats of any of them so far.

8:53Yeah, you know, I spend a lot of time on the Republican side of the floor, lurking to find Republicans who might get on a bill. Obviously, they've controlled both houses. That's the nature of the business if you're trying to get anything to move forward. And I guess I see two countervailing factors. One is the folks who would be most willing to actually get on a Democratic bill are the ones who are losing most of those races. They're happening in battleground districts, obviously, where they're most vulnerable. But I do think that, you know, we pray that the spell of Trump over the party is starting to break. And certainly the wisdom of blindly following Trump off of every cliff, as we have seen so repeatedly, is starting to become more obvious

9:39to many. And so I think there is going to be an opportunity, as he's clearly a lame duck, to actually do something sensible around a whole host of issues. I know Greg and I were just many. And so I think there is going to be an opportunity, as he's clearly a lame duck, to actually do something sensible around a whole host of issues. I know Greg and I were just talking about a few minutes ago, the critical issues that so many families are struggling with to be able to get health insurance, to be able to pay rent, the critical things. I think there's a real opportunity to get Republicans on board. Now, they're not going to support everything. Maybe they won't support our minimum wage increase, for example. But certainly,

10:07there are plenty of Republicans who understand what tariffs are doing to farmers right now in the Midwest. Greg, what do you think replaces the spell of Trump then that Sam just talked about? I mean, last night is the beginning of the end of the Trump era. And now, today, we start building what's going to come afterwards. Like last night's election was not just, hey, Democrats have solved all of our problems. We now have been given a chance by the voters to show people what we're made of. And so, yeah, let's send a bunch of bills to Trump's desk. And he's crazy enough that he might sign some of them. And then if he vetoes popular things, that's what a Democratic president can run on and then sign.

10:48So we should not be complacent. We shouldn't be cautious. We should go and pass those laws. I mean, to Sam's point, Elizabeth Warren tried this and was successful. We actually cut into law a bill to ban private equity from buying up all of our single family houses. Trump mentioned it in his speech, and now it's the law. And so let's try it with price gouging. Let's try it with getting dark money out of politics. Let's try it with the minimum wage and with childcare affordability. And if he vetoes it, we get it passed by the next Democratic president. If he signs it, we show we got something done. I mean, even though Democrats had a huge night, and it was, the party had been broadly unpopular. And what Scott Galloway, my partner, says,

11:29it's not a mortgage, it's rent right now. And what's clear is voters want change, and Democrats are going to have to deliver on some of these campaign promises, especially on affordability. I think corruption is something people have been worried about. But I think affordability, especially a central chance is to retaking the White House in two years. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah. And just to double down on what Greg said, you know, the one thing we know about Trump is whatever he says on any given day, he'll change his mind within the next two weeks. And so the man has no ideological bearing whatsoever. I don't think he's the guy who's going to have the courage to say, no, I'm going to veto this. Right. Absolutely. But one of the things that people are worried about, and there's a

12:08big debate going on, is level of retribution and level of revenge, I guess, for some people. The incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, who I've interviewed many times, Robert Garcia, had two words to the administration in its enablers Tuesday night, lawyer up. With Democrats set to have sizable majorities, where do you think the investigations should start and who are the targets? Because a lot of people, I do a podcast also with Hillary Clinton, and she felt the impeachment was pointless, even if it made you feel better, and it should be very specific toward corruption or Pete Hexeth or both or whatever. First, Greg, and then Sam, where do you lie on that issue? There is, of course, important work to stop the worst excesses of the Trump administration. People

12:52did elect us to do that, but people are used to one party has the House and there's the president of the other party and you go after them. That may not get us the new trust, or this new trust we just won. It may not hold it unless we're willing to do something different, which is go after the corrupt actors that also thought they could get a merger by potentially paying somebody off, that thought that they could get through regulations and make sure tariffs are still on you, but not on them because of a corrupt deal. So let's go after those oligarchs and corporations who are the other part of the takes two to tango. And I think that will really get voters attention and earn us trust. You can't get a bigger repudiation of Trump than what we just got last night.

13:37We can't just be known as the anti-Trump party heading into the next presidential election, though. We have to be known as the everyday American worker party. And you don't do that just by going after Trump. You do that by making sure that we go after the corruption that is screwing up our government and our economy. What about you, Sam? I mean, we've got a target-rich environment to go chase corruption. I'm a former criminal prosecutor, and we could be spending thousands of years going after all of the corrupt acts and actors in this administration. I think it's going to be very important for us to be very strategic and focused on the corruption that most impacts Americans directly. The crypto corruption, for example, that has enabled folks to get off the hook, that is in ways, disrupting our financial system and ultimately costing people.

14:27We've got to really focus on connecting the corruption to everyday Americans and how it's hurting them. I think that is going to be important for us. And I think it's going to be important for us to demonstrate, first and foremost, that we can govern. You know, Greg and I were just talking about a while ago about how we need a package that is going to be a whole lot of 80-20 issues in January that affects how we can help families pay bills. And if we can demonstrate we can govern first, then we'll have a lot more leeway to go after all the corruption. But if all people see and hear is about Democrats trying to prosecute Republicans or Trump, it gets lost in the noise. And we will lose the confidence of those independents and Americans who maybe went

15:13our way this time, but question whether or not they should support a Democrat in the next run, because all we can do is be political. Well, the economy was highest, but corruption was right up there. The idea of, I think they were linked. If you link them together, that's an interesting thing. Like, as you were talking about, I think you were referring to all the tech moguls having lunch at the White House every Tuesday, essentially, and getting stuff and putting coins in and getting stuff out for it. Now, speaking of that, the midterms are over. Let's talk about AI legislation. There are dozens of bills being debated in Congress right now. Some address fears around displacement of workers.

15:45Others tackle safety, privacy, construction of data centers, corporate accountability. The list is very long. When it comes to AI, which of the big issues should Congress tackle first? Or is there something else the Democratic majority should prioritize? The overarching issue across all of this, jobs, safety, privacy, data centers, is who should be in control of our future? Should it be just a couple of guys that are billionaires that want to be trillionaires? Or should it be the rest of us? And I think that that is really the defining feature for us here is for us to say, instead of cashing the checks from the AI lobby super PACs, we should be standing up to these guys and standing up for what everyday people want.

16:29And that's why we flipped the state of Texas in part is because people in rural Texas, just as much as here in Austin, Texas, don't think you should lose your job so that an AI billionaire can become a trillionaire. Don't think that you should have to pay higher electric bills for these guys or our national security should be compromised. So it really, I think, is going to be about taking a side and then passing meaningful legislation, in my view, to protect your jobs, to reduce your bills, protect your safety. Greg, you have a couple of bills. One is the displacement of workers. The other is a ban on artificial superintelligence you sponsored along with Bernie Sanders in the Senate. Can you just give more specifics about these and where you think they are in terms of voter interest? says, we should not develop AI that is too powerful for humans to control. And if you remember,

17:27when Senator Sanders came out against unregulated data centers, people were like, that's some way out there progressive idea. Now it's the mainstream American politics. Similarly here, you know, this idea of like, why should we develop AI that could develop a bio weapon without our authorization? I mean, who wants that? That's nuts. We shouldn't be allowed to do that and we should have it under control. On jobs, I've developed a tax proposal that disincentivizes AI companies from getting rid of your job and getting a tax break for it. Instead, they should pay a meager tax that increases if unemployment increases to make it so that we don't wind up in a situation where you've got structural mass unemployment. We should be able to develop our technology in a way that benefits

18:17people, but not in a way that puts lots of people out of work. And then I'll add a third one real briefly, Kira, that is like this simple affordability stuff. I have a bill and Ruben Gallego has in the Senate to ban AI surveillance pricing. This is where these companies know what you Googled, have so much of your private data that they can set a specific price for you. So think about, you know, if somebody Googles somebody's obituary, next thing you know, an airline jacks up your air fares because they know you've got to get to a funeral and we'll pay what it takes. There's no good reason for that. And that's the kind of affordability policy that we can pass that is overwhelmingly popular with

18:55all voters and takes on these AI oligarchs who have just been running amok. So Sam, talk about it from a California perspective. Obviously, California has been one of the states that's governed it more than other states. Yes, leading in safety. But it has to be a federal thing. How do you look, as a legislator from California, how do you look at what has to happen in AI? And what is non-negotiable, really, for you? Yeah, I think, you know, as you discuss all the issues, and I would never minimize the jobs issue because I think that's going to be a massive disruption to our economy. We have to confront it. But I think the most urgent issues we have to focus on around AI safety because the cybersecurity risk, the loss of control risk,

19:36what we've already seen with the genetic misalignment is terrifying. And I think if you go survey the employees of major AI companies in the labs, overwhelmingly, the employees will say the same things. And so this is a situation where those who are very knowledgeable in the industry have been begging not just for months but for years for the federal government to step up with sensible AI safety regulations. And it appears now even those sensible regulations are probably not going to be enough. We're going to need a lot more. And by that, I mean we need to find a way to massively accelerate the technology of safety to be able to catch up to the technology of model capability. And until we do that, we are going to be in great peril. And so Congress needs to move quickly at

20:21least to get some of the basics in place. Ensure you actually have a regulatory agency. Presumably it would be Casey in the Commerce Department that has real authority, real funding, real knowledgeable staff. I mean, they have good staff, but clearly they need a lot more to be able to engage. You're not talking about a separate agency because some people have suggested that. I mean, Casey exists now. I'm less stuck to exactly how you do it and what it looks like in the org chart. The critical thing is that we have an entity in the federal government that is actually capable of regulating and power to do so and has the resources to do so. Right. So the bill that has the most momentum in Congress right now is the Frontier Act. It

21:01required developers of frontier AI models to undergo regular independent audits. And I mean independent, not them grading their own homework and report any serious issues that occur and presumably have some teeth when they don't. The Frontier Act does have bipartisan support, open AI through its support behind it. Greg, where do you see its strengths and weaknesses? Because you've said Democrats can't afford to be squishy on AI. And where are you willing to compromise on what's non-negotiable? We have to get AI safety legislation passed. And so we will work on whatever compromises we need to. But we shouldn't be compromising ahead of time here. Because if you remember, as this law was being developed, what Republicans were

21:46pushing in Congress was getting rid of all AI safety laws at the state level, period. The ground has shifted rapidly beneath us. And so we should assess based on where we are now. And based on where we are now, I expect and think that some of these members may even change what they're saying about the Frontier Act, because we should, and I agree with Congressman Liccardo, have these auditors held accountable to the government. Some of the drafts I've seen, for example, have some of the auditors hired or paid for by the companies. I mean, we should be taking this as seriously as the mandate that the voters sent our way. And then, Kira, as you mentioned, while there may be some teeth in the bill, I think that we can have much stronger teeth here

22:31because this is the kind of situation where you don't want to say, oops, you know, we took down the internet or the grid or, you know, a hospital and go back and deal with it later. We should be monitoring these models at every stage of development and having real teeth to shut it down. And you mean including punishments, criminal or... Including punishment, including criminal punishment for people involved, you know, not just a fine that these companies could pay like a speeding ticket. And Sam, when you look at the strengths and weaknesses of the Frontier Act, what do you look at? And as you said, I think Republicans will come along on this. It's very bipartisan in a lot of ways. Well, I think the Frontier Act is a good place to start.

23:10And there are many good elements in it. I would also agree that there needs to be some additional elements. I think that we need to create strong bipartisan momentum that I think ultimately will force the White House to cave. I think everyone sees that there's great concern among the American public, unlike what Donald Trump said about AI safety being a hoax. What I'd be focusing on is probably adding elements around pre-release review to make sure that we actually have objective criteria for determining whether or not models get released, as opposed to what we just saw with the Commerce Department back in, what was it, April or May with fairly arbitrary decisions that were not transparent. I think we need to get in the game with China because whatever we do

23:59from a regulatory standpoint is largely meaningless when we know the majority of models are being downloaded today from Hugging Face. The United States are Chinese, not American, and they're very powerful, open-weight models that can be easily manipulated by bad actors. We need to be at the table with China, at the very least, on track to negotiations. You had a bill with California independent Kevin Kiley to push the two nations to coordinate more, and he lost his re-election Tuesday night. What does coordination with China look like in the middle of the AI race that both nations see as existential? And where do our interests overlap? I have always pushed for a global discussion and not this ridiculous gee or me argument. Now, there's competition,

24:39and then there's a need for cooperation, like on nuclear proliferation, for example. It's very similar in my mind. How do you look at that? Yeah, and I think that offers a good blueprint. You had top scientists on track to negotiations, engaging in very deep, technical-focused conversations around how do we agree on things like metrics and testing and evaluation and, perhaps most importantly, verification. We don't trust each other. We're not going to trust each other. So we need clear mechanisms for verification. Some of the same principles apply, but right now you've got a lot of legal barriers that prevent those conversations from happening, either in antitrust law or national security law or export control restrictions,

25:25believe it or not, to actually limit what we can say and communicate. And so we need to create safe pathways for the top scientists at our AI labs and our think tanks and universities to be talking to their counterparts in China. And what the bill would suggest is basically just register with the State Department so they know what you're doing. They can get engaged in the conversation they want, but we have to have the conversations so we can actually agree on how we're going to test, evaluate, supervise, monitor all those things we need to do to make this much safer. So, Greg, when you think about that, who should be in those discussions? I mean, I've always complained is that the White House, it's all people with shareholder interests,

26:04financial interests. It's the CEOs with shareholder interest, financial interest. It's the CEOs. You don't see a critic. You don't see a scientist. You don't see an academic. You don't see anyone who disagrees with them. Who needs to be in those discussions? This has to be a totally new kind of discussion. And really, in the last few months, this has shifted. I mean, I'm hearing from parliamentarians and members of Congress from all over the world taking a meeting tomorrow with leaders from Europe about how we come to global agreements on AI safety and also create safety in parallel, right? We could take a step forward and then other nations take a step forward. And that is how we get this done. Kira, I was recently sitting with some of these executives

26:41from some of the top AI labs, And you're right. So often, they're stuck in the same way of doing things where they said, when I asked them, why is it that you're saying we're racing towards a cliff and you keep pushing the gas? And they say, well, we just don't think that China will slow down. And I asked them, I was like, you all just finished telling me that you think you can cure cancer, but you are, you don't think that we can sign an agreement, right? We've, forever civilizations have been able to come to agreements across nations. We can do this, but we have the same folks in the room too often who, you know, just think that it is, they're, as you pointed out on your podcast, so nihilistic that they're saying, well, they're the ones that are going to create

27:24the autonomous killer robots. And it's better for it to be theirs that kill us rather than somebody else's. To me, that is sociopathic and we need folks in the room that put humanity first. Yeah. And I'm certainly never going to stand up for the nihilism because I think Greg is right about some folks in the industry. You know, we can think of those who certainly view that. But the reality is we're looking at a White House, you know, where a president has said that AI safety is a hoax. They're not serious, or at least they're not of one mind about this issue. And so it is not hard to understand from the industry's perspective why it might be hard to believe that this White House is going to negotiate anything with China. And so, you know, obviously we need to do everything we can to make

28:05that possible, whether it's for this president or a future president. But I believe that the blame is squarely on the government, first and foremost. This is supposed to be our job, and we're not doing our job. So what involvement should AI labs have in the conversations? Obviously, they need to be involved. I don't think they shouldn't. They just, they're the only ones involved at this point in the conversation. I think one of the think some of the folks that have been most helpful, honestly, have been the employees themselves at these labs. And that's how we know what's really going on here. Some of the real heroes here have been people who have, you know, people who I think were just fired, right, over at OpenAI, the people like Jacob Coxon, you know, people who I think were just fired, right, over at OpenAI, the people like Jacob

28:45Coxon, you know, putting out the tweet heard around the world. So they're critical in this conversation. And to Sam's point, to get the CEOs and executives to make a turn would be very important. Now, and I agree that while Trump bears huge parts of this responsibility, I also don't let them off the hook when it's like, if you think you're creating potentially the mass death machine, you have a big responsibility here too. But who I'm so grateful to have been those rank and file researchers and staffers who've spoken out because that's how we know what's actually really going on deep in there. They're the folks who have been holding them accountable. Now with subpoena power and potentially having these executives tell us the truth under oath, I hope that we can also get the truth out to the American people and

29:29change course. Right. So Sam, you wrote a Washington Post op-ed back in May where you argued that AI doesn't need a regulator, it needs a referee. But in September, you helped lead the call for more than 100 Democrats demanding a vote on AI safeguard legislation. So can you illuminate on that? What changed for you? Yeah, let me explain where I was going. The reality is I don't think we know how to regulate AI, AI safety. And we don't in part because the nature of the technology, this is not deterministic software code, this is probabilistic. Nobody knows exactly what comes out of these models. So it makes it very different as we think about regulating. But part of the challenge too is that the expertise is nowhere

30:08near Washington. It really is in the labs. And we have heard plenty of cries for more AI safety regulation. We have to engage the leading thinkers who are overwhelmingly in places like Greg's district and my district. They're not in Washington, D.C., to actually enable us to create much safer AI. And ultimately, I believe it's going to require us to engage the industry proactively with obviously the right liability rules and so forth to force a race to safety. That is to realign incentives towards safety rather than toward greater model capability. I think there are things we can do, but it's not the traditional regulation as we conceived it in the past. I think the Frontier Act is a good effort. It is necessary, but by no

30:56means sufficient. And we're going to need those folks in the industry to help us understand how to make this safer. We'll be back in a minute. Support for this show comes from Atmos Rewards from Alaska and Hawaiian Airlines. Most travel loyalty programs are one size fits all. But what if you could tailor the program to your own travel patterns? Enter Atmos Rewards from Alaska Airlines. There are now more ways to earn Atmos Rewards points and more than a thousand places to redeem them. Join an Atmos community and enjoy even more benefits. That means engaging in some incredible travel that's curated to your interests or your place of residence. And getting rewarded points when you do. Sign up for Atmos Rewards at atmosrewards.com.

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33:20instead of days. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash Cara for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash Cara. Rules and restrictions apply. Now, every episode we get a question from an outside expert. Here is yours. Hi, I'm Alex Boris, New York State Assembly member, author of the RAISE Act, and co-founder of Who Decides. The big question I'd ask is, should we allow the AI companies to fully automate AI research? All of the frontier companies are striving for what they call recursive self-improvement, having AIs fully build the next generation of AI without any humans in the loop. OpenAI says they're on pace to do this around March 2028. Anthropic co-founder Jack

34:13Clark estimated around 2027. But in either case, this is going to be a question the next Congress has to solve. We won't get another election before this happens. So would each of you vote to ban RSI? The mechanisms might be slightly different, but one example could be requiring that training runs be kicked off only by human beings and having senior executives at the company held personally liable if those processes are kicked off recklessly, the same way we hold executives at meat manufacturing plants or financial auditors personally responsible if they do something truly reckless. Great question. Greg, then Sam? My answer to that is yes. And to me, RSI, recursive self-improvement, is the jet fuel that could set AI on entirely the wrong path.

35:08And we know these companies are headed that direction. And if we just say that is off limits, then we can start getting on the right path. Senator Sanders and my bill to ban artificial superintelligence, one of the ways that we stop ourselves from having an AI that's too powerful to control, an element in that bill is to not have recursive self-improvement. Make sure humans are building the AI rather than having AI that we can't control building even more dangerous AI that we can't control. Sam? Yeah, I certainly support it, but, and here's the big but, I don't think we really understand how to implement effectively a ban like that. And I think there are a lot of smart folks, certainly my Nick Lewood, we have a lot of AI safety advocates and labs that are working on things like figuring out how we can verify and monitor whether or not compute is being used for training or not, as opposed to inference.

36:01Those are the kinds of technologies that are going to be very important to the extent that we can actually verify, then I think it makes a lot of sense for us to move forward with something. My concern is that you pass something and we know the bad guys won't comply. And if we don't have real verification, this whole thing becomes a mess and we end up empowering the wrong folks. Right. Although we managed to do it with cloning. We managed to do it with nuclear energy, you know, superbugs and things like that. Yeah. I think with nuclear energy, we do have better ways of verifying it for appointing. Absolutely. Yeah. Because it's things. It's things. But in this case, they do, there is records. And if nothing else,

36:39Democrats can use their subpoena power in the House to hold hearings with the leaders of top companies. Greg has been pushing this on Democratic leadership, especially in the wake of the hugging phase, and she's in it, which I have still not understood why there wasn't more worry about what happened there, because I know there was in Silicon Valley. In the past, when congressional leaders held hearings with tech leaders, it's pretty clear that some members obviously didn't understand the platforms. And I remember the one with Mark Zuckerberg around social media where Josh Hawley was haranguing them. And all I could think of is, if only was someone in this room could do something about it. Like, stop yelling at him and do something,

37:14asshole. So how can hearings and tapina power be used in a way that's effective versus performative jazz hands that is easy to do in Congress? First, there is the important information gathering about what the risks are, how far out we are from those risks, both what happened and where these CEOs think we are headed. Because to Alex Boris's point, as he just popped up for his question, we need to know directly from the executives how close we are, they believe we are to the edge. And then actually to Sam's point, we then can ask what it is that our laws need to do to be able to achieve the ends that we want. Because Sam, I don't think your answer to the RSI question was yes, but I think it was yes, and. We need strong laws and then we need to hold these CEOs to it.

38:07And that should be the purpose of the hearings because voters overwhelmingly voted against Republicans because they thought they're just taking the AI billionaires checks and doing whatever they want. We need to show that we are serious about the fact that people are worried that their kids are getting addicted to dangerous stuff on the internet. They're worried that their kids are getting addicted to dangerous stuff on the internet. They're worried that their prices are going up. And yes, they're worried that we're walking into a massive national security risk. They should see that Democrats are not just performatively fighting, but are actually trying to do something to take care of their lives.

38:40That's what they're electing us to do. Sam? Yeah, I think what's important for us is to come to the table with solutions and challenge them to come up with better solutions. You know, we have seen those performative hearings that you've described, and the running joke in Silicon Valley is we're going to have a bunch of ranting from members of Congress who are still trying to spell AI. That's not the solution. We have some ideas. Certainly, Frontier Act is a good place to start. I think Greg's got some interesting bills, again, good bills that we should also be putting on the table. Let's put them on the table and say, look, we're terrified what RSI could be doing to humanity. Come up with a better solution or else.

39:20Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, now there's a new crop of lawmakers who are, it's not all old men, like, wondering what it is, right? And they're much younger. They're more tech savvy. It's a big game changer. But one of the things that's been a problem is the deleterious effects of money, right? And we have to talk about Elon. And he's sort of the poster child for all this money. That's a big roadblock. And one of the things many of the tech people have told me is, well, Trump will hurt us. Democrats won't. They'll forgive us and then take our money, essentially. How do you fight against this enormous amount of money? It didn't work in this election, but it's sort of the fuel of all elections in a lot of ways. And

40:00Elon has proven that. I mean, yeah, Elon's a constituent right up the road here in Austin, Texas. And the answer to this is different today than yesterday. Today, we smashed those roadblocks. We broke the dam. We showed people how we actually do this. Elon Musk financed the majority of Ken Paxton's campaign. And what James Tallarico and frankly, all Democrats got together and did was to try to make that and successfully did make that a huge liability for Ken Paxton. He did. He talked about it at every single stop. Instead of being scared of the money, make that money the big issue and you can win over voters we never thought we could win over before. And so Democrats have to, as you pointed out, not cash their checks and take their apology,

40:53but instead, actually, just go fight for the right policy that people believe in. That's it. Well, that's nice. But, you know, Musk spent a half a billion dollars on the midterms. He's still got a lot of money from what I can understand, even though SpaceX and Tesla shares are down today. But how do you, in closer elections, how do you overcome that potential cudgel the tech industry can wield? And we should make it toxic where every dollar he spends, it costs his supported candidate $100 to explain it. We just had literally the most expensive elections in American history, and Democrats won overwhelmingly by fighting Elon Musk's money. So we have to make their money toxic. And then, Kira, of course, we can make Musk toxic,

41:31but then there's the others. And there's a famous saying from a Texas lobbyist who said, I want to buy off Republicans and I don't want Democrats to do anything for me, but I also don't want them to do anything to me. And we can't take that kind of advice because not doing anything to them and their billions of dollars is actually doing something for them. We've got to take this moment to say, what is it that voters want? What is the right thing to do? And let's make their money toxic. What about you, Sam? Yeah, I think I may be a bit quixotic because I'm a first term member of the minority party, What about you, Sam? to actually get a constitutional amendment in place. And I don't mean just undo Citizens United.

42:26I mean completely change the relationship between campaign money and the First Amendment. And stop pretending that this is protected speech because nobody really believes that, even though the courts have been stuck on that since Buckley versus Vallejo back in the 1970s. This is, I think, an opportunity because it's an 80-20 issue. It turns out a lot of Republican voters also believe there's way too much money in politics, even though they may not see it the same way we do with Elon Musk. And for the first time, we can say to an awful lot of folks, see, money didn't actually drive the results, right? We saw what happened in Texas and how much money Elon spent there. So we might actually get a few more folks

43:09with some spine to stand up and say, okay, it's now finally time to rid ourselves of this pox and let's allow for sensible regulation. It can be a very simple one sentence amendment. This is the opportunity where we could really unite people across the Parson divide. And I want to yes and what Sam said, Cara. We should move forward on that, but we don't have to wait on the constitutional amendment. In my view, we can pass. We have a bill to cap contributions to any PAC at 5,000 bucks. We could pass another law that's a 100% tax on any contribution politically over 5,000 bucks. If the Supreme Court wants to keep coming at us time and time again, we show the Supreme Court for who it is they are, but we have a real opportunity

43:50to be the party against big money in politics and to reset the laws here. Do you have to get rid of the filibuster to do that? I'm not sure it'll get past the Senate without it. I cannot understand why it would be that the Senate would allow Chuck Grassley or somebody to hold up getting big money out of politics. Why would we have the filibuster block things that are 80-20 issues anymore? I just think that Joe Manchin's time and Kyrsten Sinema's time has passed, and it's time for the Senate to wield democracy instead of just being stuck with some arcane rules. It's going to take a massive organizing effort in those five or six days where we need to get those senators on board. But this is something I think is within our reach. I never thought

44:35it was within our reach a couple of years ago. We'll be back in a minute. Support for the show comes from InGen. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. InGen is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes. Earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, Enjin customers save more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than a thousand businesses join Enjin every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at Engin.com slash box.

45:30Shop Black Friday appliance savings and get up to an extra $1,250 off select appliance purchases like GE Profile. Plus, free delivery on appliance purchases of $398 or more. Make life easier with the fridge that doubles as your personal kitchen assistant. Or upgrade your laundry room with the ultra-fresh Vent System Plus front load washer. So your clothes stay fresh after every single wash. Shop Black Friday appliance savings with fast free delivery at the Home Depot. Offer valid November 4th through December 2nd at participating stores and at homedepot.com. U.S. only. See store online for details. Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a

46:11little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers not available in all states. Democrats will still face a lot of challenges to passing meaningful AI legislation. And two of you, as I said, represent the divisions the Democratic caucus has of how to best approach it. Where is the common ground in the caucus? Well, I think there's a lot of common ground about all the major risks that AI poses that we need to address legislatively. And I think

46:53there's going to be a lot of common ground on safety. Certainly, we can debate about the details, but a real sense of urgency to move forward. I think on jobs, there's a lot of common ground about the critical need for us to be able to invest in people again and enable our workers to be nimble enough with the skills they need. I think we've failed in the past to do that. A lot of federal programs have failed. I have some ideas about how we can do it much better. But this is a moment when we've got to enable millions of Americans to see a pathway, and it has to be a real pathway in an AI-enabled economy, because we are not going to order back the sea of AI. No matter how much we may try, it is coming at us, and we've got to be much more prepared. So I think in and around data centers, look, Lord knows data centers poll about as well

47:48as measles, mumps, and rubella. But the truth is we critically need all that money that hyperscalers can invest in the grid if we are going to transition from a fossil fuel economy. And if we do this right, we can leverage those resources and protect local communities. We just need federal rules in place that protect local communities, protect rate payers, and elicit the investment we need from the hyperscalers into the grid. And I think we can have the data centers we need for infrastructure. You've got to battle a lot of voter discontent about this issue. It's really quite high. Oh, absolutely. Because we haven't stepped up. Yeah. I was just texting with Mark Cuban about this, and he's like, they've got to not be against data centers all the time.

48:31I said, it's the voters, Mark. It's not the politicians. It's the voters. And maybe you should convince them you're not all assholes, right? You know what I mean? Like, maybe there's, like, if you could make your argument, if that's the case, instead of running over people. And of course, that was Elon Musk and Kevin O'Leary behaving like that. Agreed. We know what's happening on the right, but I think there's plenty of folks in the industry, hyperscalers who are saying, look, we're willing to pay our own way. We're willing to do this with much cleaner energy. Let's put the rules in place and make sure everybody's playing by those rules. And Greg, where do you see common ground? I think the common ground

49:05is growing and has grown rapidly over the course of the last few months, right? I think that Democrats have come together and realized that our voters are increasingly united in saying, we want real rules. We don't need you to tiptoe around the edges. And as Sam said, although we may represent two different ideological caucuses inside of the democratic family on what the problem is, we don't want mass surveillance from corporations or the government. We don't want a massive national security risk. We need agreements with China and other nations. And no, I don't want great depression level of unemployment and to try to make that a little less bad with small checks sent to people. We agree on all of that.

49:51And now we just get to which policy can we pass that gets us closest to that goal. And if we take that seriously, that is such a better place than we were just even a few weeks ago. Now, of course, as you were kind of pointing out, Sam, right now the U.S. economy is massively dependent on the AI boom. It accounts for roughly one-fifth to one-third of economic growth right now. This is not good. The Wall Street Journal said, never before has the U.S. economy been so dependent on the build-out of a single industry. So when you're thinking about, and we shouldn't be in this situation, how do you balance the need for economic growth, which is critical, with the push for regulation? Sam and then Greg.

50:31Well, I think we need to acknowledge that it probably is a bubble. And we need to ensure that first we are not subsidizing this bubble that is not being encouraged in some way with taxpayer help. And we need to do everything we can to protect taxpayers and workers through this bubble. But the reality is, as much as I think there is likely going to be some correction, we are still going to need this infrastructure. So it's going to be important for us as we think about policy, how we can direct this private sector investment to a maximal extent possible to actually get us the infrastructure we need, which is overwhelmingly around grid expansion and bolstering that grid. subsidizing the financially irresponsible behavior and blowing up the bubble.

51:31The big ugly bill that Trump ran through as his only horrible achievement gives enormous tax breaks that are being taken advantage of by the big AI companies that leads to more financially irresponsible behavior. So I and Maxine Waters have filed a resolution calling for a sense of the house that we will not bail out the AI companies and instead should be focused on helping retirees and workers and anybody affected by this financially responsible behavior. Because we need to have learned from the housing bubble where people lost their houses, but then some of the people responsible for the devastation, you know, got golden parachutes. And we can't allow that. And we should start making sure that our economy is directed towards truly productive uses of everybody's labor and

52:15money. And it is really, you know, nobody wants for there to be a devastating correction, but we need to be prepared to make sure we take care of people in the instance in which that happens. I was just going to build on that. I think, you know, particularly as these larger companies are going public and the SEC is going to be really critical here, and Paul Atkins has been completely spineless. Yes, I've noticed that. But we need strong oversight on the SEC to ensure that these very circular financing arrangements are made very transparent so that the market corrections can happen sooner in a less abrupt and painful way that we know will happen if they're not transparent. And the one person you're going to have to get past is Trump.

53:01He said he will work with Democrats. He also said he's ready to be Mr. Vito. He has been the doormat for the AI industry completely. Honestly, Elon Musk, even though he lost all this money this week, he's made a ton of money elsewhere. How do you get Trump on board? Because you have to in a lot of ways. And which of these tech people do you have to remove from the conversation? We may successfully, I hope we successfully avoid any kind of bailout for the AI companies, but they then may be coming for federal contracts, right? Or for other kinds of relief. And as you said, the number one person on this is Elon Musk, who gets at least $8 million a day in federal contracts while he was trying to cut your mom's social security check down.

53:49And so if we're going to be doing investigations and be doing this work, and as you said, we can't just be known as the anti-Trump party. I think we should be very targeted and look at how it is that these AI billionaires who keep squeezing money out of the federal taxpayer kitty, right? They're not just making all of this money because they've been extremely profitable and productive. That we cut them off there and we have the power of the purse. And so there are lots of ways that we can have an influence there, even without getting Trump on board. There may be some things that Trump comes on board with, but even without getting him on board, making sure that we are exposing where there is this grift and federal money flowing directly to the AI oligarchs.

54:36And Tim, how do you get Trump on board or out of your way? Either way. Yeah, I don't. I struggle with that one. Look, I think, you know, going back to what I said about the fact that Trump is guaranteed to change his mind on any position he takes, he sees where political winds are going. I think it's imperative for us to build the momentum in a bipartisan way. Even though we now have strong majority in the House, this is an opportunity for us to show leadership, bring enough Republicans along to show that this is inevitable. The more that we can do that, the more effective we'll be. Or you can just let them go build, let them build something. It's fine. Go over there. Yeah, he wants to hang out at the pond. Go ahead. It's fine. We'll name Sam's

55:20AI safety bill after Trump, you know? Yeah, that's right. Have it printed on gold paper. Yeah, something like that. So last question. Congress has not managed to pass some meaningful regulations on social media platform, even as their dangers became obvious, like the spread of disinformation, the effect on kids' mental health, election meddling, foreign actors, list just goes on. How do you ensure history doesn't repeat itself with AI? There has never been an industry that has been so unregulated and so powerful. I think since, well, no, the railroads got regulated. They all did. I think it would help if we created an AI committee. Right now, AI is spread across a lot of different committees and jurisdictions.

56:00And frankly, it could be every committee if you want to be really specific about. So we're not going to get bills over the goal line if we're playing legislative pinball between every committee that wants jurisdiction. I know this is a big fight. And, you know, God love Hakeem Jeffries. He's got a lot of cats to herd in our caucus, to be sure. And I respect his leadership tremendously. I'm hopeful that we're going to end up with a single committee that is going to drive the most critical, most urgent AI legislation so we can get it to the floor and start pushing the accelerator. Data privacy, it's been 30 years now. I mean, you went down a long list. We can't keep doing things the same way. Right. Very good point. Greg, you have the last word. Sam is part of what's known as the New Democrats.

56:49I'm the chair of the Progressive Caucus. Typically, you've seen sort of this democratic battling over ourselves. But what is so important and interesting and different this time, Kira, is that people are demanding action. And Sam and I agree entirely on this point, that our biggest mistakes, having been just being a little left here or a little right or center there, it is when we fail to act. People want a Democratic Party that takes action. I've heard from zero voters that they think, Democrats are too strong and you get too much stuff done too quick. Nobody says that ever. And what people are asking is for us to act. And so we have to learn from our failures during the housing bubble. We have to learn from our failures on social media. And this is our shot. Inequality is worse

57:36than it was under the railroads and the Gilded Age. We are in a crazier position than they were back then. And we have to have our version of what FDR did, getting all this stuff done. And that's our task. That's our job. Yeah. Teddy Roosevelt. It was Teddy. Was it Teddy or FDR? Teddy got a lot of good stuff done, but FDR- Teddy did too. Both of them did, yes. But FDR did it coming out of the Great Depression. Yeah. Yes, he did. Yes. FDR, all the Roosevelts. I'm going to be bipartisan and say we love both of our our Roosevelt's. All the Roosevelt's. We need them back. No, the Bull Moose Party, third party Teddy Roosevelt. Whatever it takes, guys. I'm waiting. I've been waiting. I've been sitting here waiting. Anyway, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

58:18It's really a time to actually get things done. And I think that's the critical part. And I really appreciate you for being here and talking about it so substantively. Thanks, Kira. Thank you, Kira. I look forward to continuing the conversation. Today's show is produced by Vicky Virgulina, Michelle Aloy, Catherine Milsop, Madeline LaPlante Duby, and Megan Burney. Nishat Kerwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Annika Robbins, Jim Mackle, and Manolo Moreno. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you don't have to protect your little heart anymore. If not, you're still under Trump's spell.

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1:00:41at enjin.com slash box. Shop Black Friday Appliance Savings and get up to an extra $1,250 off select appliance purchases like GE Profile. Plus, free delivery on appliance purchases of $398 or more. Make life easier with the fridge that doubles as your personal kitchen assistant. Or upgrade your laundry room with the ultra-fresh Vent System Plus front load washer. So your clothes stay fresh after every single wash. Shop Black Friday appliance savings with fast, free delivery at The Home Depot. Offer valid November 4th through December 2nd at participating stores and at homedepot.com. U.S. only. See store online for details.