By now, the string of alarming recent headlines blur together: an Anthropic engineer who quit out of fear that his company was downplaying the possibly humanity-ending risks of its product. Swarms of rogue AI agents attempting to deceive their human overseers. A string of dire warnings from AI executives and luminaries. Such apocalyptic talk has been a regular feature of the tech world in recent years, but the rapid-fire developments of recent weeks have put it on the front burner for everyone else, most notably in Washington. Until just the last few days, Congress — where AI knowledge among its oft-geriatric members tends not to be expansive — had mostly been twiddling its thumbs on artificial intelligence.

That’s where Rob Flaherty saw an opening. Flaherty, who was the Deputy Campaign Manager for Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris in 2024 (and whom I spoke with earlier this year about the infamous DNC autopsy), recently co-founded a group, Tomorrow Together, which will fund and advise Democratic candidates around AI in the midterm elections and beyond. Flaherty believes that artificial intelligence will be the defining political issue of the next several years, and that Democrats need a far better and more unified message than they have presented so far. His efforts have coincided with a moment where everyone in politics is suddenly paying close attention. I spoke with him about what both parties are failing to understand about AI, what sensible regulations might actually look like, and why President Trump is so politically toxic on this subject.

You recently told Politico that on AI, “Voters don’t know which party is better. They want solutions that look a lot like things that Democrats want. They still don’t know whether a Democrat or a Republican is going to be more helpful.” You went on to say that there’s a huge political advantage in taking the issue seriously now. I’m wondering how much of this initiative you’re leading has to do with your personal level of fear and apprehension around the technology, and how much is that you see it as a rare kind of political opportunity.The truth is that it’s both. I am super freaked by what this technology can do, and that makes me completely in line with the average American. People are actually concerned about this. This is one of those opportunities where good policy is good politics, and doing the things that we need to do to step up and regulate these companies, provide a really strong set of protections and guardrails, build a society that can exist in the context of powerful AI in an economy that doesn’t concentrate the wealth with six rich guys. That’s important for continuing democracy and making the country work, but also a thing that a political party would have a lot of advantage by jumping on.

And as you said, people don’t really know who’s advocating for what. If the average voter could name anyone’s political position on AI right now it would probably be Trump, who is loudly against any regulation and totally blase about the risks.It is one of the truly most bafflingly unpopular political positions he could be taking right now.

As Matt Yglesias put it, Trump is below the“legalize heroin” line in public opinion on this..Exactly. Trump is historically unpopular and maybe he just doesn’t care, but I think he is dragging the Republicans to a really bad place here. It’s one thing to be holding the bag when a bad thing happens. But if a bad thing happens, the worst possible thing is to be the person who said it wasn’t going to happen in the first place. So voters are screaming at Washington saying they need to take this seriously. If you look at Mike Rogers, who is running in a competitive Senate seat in Michigan, he’s calling for pacing the frontier and regulating the AI companies. That is more of an indicator of where Republicans who actually have to deal with voters are.

Trump does seem indifferent to public opinion at this point, and he’s doing a lot of unpopular things, like continuing the Iran War. But why do you think he is so all in on AI? Is it a financial motive? Self interest? I can’t quite glean what’s happening there.Who knows how he’s making money? What I will say is the reason Donald Trump is here is the reason Donald Trump is Donald Trump. You can see this in the reporting. There are a number of people in his White House who are incredibly concerned about what this technology can do, going all the way up to Susie Wiles. But at the end of the day, a bunch of rich guys can call Donald Trump and get access. And the guys who are most financially incentivized to have no regulations or oversight for their tools are dialling him up and telling him, “Don’t do anything here.” Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang, David Sacks — all these guys are in his ear.

So it’s Donald Trump — a rat king of self-motivated profit — and a bunch of rich dudes trying to make it so this industry........

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