I’m writing this on a plane back to Washington, DC, from a conference in the Bay Area, the land of tomorrow. While the conference wasn’t about AI, this is the Bay Area, and thus roughly 90 percent of conversations were about AI.

It is hard to overstate the scale of the gap between the cultures of the Bay Area and DC on this topic. AI has certainly become a real part of the policy conversation in DC, but only in quite technical, near-term, and not especially high-profile ways: How should we regulate deep fakes? How should we handle data centers’ increasing demands for energy? Should we require Nvidia processors to have a little component that can tell if the chip is physically in China to prevent Beijing from getting its hands on too many?

But if DC’s AI concerns are quotidian, the Bay Area’s are existential.

In Berkeley, or at least among the crowd I was talking to, the questions were more like: Are we ever going to be able to stop these machines from cheating on our attempts to evaluate us, from blackmailing us when we obstruct their goal, from actively working to avoid being shut down? (These are all real things that researchers have found leading-edge AI models can do.) If we don’t fix these problems, will we survive the next 10 years?

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When somewhat less apocalyptic questions like “how will we cope if billions of people are suddenly unemployed due to AI and robotics progress,” the tone of most responses I got was something like, “God, I really hope that turns out to be the biggest problem. It means we all survived.”

Temperamentally, I’m more inclined to think about these things in very concrete, near-term ways. There’s a reason I live in Washington, DC; it is a town for good-natured incrementalists. So, naturally, all the AI talk got me thinking about the huge budget reconciliation bill passed by the House and being considered by the Senate.

Let me be blunt: This is, in ways big and small, not a budget that takes AI seriously at all. Even worse, if you think this technology is going to have an even slightly significant influence on the world in the next decade, the One Big Beautiful Bill will make that influence worse.

The directly AI-related stuff

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