[profile of Chris Lehane’s lobbying methods (now working for OA)] …Lehane, who had worked on the Telecommunications Act of 1996, was convinced that Silicon Valley was the future, and he quickly built a business providing his dark arts to wealthy Californians. When trial lawyers wanted to increase the state’s caps on medical-malpractice jury awards, they brought in Lehane, who helped send voters flyers that looked like cadaver toe tags, and produced ads implying that doctors might be performing surgery while drunk. A few years later, when a prominent environmentalist hired Lehane to campaign against the Keystone XL Pipeline, he sent activists into press conferences carrying vials of sludge from an oil spill; the sludge was so noxious that reporters fled the room. Then he hired one of the Navy SEALs who had helped kill Osama bin Laden to talk to journalists and explain that if the pipeline were approved a terrorist attack could flood Nebraska with one of the largest oil spills in American history. Lehane explained to a reporter his theory of civil discourse: “Everyone has a game plan until you punch them in the mouth. So let’s punch them in the mouth.”

But Lehane’s efforts generally failed to impress the tech industry. For decades, Silicon Valley firms had considered themselves mostly detached from electoral politics. As one senior tech executive explained to me, until about the mid-twenty-tens, “if you were a VC or CEO you might hire lobbyists to talk to politicians, or gossip with you, but, beyond that, most of the Valley thought politics was stupid.” Within a decade of Lehane’s move West, however, a new kind of tech company was emerging.

…In August, OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence giant, announced that it had hired Lehane as its vice-president of global affairs. Unlike the battles that he’s fought at Airbnb and Coinbase, where the ideological lines of combat have been easy to define, the political fights over artificial intelligence are murkier and more nascent. There are numerous stakeholders with competing interests within the tech industry itself. Marc Andreessen, for one, has called for little to no additional regulation of underlying AI technologies, because, he wrote in a jeremiad last year, hampering the development of technology that might benefit humanity “is a form of murder.” In other words, “any deceleration of AI will cost lives.” He left it unsaid that creating regulations would also likely make it more difficult for him and other venture capitalists to find fast-growing companies to invest in, thereby denying them profits.

On the opposing side is a contingent of AI engineers who believe that their creations may soon become powerful enough to exterminate most of humanity. Regulation, therefore, is urgently needed to ensure that only the most enlightened technologists can practice this mysterious alchemy. The technologists pushing these arguments, inevitably, place themselves among those enlightened few, and their “more responsible” visions of AI development often align with the business plans of their own startups.

Somewhere in the middle is Lehane and OpenAI. The company made an opening salvo in July, when its chief executive, Sam Altman, published, with Lehane’s support, an op-ed in the Washington Post which portrayed the fight around AI regulations as one pitting democracies against authoritarian regimes. “The bottom line is that democratic AI has a lead over authoritarian AI because our political system has empowered U.S. companies, entrepreneurs, and academics”, Altman wrote. But that lead is not guaranteed, he continued, and it can be protected only if Congress passes regulations that encourage important software advances—like OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot—and also prioritize “rules of the road” and “norms in developing and deploying AI.” OpenAI, Altman indicated, is prepared to accept substantial constraints on data security and transparency, and it supports the creation of a government agency to regulate AI development and use.

This rhetoric may sound high-minded, but—not surprisingly—Altman’s position is also somewhat self-interested. The company’s smaller rivals would probably find such rules and norms expensive and cumbersome, and therefore have a harder time complying with them than OpenAI would. The op-ed was also an example of Lehanian reframing: instead of talking about big AI companies competing with small startups, or about the inevitable tensions between rapid technological leaps and slower but safer progress, Altman recast the AI battle as one between good and evil. And Silicon Valley, in this story line, is the home of virtuous superheroes.

…Lehane’s strategy of putting Altman forward as a strong political voice guarantees that OpenAI, and the AI industry as a whole, will continue to influence the American political conversation for years to come. Venkatasubramanian told me, “The goal is to get a seat at the table, because then you have influence over how things turn out.”

The AI industry’s influence is already being felt in state capitals. Workday, a giant human-resources software company, has been lobbying in several states to add what could be a subtle loophole to legislation about “automated decision tools” in the workplace. Companies that, like Workday, sell AI-enhanced software for hiring employees would essentially be immune from lawsuits over racial discrimination, or other biases, unless a litigant could prove that AI was the “controlling” factor behind the rejection of a candidate. “It all comes down to just one word in the legislation”, Venkatasubramanian said. “One word makes all the difference, and if you are at the table, and involved in the conversation, you can nudge that word into the legislation, or out of it.”

Even Lehane admits that the AI campaign is in its early stages. The exact pressure points aren’t quite clear yet. Alliances and enmities are constantly shifting. What is certain, though, is that Silicon Valley will continue to bully and woo politicians by deploying money—and its giant user base—as a lure and a weapon.

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