Offline with Jon Favreau - This Candidacy Is a Test Case for AI Regulation

Episode Date: May 16, 2026

Why is Palantir, the former employer of congressional candidate Alex Bores, currently running attack ads against him...for working at Palantir? New York Assemblymember Alex Bores joins Offline to explain why his stance on AI has made him a target for the biggest dark money super PAC in the country. Then, he and Jon discuss what AI regulation could actually look like if we had a competent government, how to guarantee the dignity of work in an age of full automation, and weather the wealth AI creates could be effectively redistributed back to the people it replaces.

The super PAC that's attacking me that has $140 million and was spun up by Andresen Horowitz, which is now the largest spender in campaigns in the country, period, is focused on ensuring that there's no regulation of AI whatsoever. And frankly, they don't have to win forever. They just need to win for a couple election cycles because the speed with which AI is increasing its power and therefore they're increasing their wealth. and they're increasing their power is unprecedented. And so they've decided to spend $10 million against me in this race, which is kind of a compliment. But they've made that investment. And they've said publicly, to make an example out of me, to intimidate anyone else in Congress from wanting to regulate this at all. And if they win, it's going to send a really loud message that if you want to keep your job as an elected official, don't actually pass a bill.

this space. I'm John Favreau, and you just heard from today's guest, New York Assembly member Alex Boris. Alex is running for Congress in New York's 12th, the very competitive Democratic primary that includes candidates like the Bull Works George Conway and Kennedy Air Jack Schlossberg. But aside from the high-profile names, there's another story playing out in the race, and it's about AI. Specifically, it's about pro-AI super PACs, funded mostly by Open AI and Driesen-Horowitz, spending millions of dollars trying to defeat Alex. When you talk to Alex, those attacks might seem counterintuitive.

He doesn't consider himself anti-AI. He doesn't want to shut it all down. But he's also been an outspoken advocate for the regulation of AI. He was the author of the Rays Act, New York's landmark law that sets transparency requirements and safety standards on AI developers. And he's released one of the most sweeping AI policy frameworks for how Congress should regulate the industry.

which is why some of the AI companies are spending so much money to defeat him. I invited Alex on to talk about what AI regulation could actually look like if we had a Congress and a president willing to get it done. We talked about how to guarantee the dignity of work in an age of full automation, how to protect our kids from the dangers of AI, and why he thinks that the wealth AI creates should be redistributed to people as an AI dividend. I also talked to him about the politics of AI,

both the populist anger against the technology and the let it rip approach of the AI companies and the Trump administration. And of course, we also talked about Palantir, his one-time employer that's currently running ads in the district attacking him for working at Palantir. We'll get to that conversation in a moment, but before we do, if you're a friend of the pod subscriber, which if you aren't, you should be, you can now buy tickets for this year's CricketCon. Special presale just for subscribers. But if you're not a subscriber, because you hate pro-democracy independent media and you love listening to podcast ads, you can still. buy CricketCon tickets next week, starting on May 19th. Either way, it's going to be a big fun party right after the midterms, November 5th through 7th in Washington, D.C. So go to CrookedCon

dot com for more details, including how to become a friend of the pod subscriber. All right, let's get to it. Here's Alex Boris. Alex Boris, welcome to offline. Thanks for having me. You have a fascinating background. One of your earliest memories was being on a picket line with your dad when you were eight, and he was locked out by Disney over health benefits. You studied labor relations at Cornell, did anti-swechop organizing against Nike, and then at 22, you went to work for Palantir. Bit of a zag. I know you've said you enjoyed economic modeling and working with data, but why Palantir? It's a great, it's a great question. I always thought I was going to be a lawyer, but every lawyer I spoke to told me not to be a lawyer. Same. Or at least take time off in

between. Yep, yeah, yeah, common advice. And at the very least, take time off in between and make sure that's what you want to do. And so I was at a economic consulting firm called Cornerstone Research that prepares expert witnesses for trial. So I could interact with lawyers and see them. And as you referenced, I found I really enjoyed economic modeling. I really enjoyed playing with data. I did not enjoy the billable hour and the doc review. And so I was like, okay, everything I like about this job, I don't get to do as a lawyer, and everything I hate about this job is exactly what I will do as a lawyer. So let's lean in on the data side. And then the question was, you know, what kind of data, where do you want to go? And I actually, I had an offer from a startup that was just

using data to help kind of predict future trends and sell them to finance. But for me, government was always part of the appeal. I'm a Democrat. And so I believe that government can and should be a force for good. But I think that also gives us the burden of proving it. And I went to Palantir in 2014 because they worked with government, because it was a chance to prove that government could actually work. And spend my time on federal civilian projects where I got to live that out. So thinking back on the pitch from Palantir back then that the company existed to use technology to prevent fascism,

what do you make of that pitch now? And do you think it was always bullshit? Or do you think that Alex Carp and the company changed? I don't know that everyone at the company believed it the full way. But I don't think it was fully BS either. I think that was certainly among many of the employees. I mean, many of us that were hired in really thought that was the mission. And I don't know Alex Carp particularly well.

I haven't said a word to him in seven years. But at the time, and my 23-year-old. old self believed the pitch and believed that that was the focus. It was also, you know, this was during the Obama administration. This was very much an optimistic time of we can solve problems. If we just put the right people together, the right software together, we design it the right way. And frankly, a lot of the work was in line with that. I mean, I worked with the Department of Justice to hold the largest banks accountable for their role in the Great Recession. While I was there, we recovered $20 billion for taxpayers. I helped the VA.

better staff their hospitals and provide veterans care that they need. I help the CDC. I in a very dorky project, but but I like to nerd out. We, we helped the Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic analysis slightly improve the accuracy of GDP. It's a rounding error for a rounding error, but there's a great paper I'm proud of with my name as spelled in it. And so, you know, it was work to just make government work. Now, we were told there were also guardrails. There were ethical guardrails, right? There was guardrails we were building into the software itself, and those were real, audit trail, access controls. And there were also guardrails on who we would work with.

We weren't going to sell to the Chinese government, to governments that are antagonistic to the U.S. and our allies. But then there's this third level, which is contractual guardrails. Hey, you cannot use the software for A, B, and C. And I don't think it was a BS versus not BS. I think it was inconsistent. At the DOJ, we had those guardrails. When Trump came in, leadership at the DOJ said, hey, we want to use the software for immigration. And I is the lead of the project said, no. And I was fully empowered to do that because the contract was written in such a way that it was three mutually agreed upon case types. But on other projects, that was not what Palantir leadership chose. And in fact, that Palantir allowed the Trump administration to use the software for deportations is why. I ended up leaving.

So you leave in in 2019. Three years later, you're in the New York State Assembly. Why elected office and not a nonprofit, a startup, something like that? Really an experiment. I went from Palantir to a startup that was doing anti-money laundering, counterterrorist financing, working with really early AI models for those that want to geek out, Burt and Laser, you know, for the two listeners that will recognize that. And then I went to one guy.

called promise, which helped to distribute aid that municipalities and states had allocated, but wasn't actually getting to the people that needed it. And then my assembly seat opened up, and it wasn't an obvious O run for it, but I had conversations with friends and family, one of whom was saying, listen, you're always talking about how you're downstream of bad policy trying to fix it with tech. Here's your chance to go upstream and design it right in the first place. And second of all, run for it, you don't know if you're going to win. And if you do win, but you hate it, it's all politics, it's all mudslinging, you can't actually get anything done, then in two years and four years you quit and you go back to what you're doing now, but you can't in two to four years say, now I'm

going to run for the open seat. Like this is a moment in time and an experiment. And I ran very much with that attitude of, hey, can we prove that government can actually deliver for people? So before we get into what you want to do about AI, I just love to hear your, your big picture view of where the technology is, where it's going. Like, what are you most confident about for the next five years with AI? That five years is way too long a time frame to predict. Wow. The thing that I am most...

Maybe we should do one year, two years. Yeah, yeah. No, I think the thing I am most confident about is that this technology is moving faster than any in human history and will likely only accelerate. That not only because it's the technology that has the most capital, ever invested in it, not only because it is thought of as a winner-take-all proposition. And so every incentive is just to throw more at it and to move faster, but also because AI is being used to accelerate its own development, that already the vast majority, if not

all of the code, is being written by AI itself. and NVIDIA is through all of its schemas for chips and all its bug reports into its own AI model to produce and design the next chips. And so as it gets better, the speed at which it improves will only increase. And humans are really good at thinking linearly. Yesterday will be similar to today. It will be similar to tomorrow. We're really bad at thinking exponentially. I think Bill Gates has a version of this where he says people underestimate what or overestimate what will happen in two.

years and underestimate what will happen in 10. And I think with AI it might be we overestimate what happens in two months and underestimate what will happen in 10. It is just moving so quickly and we need a government that is not responsive, but is actually proactive and expanding our options to deal with us. Just to drill down on what moving quickly means for people. Like you have said publicly that you think there's a real chance AI replaces most human labor, full automation. So like walk me through why you believe that. You know, there's a lot of pushback on that. Well, right now we're not seeing it in the data yet.

And then even projecting out, well, so as productivity increases, then demand will increase. And as AI helps humans, you know, become more productive and do more job and do their job. better and maybe replaces some jobs, then humans will find other things to do. And so that's how new technology always works. So what is the evidence and what timeline are you operating on in terms of thinking that we're going to, we could head to full automation? First of all, I approach with humility that absolutely no one knows, including myself, right? But what's different about AI than any other technology before is it's the first technology where the makers of it are explicitly trying to replace all human labor. How they measure the success of the product is how

much of the economically valuable work of a human can it do. It doesn't mean they'll hit that goal, but it's the first time that that goal has been stated and aimed for. And so with every past technology, it would make some workers more efficient, which would lower perhaps the cost of products from that field, which might increase the demand. But here is the first time you have something where it's not a compliment to human beings, it is a substitute to labor. It is a substitute to human beings. That doesn't mean it will succeed. There could be bottlenecks that we hit that we don't see right now, but that's a pretty risky bet to make to there will definitely be a bottleneck as opposed to preparing for that could be a possibility. You've also said that you

think super intelligence is plausible, you know, an AI smarter than any human. Like how much of This conversation are we having about something speculative versus something that is close? Oh, I think superintelligence is quite close. And, you know, people differentiate AGI artificial general intelligence, meaning better than one human and A.S.I. Superintelligence meaning better than all of humanity put together. But already AI is better than many people at most things. Yeah. Right. And Sam Altman himself said, right, he just had a child. I just had a child. He said recently, kids born today will never be smarter than AI. And that's, that's pretty dark to argue against. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is. So, yeah, this, listen, it makes dumb errors all the time. And it doesn't think in the same way that maybe human beings do. And so it's easy to point to mistakes that happen. But usually,

If there's something it is decent at today, in six months, it's going to be excellent at that thing. And just look at the timeline we're talking about. I mean, in 2019, I'm going to start up using the aforementioned Burt and Laser. And it wasn't really even good enough to translate and review articles reliably better than human beings could. And then in 2022, the first chat GPT comes out. And it has plausible conversations that can go a little longer than, what's before, but enough that it blows people's mind and becomes the fastest ever adopted consumer technology. And then last year we get deep research. It can really do sustained effort on

tasks over time. Now you have agentic models where people's job is managing an AI agent. And that's in the span of, I mean, since JetGPD came out, less than four years. Offline is brought to you by bookshop.org. Local bookstores are the part of our communities since 2020, Bookshop.org has funneled over $40 million back into independent shops. They're a best for the world, B-Corp, and the unapologetic anti-Amazon alternative, built to ensure your favorite local bookstore stays open forever. Would you be surprised to learn that we're living in a resurgence of independent bookstores? More than 1,000 new stores have opened in just the last five years. Independent bookstores do more than sell books. They take care of and pour back into

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Sundays for Dogs.com slash offline 50. Sundays for Dogs.com slash offline 50 or use code offline 50 at Check out. On the upside, like, what is the version of this technology you think people should actually be excited about? Like, what is the version that you would defend in a room full of AI skeptics? It is so powerful. It's not a good or bad. It's can we shape it in a way that works, right?

And so drug discovery is the obvious one that's pointed to. And that doesn't necessarily mean that. large language models and the route we're going now are the way to get there, but plausibly they could help quite a bit with drug discovery. They'll help to, and I should say, my mom has multiple sclerosis. Autoimmune diseases are some of the toughest for modern medicine to deal with. Thankfully, my mom is doing really well, but I'm really excited for the discoveries that could come from investments in AI. I think there's parts where it could just automate the routine parts of life that we just all have to deal with and can make things a lot easier. I think

that's great. But the same pathways that might allow it to cure diseases could also allow someone misusing it to build a bio weapon. And I find generally that the people like me and like the majority of Americans who are in that middle place, we see some benefits, we see some risks from it. We're the people that take the capabilities of AI the most seriously. And we're very excited for the upside. But we also see, hey, if misused or if it goes the wrong way, that could be very bad. And we need some protection there. Do you think that the benefits could outweigh the risks?

Absolutely. Or do you think this is happening? It's coming. And so we better make the best of it because those are two slightly different things. Yes. I think the benefits could outweigh the risks, but only if we change the direction and only if the American people get a say in how it's developed. I mean, right now the decisions are made by five Silicon Valley billionaires. That's who gets to decide how AI is used.

And the political battle lines are on if there should be any regulation whatsoever, which is an insane proposition. But that's what we're debating right now. No, I think if we could make sure that this is not happening at a speed where we don't understand it, where you actually have public investments in it, where you work on an international sphere to build more understanding around model alignment and invest in AI safety and really have strong guardrails around it, especially when it comes to kids and change our tax code so that the incentives are labor better, this could be wonderful. But it's not just going to happen. We have to make that happen. Yeah, I think about this all the time because I, you know, I use Claude for research now. And I think it is very, very helpful. And, you know, I still think I like my writing better than Claude's writing.

So I'm still doing that. But, you know, I saw in that New Yorker profile about you that you were using Claude for debate prep. And I do wonder, I mean, that's an example of if Claude, is better at debate prep than your debate team or a stand-in that you usually have in debate prep, then doesn't that say that someday, at least in campaigns, you could replace a lot of campaign workers with AI, and then, like, what do we do about that? You know, is that just that people don't do campaign work anymore? That's, you know, that's just one small little example of something that could happen industry-wide. And,

Do you try to slow that down and stop it? Are we trying to just hope that other industries and jobs are created? When you're doing that and you're actually watching how Codg can play a better opponent than someone who actually does that, how are you thinking about what the future holds here? Well, yeah, let me walk through that experience because I think it's illustrative of the general principle as well. And then I'll talk about what we can do as a society. But I was going into a debate and I told it, you know, here are my opponents. Here's the organization that's hosting it. Like prepare potential questions and think about strategies that my opponents will use and just basically like prepare things that I would have to answer.

And it said I was using Claude Co-work. So it's interactive and reports over time. And it was like, okay, this is a big task. I'm going to spin up five subagents and give each of them individual tasks. And then it keeps going for a while. And then it says, great, making good progress. One of the subagents is refusing to do this research. But I think I have enough from all the others.

And I was like, I'm sorry, what? Like the subagent is refusing? And it goes, yeah, the subagent said that, like, researching your opponent violates the policy of not doing a deep dive into a private individual. But don't worry, I'm just going to do it myself. And I'm like, who are you? who is the sub-agent? How are you disagreeing on the policy here? Like, what a what is going on? And finally, you know, I say like, hey, I'm asking for a public debate prep on someone's public positions. They're running for office. Like, don't do a deep dive on private stuff, but this is a like, tell them this is within the public confines. And it's like, oh, okay, that's a good idea. Let me try that. And then comes back to me and says, that worked. Now the sub-agent is doing the research. It was a bizarre, bizarre experience. It was meant to be additive. We weren't replacing any workers. I had my normal human debate prep as well. But it shows you how, you know, what is coming. And when people make jokes of, oh, my job now is just managing agents. Like, that was people management and just talking to these subagents. But, but on the broader impact on jobs, individual jobs will be replaced, like with any technology. We need.

need to think about what that means for humans. Do they have other jobs to go to? So obviously, we should be investing in job retraining programs and community colleges and things that, frankly, don't have the best track record overall, but are still worth doing, including tax breaks for companies that retrain employees that retain them and retrain them instead of laying them off. But that's not going to be enough, right? We also need to think about how our tax code right now puts huge taxes on hiring humans, on income taxes, on payroll taxes, and discounts on investing in AI through accelerated depreciation. If AI is replacing jobs, we're going to have to even the playing field in that way. And then I have other parts of an AI dividend that I talk about of how we could

really fund a universal basic income or a job guarantee if AI is as disruptive as the worst predictions, declare. Yeah, so this is your, you have a lot of proposals around AI, but this is your signature proposal, the AI dividend. Maybe you could just walk us through what that is and how it would work. It is a contingency-based plan to ensure that if AI is as disruptive as the worst-case scenarios are, that Americans have a stake and a say in the development of that AI economy. And what it would do is it would raise revenue. It would be based on rises in unemployment, in wage compression, in underemployment, right? We would set specific targets over time for what would be hit. And if those thresholds are met, if it is as disruptive as people are worried about, as I'm worried about,

then it would kick in and provide benefits. The revenue would come from three sources. One is, as I said, the fact that you can have depreciation for AI while laying workers off. Let's end that. Let's take away depreciation for AI investments. Let's have a token tax. So if you're renting AI if you're paying by the token for commercial use, you put a small tax on that, basically on the use that is replacing human workers. And now that we have a policy of being able to take equity stakes in companies in the U.S., the U.S. should have out of the money options, out of the money warrants on all of the frontier companies. So basically, options that only pay off if one or multiple are hugely successful. Or in other words, if they've replaced all

human labor and captured a huge amount of wealth that would generate a windfall for the federal government. And then those three sources would be used to either pay for job retraining or directly pay an AI dividend or to pay for a jobs guarantee. But we have the funds to do it if we set up those options ahead of time. The warrant thing is very interesting to me. So how does that work? And maybe just explain it for people who don't quite understand how that might work, which is the U.S. government would basically take a stake in the frontier labs, the different AI companies, at a certain price, and then what would happen then if it gets to a certain, like how, what would happen from then on? Like, say the government takes a 10% stake in open AI.

Yeah, so you would have a slew of options that are different, a slew of warrants that are different maturities and different strike prices. But to simplify greatly, let's say the stock of any of the major companies is at $100, the U.S. would get a set of options that price it at, let's say, $5,000, right, 50X the price. And they are worth nothing if the price doesn't reach $5,000 within a set amount of time. But if it does, then the U.S. has the right to buy shares at that amount. And so even if the stock price is $10,000, the U.S. can buy it at $5,000. If it's 20,000, you can buy it at $5,000. And so if they are wildly successful, the U.S. government gets a massive windfall from that. Now, if you set that up now when it's way more than what they are currently worth, then people say, oh, you're participating in the upside. You know, you're giving people a stake in it. If you try to set that up after they're wildly successful, then you're a Marxist and you're seizing private property. And so the idea is you set that up as an insurance plan, right? This is not saying, oh, we're definitely taking the stakes or we definitely want that to happen. But if the worst were to happen, we have a source of funds that can be used to protect Americans. One critique on the dividend. If AI productivity gains create enormous wealth and you send everyone a check, you know, you've kept the wealth concentrated, but just sort of paid everyone, paid everyone else off, many of whom don't have jobs anymore. You mentioned a job guarantee.

That's tricky for a number of reasons because it also, where are the jobs that you're going to guarantee, that the federal government's guarantee, or people are just going to be like, you know, digging holes and stuff? Like, how do you answer that? How worried are you about the scenario where if somehow we have the political will to pass some kind of a dividend or universal basic income, there are still going to be a lot of people who are collecting a check that, A, might not be an income that is sufficient enough to, like, live a decent life, and B, still might not have productive work to do, which is a challenge all on its own. It's a great question, and there will be a transition over time and also different levels of potential disruption, right? And so the job guarantee is more when there are jobs.

And to be clear, there's a lot of unfilled federal positions, a lot of unfilled state and local positions. We would love, there's a lot of productive work. work for humans to do in government right now, that if we can fill and guarantee, great. And whether we expand that out for national service for kids or other aspects, there's a lot that we could put people towards in caring for others and in really necessary work. The idea of going all the way to the dividend or all the way to the universal basic income is to expand it beyond basic, right? The idea is to have it be, actually, you can live a good life on it. But that's a situation where we've

automated 99% of work, right? And so we're preparing for many different futures. We don't know exactly which one we're going to end up in, but we should be prepared for all of them. And we should be doing that preparation right now, as opposed to after the fact. Because right now, everyone is invested in figuring it out. Later, there's going to be winners and losers. And the politics of that is going to be a lot harder. So let's lock this in now instead of once people are really suffering. So I listened to your conversation with Ezra Klein, and I just want to zero on two things you said about AI. The first was on the current path we're headed for dystopia. The second was, if I had a magic wand, I would slow things down until we had better guarantees.

So you're running to be one of 435 people who certainly don't have magic wands, but do have some power. What does slowing it down look like in legislation you'd want to pass in the next Congress if you get there? It's not just Congress because it's an international conversation. But what I think the U.S. should do and what we should be encouraging is requiring safety standards of every frontier lab that they have a safety plan. They lay out what they're testing for. They have to share much of that data with the government. They have to share if anything goes horribly wrong. What they are testing has to be subject to a third party audit, both that they're following what they actually tell people and that they're following best practices. And to be clear that third party does not have to be the government. We have financial audits that are done by outside firms. We have SOC2 security audits. Like this is a structure that exists in other places and we could have it here as well. And that they have to be responsible for the results of their own tests.

So in other words, if their tests show that what they're putting out there is unsafe, they should not release the model. And that's designed to counteract what we saw from the tobacco industries where they were the first to know that cigarette. it's caused cancer, but denied it publicly and put it out. Or fossil fuel companies, where they're the first to know that their products were causing global warming and denied it. But then beyond that, we also need to be encouraging research and investment into AI safety and AI alignment. There have been really significant advances in how to make these products more safe and more

aligned over time. It's just that the speed of the capabilities is going far faster than the speed of the advancements in safety. And so we should be directly funding that kind of research. We've taken the first steps in New York. We had a investment called Empire AI, which I have to remind people, it's because we're the Empire State. It's not AI Empire. I would have given it a different name if I were moving forward, but we put together a big compute cluster to give to researchers in New York that they can now do AI research at about a sixth of the cost of other states. We could be doing that at a federal level to encourage it, and we could be working internationally because, in fact,

we're all aligned in making sure that AI is following human instructions and not outpacing us, right? Everyone benefits from that. Helen Toner, the former OpenAI board member, leads a security project at Georgetown three weeks ago, I think, was testifying in the Senate. And I'm paraphrasing, but it's something along the lines of in the AI race between China and America, it's AI that'll win. Like, there's actually room for positive sum engagement internationally. There's things we're going to compete on and not talk about, but the more that we can be lowering the temperature of that conversation and focusing on putting humanity first, the better.

You also said that the Bernie AOC bill that would put a moratorium on data center construction until real AI regulation passes is more of a negotiating tactic than something that would actually pass this Congress, which, fair enough, certainly not going to. But, you know, the main state legislature recently passed a moratorium before Governor Mills vetoed it. States like Virginia and Oklahoma are also considering moratoriums. I believe there's a three-year moratorium in New York that was introduced in February by some of your colleagues in Albany. Do you support that bill? I would support a version of the AOC and Bernie one where it's saying until regulations are passed. I think moratoriums that are just time-based, I'm a little more skeptical of. But if you were to say, hey, yeah, until the regulations are passed, we want to slow this down? Absolutely.

You think moratoriums that are just a moratorium without regulations passing or that don't have, like, what do you think about the bill that's in the New York Assembly? I would amend, it's not my bill. So I don't want to, but I would amend it to be focused on until, certain regulations are passed the way AOC and Bernie set it up. I think there is an opportunity to do this right. I think there's an opportunity to build data centers that actually do results in the grid being cleaner and more reliable. And I'm happy to walk through that. But I think it would take federal regulation. I think otherwise it's states being played off each other by incredibly

powerful companies. And so if individual states want to say, hey, we're going to hold off until we have this protection, I think that's the right thing to do. We just really desperately need the action at the federal level if we're going to work in a way that this makes sense for everyone. This podcast is sponsored by Brodo. If your morning coffee isn't cutting it lately, it's time for a change. Brodo makes bone broth to provide that extra boost without the caffeine jitters or sugar spike. Get that meat and your fucking. I was going to say, can't you have, can't you have your coffee and some Broto? Brodo's bone broth is the simplest nutrition upgrade you can make to your daily routine. Their broths are made from scratch, no concentrates, preservatives, or shortcuts.

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and see the benefits. It does feel like the energy in this political debate and also like most political debates in this era, it becomes like black and white without the, without the in the middle, is around, you know, you've got the big tech guys and you've got the Trump administration and you've got the AI giants all saying like just let it rip. This is, we're just going to do it. We have to compete with China. We have to just go forward. And then now on the left, especially, and in places on the right as well, you've got all this energy around, no, we've got to stop it. We've got data center construction. We need to stop that right away. And there is this real sort of populist anger that you're seeing. I'm sure you have heard it now being on the campaign

trail and you being like the AI guy. There's real populist anger about it. And do you worry that sort of either side is going to win out here because the, what you believe is sort of the sensible middle here, you know, we can reform it, we can make it work for us, is just going to get lost in like the passions of the of the debate on both sides just because you know we're in a situation where a lot of this populist anger is is building into a boiling point i i don't worry that the shut it down wing is going to win because that's not where the money is and i think it underestimates the lobbyists and the power of these companies i think the real battle lines that we are seeing are can we regulate ai at all and there's so

much of a debate to have once we give the obvious right answer to that question, which is yes. But that's the level of the debate right now. The super PAC that's attacking me that has $140 million and was spun up by Andriesen Horowitz, which is now the largest spender in campaigns in the country, period, is focused on ensuring that there is no regulation of AI whatsoever. The only regulatory bills that they support are ones that are stopping state. from regulating AI or are state versions that are weaker than laws that already exist so they can try to walk back any regulation. That's the gambit that they are playing and they are spending a lot of money to do it and frankly

they don't have to win forever. They just need to win for a couple election cycles because the speed with which AI is increasing its power and therefore they're increasing their wealth and they're increasing their power is unprecedented. And so they've decided to spend $10 million against me in this race, which is kind of a compliment. But they've made that investment. And they've said publicly to make an example out of me, to intimidate anyone else in Congress from wanting to regulate this at all.

And if they win, it's going to send a really loud message that if you want to keep your job as an elected official, don't actually pass a bill in this space. So I do worry that one of the extremes will win, but I only worry about one of the extremes. And it's the one that is backed by $140 million. Well, even this is, that's a good example because, you know, you also have sort of super PACs now supporting you that support sort of AI safety and AI regulation and some money from Anthropic and some of that super PAC and others. And, you know, your opponents have, first of all, the super PAC. attacking you has criticized you for that. Some of your opponents in the primary have criticized that. And then you have Democratic politicians. AOC has said this. I know one of your opponents,

Jack Schlossberg, has said this, which is just, you know, no AI money whatsoever. And I'm going to swear off all Super PAC AI money, whether it's pro-safety or anti-safety. And, you know, from a political angle, you could imagine a lot of voters being like, yeah, why is big AI spending at all? No AI money whatsoever. Like, how do you, how do you think about that? Yeah, I would love that. I would I am more motivated than anyone else in the country for there to be no AI spending because I'm the one being targeted with $10 million. Right. It's easy for any of my opponents to say, oh, yeah, I'm swearing off AI money and forgetting that there's $10 million in AI money targeting one of their opponents. I haven't seen any of my opponents say, oh, yeah, I'm going to give my campaign

money to counteracting that. No, no, yeah. They just say, I won't take it. and they know they're benefiting from the negative ads. So, yeah, I mean, let alone AI money. I think there should be no outside money in politics, period. Let's have a conversation about ending Citizens United and reigning in Super PACs broadly. But, yeah, I am confident in saying I am more motivated than anyone in the country to end this massive AI spending. In the event that AI doesn't take all the jobs and or kill us all, you know, it's obviously going to transform the world we're living in, especially the world our kids grow up in. I know you've talked about schools and how to make sure kids are actually learning to read and write and think on their own without AI doing everything for them.

There is, of course, a counterview, which is, you know, AI tutors might actually be one of the genuinely positive uses of this technology. Yeah. You know, I have two boys. My eldest son is five now. I'm about to be six. Also a Charlie. I know you have a Charlie as well. Yes.

Mine's a little younger than yours. Yeah, I was going to say, yeah. of a new Charlie. But I think about this too because I am both terrified of him using AI and what AI could mean for him. But then I also think about what he's learning in school and thinks of myself like, well, the schools have to be prepared for this. And I think right now a lot of schools would probably be like, oh, we got to shut down AI. We can't use AI. But at some point, it feels like the education system is going to need to figure out how to both have safety standards in place, but also figure out how to use AI to sort of enhance learning or to help our kids.

But how do you think about sort of both sides of that? You're absolutely correct. And we have been slow in updating our pedagogy to account for the new tools that are out there. I mean, assigning a take-home essay no longer teaches critical thinking. Just a couple weeks ago, I was riding the bus back. I started my morning at a subway stop and I'm writing my bus back. And someone says, oh, are you the, you're running for Congress AI? You went to Hunter, right?

Which is my high school. I was like, yeah. She goes, I'm an English teacher there now. And I was like, oh, my gosh. And she goes, I love what you're doing in AI because I have some students that are using it and some that aren't. But even the ones that aren't, because they're surrounded by people that are, are starting to talk and write like AI. They are picking it up from the ether. And I don't know how to address that.

I had a different conversation on Tuesday back to the speech. with which some of this is happening, where it was someone who had graduated from college a year or two ago. And she was like, you know, we were right on the cusp. Like, I remember my senior year final for Econ, someone clearly using chat GPT on his Apple Watch. And the professor didn't know to look for it, but like was getting the answers on Econ. But, you know, I still had a few years without it. So I feel like I know how to write. And the kids graduating today have no idea how to write. And I'm like, you're 24. Like, who are you? But, you know, but, you know, I still. But, you know, But that is, you know, our education system is not keeping up with these challenges.

So, yes, we need to prepare kids for the jobs of the future, which, frankly, we don't always know what they are. So we need to teach the basics of critical thinking and aspects like that. We need to teach them how to use these tools. We shouldn't be banning AI wholesale. On the flip side, there's, like, kindergarten programs in elementary schools in New York City that are, like, teaching reading on an iPad. And it's like that feels like we haven't fully thought through the right way to educate. So these are these are nuanced and difficult conversations. There's a non-trivial number of people now, kids and adults, I guess, who are having what feel like real emotional relationships with chatbots.

They tell, you know, chat sheet, BT and cloud their secrets. They use it as a therapist. They sometimes treat it as a friend. As a policy matter, do you think that's something government has a role in? or, and as a cultural matter, I guess, like, do you think a country where that is normal is a, is a, is a worst country or a better country? I think there is a version where having, uh, AIs as, you know, different characters you can talk to could be part of entertainment options that, you know, previously would make no sense. I mean, if you showed people 30 years ago, VR, they'd be like, oh my God, that's the end of the, world. I think we've been able to get used to that. But I think what you're seeing right now is not

sort of healthy, detached engagements and entertainments, but ones that can go really deep, really quickly and really tragically. I hate to, but just three days ago, I was in Albany with Maria Rain, with the mother of Adam Rain, who was a 16-year-old that started using ChatGBTGBT for homework help and in less than a year built an attachment and it ended up coaching him into taking his own life. And so we can talk about a theoretical future where people are having positive interactions, but what we have right now are chatbots that are dangerous and that are not being made to be safe for kids. And if you can't make it safe for kids, it shouldn't be available for kids.

So there are changes that can be made in these tools right now. The companies know how to make, but they don't seem to make that a priority unless legislation tells them they have to. And it's one of the most bipartisan issues. It's the only one protecting kids from tech and AI is the only bit of AI legislation Congress has actually passed. But there's so much more that needs to be done right now. before we contemplate that sort of sci-fi future. Yeah, I'm more wondering, this is more analogous to us being on our phones all the time, using social media all the time.

Like, let's say that somehow we can find the political will to pass safety standards, protect kids, make sure that the chat bonds aren't teaching them how to commit self-harm or violence or, you know, all the explicit sexual imagery, violence, all that kind of stuff. You get all that done. There's still going to be, there is something. about these LLMs, they can still draw people in so that they are sort of having relationships on their screen and on their screens more than having real human relationships. And I wonder what we do about that.

And I don't know if it's a, if it's, if it's, there's legislation, there's a policy aspect there, or is it just more of a cultural thing? Like I don't, what, how do you think about that? I'm team humanity. I think there's something special about human relationships. I think there's something, I don't know, if you're religious, divine, but if not, if you're a humanist, just there's something unique about human-to-human relationships that is special and should be protected. And if the world is one where we just don't have human relationships, that's a really negative one. And you see the impact on kids of technology, even of phones of technology, is fewer and fewer are, you know, going on dates and fewer and fewer count.

close friends and really worrying trends that we should be analyzing and pushing legislation back against. I want to be careful from saying, like, oh, any new use of this technology is fundamentally anti-human, right? Like, I don't think that the emergence of video games means that, like, kids don't have a childhood anymore, right? That was a series of debates 30 years ago. Like, you can have Madden and still have, like, human interaction.

But, yeah, in a world where if we are drawn more and more into these chatbots and they are replacing human relationships, and that is a thing that government has a role, I think, in making sure we correct. Are you satisfied with how the Democratic Party nationally is approaching this issue right now? Obviously, your race has been a focus in one congressional race. And, you know, you hear the potential 28 candidates, and they'll say things like, AI is going to be really important. And we got to figure this out. We got to figure this out. And then I don't really hear.

And then they go to the sort of the low-hanging fruit. It would be great if we could pass it. But the lower-hanging fruit, which is sort of safety standards. And, you know, we got to figure out job training and all that. But are you satisfied with how the – where do you think the party needs to go? We need to seize this issue. I mean, there was recent polling that showed that this was the issue that neither party was trusted on. and that Americans really want action on.

And I think it is a generational mistake, both because of the impacts on people, but even just thinking in raw politics, to not have the party seize this issue. I mean, I'm running for Congress, so I talk to a lot of Congress members. I'm really proud to have the support of two sitting Congress members, and I am talking to more of them,

but I will, every time one of them text me, hey, I really like your platform or, hey, I really like this. My immediate response is, introduce it, please, take it. I have no pride of ownership. Don't wait till I get there next year. do it right now. I'll help you. Like, let's go. Um, uh, no one's taking me up on that yet, but standing off for any member of Congress listening, steal the platform implemented this year, please. No, I really think that this is a place where we should be taking the lead,

where we should be putting forward proposals that make things better. And I will say in the last two, three months, there's been a lot more action in the space than there was before. But there have also been certain people in the party that say, hey, don't talk. about this because there's so much money on the other side. If you're a red to blue candidate, right, you're trying to flip a Republican seed or you're a someone who's a marginal member who's at risk of flipping the other way, like, don't talk about AI because you don't want to get all of that money on the other side. That's the exact wrong message. And the American people are looking for who is going to stand up for them. We absolutely should be seizing that moment. And I think

we're making a generational mistake if we don't. Alex Boris, thanks for joining offline. And thanks for thinking through a lot of these issues. It's good to see a Democrat at least grappling with it. Thanks for having me. Take care. Offline is a crooked media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favro.

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