The AI industry has spent this midterm cycle pouring record sums into super PACs. Tech executives contributed hundreds of millions to elect friendly, deregulation-minded candidates, even as some of those execs publicly call for federal industry standards on AI.

With the public souring on data centers, the massive donations felt like an exercise in terrible timing for the candidates who took the money — and extra clumsy on the donors' part, since Silicon Valley picked a side that most polls say is doomed to fail. And, if the polls are right, a newly empowered Congress could hand the industry the kind of oversight it never intended. Careful what you (publicly) wish for.

While tech billionaires wrote unlimited checks, many voters in most legislative districts were just trying to survive.

Those dollars had no clear messaging behind them. For example, Silicon Valley's multimillion-dollar midterm blitz imploded when elite tech PACs ran blanket campaigns, assuming struggling Rust Belt towns and rural farming communities cared about "open-source model parameters" rather than their own economic survival.

The AI industry also spent millions trying to normalize itself through advertising, but the public doesn’t seem to be buying it.

There's a bizarre dichotomy in public perception right now. The average person is perfectly happy to ask ChatGPT or Claude how to balance their checkbook, diagnose a weird ache in their knee, and, as I wrote about, ask AI who they should vote for.

But zoom out to the bigger picture, and that same person may view the industry with immense anxiety.

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