Newton: AI backlash has a mandate but lacks a Congress plan

Democrats took both houses of Congress on Tuesday, and Casey Newton's read in Platformer is that part of that mandate was an AI backlash the party is not yet equipped to turn into law. Voters approved bans or restrictions on data centers in at least 38 jurisdictions. Elon Musk, Newton writes, "spent nearly half a billion dollars this cycle and got almost nothing in return."

Newton's column is a warning drawn from the social media years. "Only Congress can protect America's jobs, national security, and the various other flanks that AI has left increasingly exposed," he writes, his point being that the courts alone will not catch up to a technology moving on this timeline. He cites a METR report out the same day, based on a review of internal progress at Anthropic, finding that "the pace of capability growth on well-specified tasks is likely about 2x what it was from Mar 2024 to Oct 2025."

He lays out three mistakes to watch for. The first is "no coherent goal": privacy, bias, misuse, and power concentration are all live, and reform stalled on social media for a decade because lawmakers never agreed on what "safety" meant. The second is "no plan B": states have already passed a range of AI safety regulations, and Newton expects the industry to push hard for federal preemption that would restrict further state lawmaking.

The third is "thinking in silos."

"Today there are more than 800 local groups fighting data centers," Newton writes. "There is a growing number of parents whose children were harmed by chatbots. There are safety PACs worried about catastrophic risk. There are also building-trades unions endorsing candidates because they support data centers, since they bring construction jobs with them. If the AI story follows the path of social media, those groups will rarely speak to each other."

His closing is blunt: "Democrats now have the votes, the mandate, and the industry's call for real guardrails. What they don't have much of is time."