民主党选民呼吁对人工智能进行监管，但其领导人对此不感兴趣。

The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.---Last month, Democrats in New Jersey, Virginia, and Georgia surged to victory on the back of an affordability message that took aim at soaring energy costs fueled by the proliferation of power-hungry data centers.

In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill pledged to declare a state of emergency and freeze utility rates, while in Georgia, two Democrats won statewide elections by over 20 percent, with their campaigns fueled by popular resentment of artificial intelligence’s soaring energy costs.But not every Democrat is excited about the public’s revolt against the AI industry’s infrastructure demands.

On Tuesday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries announced the creation of the “House Democratic Commission on AI and the Innovation Economy,” which is supposed to steer the Democratic caucus’s thinking on the thorny issues of AI regulation. To lead this, Jeffries selected Reps. Ted Lieu (D-CA), Valerie Foushee (D-NC), Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Frank Pallone Jr.

(D-NJ), and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA). Together, these five members are expected to “develop policy expertise” in AI and forge relationships with the ascendent AI industry, which Jeffries euphemistically terms “the innovation community.”But the choice of these specific members speaks more to the true intention of this project: reconciliation with the Silicon Valley oligarchs who backed Donald Trump in 2024.

Read more from the Revolving Door ProjectUnlike the Democratic base, which seems eager for a crackdown on AI, data centers, and the rising electricity costs associated with them, Jeffries’s hand-picked commission members have a history of supporting Big Tech. Lofgren, who represents a portion of Silicon Valley, has been a longtime ally of the technology platforms and among the top recipients of Big Tech campaign donations.

In 2021, Lofgren bucked her own party’s efforts to pass regulatory restrictions on Big Tech at the outset of the Biden administration, speaking candidly about the large campaign donations she received from them.Perhaps the most vocal supporter of business interests on the commission is Josh Gottheimer.

He is among the most aggressively pro-corporate members of Congress from either party, and has co-sponsored industry-backed legislation that would exempt financial services companies from regulations, including civil rights laws and consumer protection laws, in the pursuit of AI “innovation.”Gottheimer has also received significant funding from the cryptocurrency-aligned super PAC Fairshake, whose backers include Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the billionaire venture capitalists.

Andreessen and Horowitz recently launched an AI industry super PAC with some of the same staff, vowing to spend up to $100 million in the midterm elections. Gottheimer, a former Microsoft executive, also holds stocks in some of the AI industry’s largest firms, including tens of millions of dollars in his former company.

Even the less obviously concerning members of the commission are hardly vocal critics of Silicon Valley. Foushee is a member of the corporate-friendly New Dems, and helped craft their “innovation agenda,” which opposes broad regulation of the AI industry and instead calls for working with AI companies to build “consensus for next steps as lessons are learned” and “regulate incrementally.

” Foushee also partially owes her 2022 victory in a crowded Democratic primary to almost $1 million in outside spending from super PAC Protect Our Future, funded by now-imprisoned cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried.Ted Lieu is a longtime Big Tech ally who is so impressed by the innovations of AI models that he introduced legislation drafted for him by ChatGPT back in 2023.

While Lieu has called for AI regulation, he has been careful to always caveat these requests with demands that the industry be protected from any regulations that may threaten to impede innovation. Pallone has also worked with Big Tech in the past, introducing a bill in 2022 that would, among other things, preempt state data protection laws, putting in place a weaker national data protection standard.

BY APPOINTING THESE FIVE MEMBERS to the commission, Jeffries is signaling to the AI industry that he is open to their demands. This is not the first time that the House Democratic leader has attempted to broker peace with the tech oligarchs who’ve flocked to Trump’s side. In February, he traveled to Northern California to meet with tech titans on their turf and reassure them that the post-Biden Democratic Party had no intention of threatening their business interests.

But this has done little to dislodge the hold the Trump administration has over the industry.AI giants like Google, Meta, and Microsoft have poured money into Trump’s privately funded White House ballroom project. That investment is already bearing fruit. The administration’s AI czar, David Sacks, is himself a tech oligarch moonlighting as an ostensibly part-time “public servant.

” Sacks has been wielding his influence to ensure the industry gets everything it wants from the White House, from loan guarantees, to data center construction on federal land, to lobbying other countries to reduce tech regulations and taxes, and now an executive order signed yesterday that attempts to ban states from enacting their own regulations on the AI industry.

While the legal grounding for the executive order is dubious, it stands a good chance of being enforced thanks to the obsequiousness of federal courts.Most recently, the Trump administration damaged national security by giving Nvidia the ability to sell some of its highest-end semiconductor chips to Chinese companies, as long as the U.

S. gets a 25 percent cut of the revenues. The announcement, which goes back on decades of export control policy and would be worth billions to the world’s most dominant chipmaker for AI, came after a personal meeting between Trump and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. “By giving this up we increase the odds the world runs on Chinese AI,” said Georgetown professor and China expert Rush Doshi.

Eager to get in on the action, Sen. Ted Cruz has introduced a bill to preempt state regulation of AI, granting the administration an alternative course of action in case courts ignore Trump’s farcical executive “order.” The Cruz effort has failed a couple of times amid bipartisan outcry. But rather than fight this effort to undercut consumer protections, Jeffries’s commission seems poised to legitimize it.

Gottheimer has already said that he, and the rest of the commission, is open to Republican efforts so long as they have minor carve-outs.Signing on to federal preemption of AI regulations would undermine the ability of Democratic governors to develop functional AI regulations that protect their constituents (though some governors have been perfectly happy to undermine themselves).

Fighting back would ensure that this technology does not proceed at the discretion of the most corrupt White House in American history. And it would align the Democratic Party with the public, who increasingly disapprove of AI across the political spectrum. But such considerations are easy to overlook when it’s corporate interests you’re pursuing rather than voters.

The Republican Party is fundamentally opposed to restraining corporate power, using regulation only as a threat to extort firms for bribes. The AI industry knows this. That’s why they poured so much effort into courting the Trump White House. In exchange for relatively paltry sums of campaign donations and funding for Trump’s gaudy ballroom, they are receiving protection from any regulation and subsidies for their businesses.

As Democrats try to regain power in Washington, any competing offer from Jeffries cannot match Trump’s shamelessness. Attempts to do so will only further tilt policy toward the untethered demands of AI oligarchs.This is exactly what prominent AI leaders are hoping for. Marc Andreessen’s new AI super PAC was launched in conjunction with OpenAI president Greg Brockman, with the goal of punishing anyone who dares threaten the industry’s bottom line.

Meta has announced the intention of doing the same, launching both a California-specific super PAC and a national one to help pressure lawmakers into complying with the industry’s agenda. A preemptive fold on AI regulation by House Democratic leadership will not stave off the inevitable onslaught of outside expenditures, but it will leave members who refuse to follow the industry’s playbook even more exposed.

Jeffries’s lurch toward the industry also threatens to undermine the affordability message that helped win elections across the country last month, while tying his party to the industry’s failures when the AI bubble inevitably pops.The lesson Big Tech wants Democrats to take away from 2024 is that they need to be more sycophantic toward Silicon Valley and AI.

Voters haven’t gotten the message. But Democratic congressional leadership sure is listening, and eager to prove their fidelity to Silicon Valley’s oligarchic class.