21 Articles about AI & Politics

The Unlikely Political Bedfellows on A.I. Regulation – New York Times

Washington's AI paralysis – Axios

Obama Urges Democrats to Move A.I. Oversight to the Center of Their Agenda – New York Times

How Chinese AI Firms Tried to Clone U.S. AI Models – Wall Street Journal

As AI fears grow, lawmakers are racing to turn alarm into action - Washington Post

Voters Are Asking A.I. About Elections. The Answers Can Vary by User. – New York Times

Bernie Sanders floats ban on superintelligent AI – Axios

US government sides with OpenAI on issue of training LLMs on copyrighted material - TechCrunch

Trump and AI investors wage campaign to save data centers – Axios

A.I. Is Everywhere in China. See For Yourself. – New York Times

The Brains Who Powered China’s Surprising AI Leap – Wall Street Journal

AI advocacy group launches data center push in battleground states – Axios

What Really Happens If China Wins the AI Race? – The Atlantic

The US is building barriers around drones and robots, but China has scale to get around them – Tech Crunch 

The administration’s biodefense team has dwindled amid growing concern over AI-enabled pathogens – Washington Post

The rise of physical AI: can robots save US manufacturing? – Financial Times

China Wants to Shape What the World’s A.I. Knows – New York Times

AI deepfakes are already in full force this election season – Fast Company

A.I. Is Now a Major Election Issue – The New Yorker

Trump’s AI protectionism has come for robotics – MIT

AI Companion Robots Are Closing the Human Connection in Modern Homes – Spectrum

18 Articles about AI & Politics

Chatbots are doing the work of Congress with little oversight – Washington Post

China’s A.I. Is Surging Across Africa. That Should Worry Silicon Valley. – New York Times

The hottest AI models in Silicon Valley face a powerful source of competition – Washington Post

China’s A.I. Play Is Different From America’s – New York Times

White House will exempt ‘open’ AI systems from security review – Washington Post

New York bans data center construction for a year, rattling AI industry – Arstechnica

Nearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. Threats: A letter calls for policymakers to do more to understand and respond to potential disruptions from artificial intelligence. – New York Times

Xi Jinping casts himself as leader of new AI world order – Semafor

India Is Moving Fast to Catch Up in A.I. A Coastal City Fears the Fallout. – New York Times

Censorship in Chinese AI models can be undone, new research shows – Semafor

How Terrorist Groups Are Using A.I. to Gain an Edge in Battle – New York Times

Political text messages could get more effective and annoying. Blame AI – NPR

The Logo for Donald Trump International Airport Appears to Be AI Slop – Futurism

Trump’s Vision for A.I. Dominance Comes With Major Air Pollution – New York Times

What AI companies want for the millions they’re spending on elections – CNBC

AI-generated video of Vermont congressional race tests new state disclosure law – WCAX

In Texas, AI-generated political ads are blurring the line between real and fake- Poynter

As Voters Grow Anxious Over A.I., Trump Shrugs Off the Concern - New York Times 

Differing Approaches to AI by the US & China

The United States is behaving as though frontier A.I. models could be the equivalent of nuclear weapons, offering an immensely destructive form of power that requires a careful and jealous watch. Meanwhile, China treats the models that its companies produce as the equivalent of nuclear energy, a lower-risk technology to be shared and commercialized to win friends and influence the world and undermine the advantages of the American A.I. giants. - Ross Douthat writing in The New York Times

Political Pros Use of AI

According to a new survey, 83 percent of political professionals say they use AI tools for work at least once a week. That’s up from 59 percent a year ago. Even more striking: 48 percent now say they use AI multiple times a day – a 57 percent increase over 2025 levels and significantly more than the 26 percent who say they use AI a few times a week. -Campaigns & Elections

Study: Can Chatbots get People to Change their Vote?

"Roughly one in 10 participants in a study said they would change their vote in highly contested national elections in Canada and Poland after talking with a chatbot. The AI models took the role of a gentle, if firm, interlocutor, offering arguments and evidence in favor of the candidate they represented. 'If you could do that at scale,' the senior author on the study said, 'it would really change the outcome of elections.'” -The Atlantic

China's AI Lead

"China has taken a commanding lead in the exploding field of artificial intelligence (AI) research, despite U.S. restrictions on exporting key computing chips to its rival, finds a new report. In 2000, China-based scholars produced just 671 AI papers, but in 2024 their 23,695 AI-related publications topped the combined output of the United States (6378), the United Kingdom (2747), and the European Union (10,055). U.S. influence in AI research is declining, with China now dominating." -Science.org

AI-assisted Reviews of Student Visa Accounts Begin

AI is being used by the US State department to find foreign students who it perceives to be Hamas supporters. Their visas will be revoked. News reports of anti-Israel demonstrations and Jewish students' lawsuits are being checked for evidence that "foreign nationals allegedly engaged in antisemitic activity." Read more from Axios

The 3 Things Far-Right & Far-Left Political News Sources have in Common

When researchers analyzed almost 6,000 political news stories produced by partisan and nonpartisan media outlets in 2021, three things became clear:

• Media outlets with extreme biases — regardless of whether it was a conservative or liberal bias — tended to use shorter sentences and less formal language than nonpartisan outlets.

• Mainstream news organizations, as a whole, wrote at a higher reading level.

• Far-right and far-left outlets took a more negative tone than nonpartisan outlets. They generally had a lower ratio of positive to negative words.

The researchers describe their findings in a paper forthcoming in Journalism Studies, “At the Extremes: Assessing Readability, Grade Level, Sentiment, and Tone in US Media Outlets.”

Read the full article from Journalist’s Resources here.

the strongest political bias of all

The strongest bias in American politics is not a liberal bias or a conservative bias; it is a confirmation bias, or the urge to believe only things that confirm what you already believe to be true. Not only do we tend to seek out and remember information that reaffirms what we already believe, but there is also a “backfire effect,” which sees people doubling down on their beliefs after being presented with evidence that contradicts them. So, where do we go from here? There’s no simple answer, but the only way people will start rejecting falsehoods being fed to them is by confronting uncomfortable truths.

Emma Roller writing in the New York Times