Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman in for Jeremy Kahn, who is traveling. In this edition…AI politics in a New York congressional race…Microsoft, NVIDIA and Anthropic announce strategic partnerships…Cloudflare outage causes internet outages including AI sites such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Perplexity…Jeff Bezos creates AI start-up where he will be co-CEO..Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son back new AI research lab aiming to revive the spirit of Bell Labs…Japanese AI darling Sakana AI raises $135 million at $2.65 billion valuation.
Leading the Future — a $100 million pro-AI super PAC formed in August and backed by Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI president Greg Brockman — has identified its first target: Alex Bores, a Democratic congressional candidate running for the New York seat being vacated by Rep. Jerrold Nadler after three decades in Congress.
It’s an early signal of a broader shift: while AI won’t determine every race in the upcoming midterms, it is emerging as a potent new pressure point in American politics, particularly as deep-pocketed Silicon Valley interests begin injecting themselves into local contests from afar.
Bores is the chief sponsor of New York’s RAISE Act, which would require large AI labs to create and follow safety plans designed to prevent critical harms; disclose serious safety incidents, such as the theft of an AI model; and avoid releasing systems that pose “unreasonable” risks. Companies that fail to comply could face civil penalties of up to $30 million. The legislation—similar to a California’s SB-1047, a bill vetoed by California Governor Gavin Newsom last year—awaits Governor Kathy Hochul’s signature and has attracted support from AI safety advocates, policy groups, and prominent researchers including AI “godfathers” Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton.
