One of Silicon Valley’s top political fixers, Bradley Tusk, built a career helping startups like Uber and FanDuel brawl their way to legitimacy — in his words, “legalize disruptive sh*t.” His message to AI companies: You have no idea what’s coming.
“It is quite possible that this is the most permissive it’s ever gonna get for AI regulation,” he said on the latest episode of Compound Interest.
Tusk sees AI as unlike any industry where he’s fought and won. It’s too amorphous, too risky in its doomsday warnings, and too unpopular to run his tested playbook of mobilizing customers to pressure politicians. “I don’t think it’s inspiring people to say, ‘I must have access to Claude or ChatGPT or Grok, and I will fight to the death to keep it,’” he said.
He singled out Anthropic for smartly positioning itself as the “Luke Skywalker to OpenAI’s Darth Vader.” Anthropic has warned the public repeatedly about the risks of its AI advancements, while OpenAI has been more sanguine and has positioned itself as close to the Trump administration.
“I think OpenAI has very willingly embraced the Vader role,” he said. “I don’t quite understand why they’ve done that, but they have.”
And for all the focus on Washington’s relationship to AI, most of the fights coming for LLMs, data-center operators, application makers, power providers will be at the state and local levels, Tusk said. That means executive orders and White House positioning matters far less than the restrictions and limits on AI moving through state legislatures in Texas, Tennessee, Minnesota, and Indiana.