Candidates favoring stricter AI oversight won key congressional races, aided by a pro-regulation political funding group backed in part by Anthropic. The Democratic midterm sweep is now expected to bring tougher congressional scrutiny of AI companies and data center expansion.
OpenAI announced new commitments for its data center projects, including dropping non-disclosure agreements with public officials and pledging greater community engagement, in response to the midterm backlash against AI infrastructure.
Across 10 states, voters passed 40 of 41 ballot measures restricting data center construction, while Democrats won key gubernatorial races including Texas, where Governor-elect Hinojosa called for a moratorium on new data centers.
AI data centers have become a central political issue in the 2026 midterms, with over $173 million in ad spending focused on the topic. The backlash is concentrated in Rust Belt states, with voters concerned about power consumption, infrastructure costs, and environmental impact.
The Department of Energy will provide $5 billion in loans to Constellation Energy to expand nuclear capacity at eight plants by 1.1 gigawatts, with most capacity already claimed by Google, Meta, and Amazon for data centers.
Bipartisan senators Richard Blumenthal and Josh Hawley are questioning Google about how its artificial intelligence tools affect schoolchildren, amid mounting concerns about potential harm to students' academic performance and mental health from AI deployment in classrooms.
President Trump's artificial intelligence task force convened its first meeting on Thursday, agreeing to address risks related to cybersecurity, biosecurity and model control as featured areas of focus.
A new Senate Democratic report found that generous state and local tax breaks for data center construction are causing billions in lost tax revenue, as the AI-driven data center boom accelerates across the country.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order officially rebranding artificial intelligence as "super intelligence" or "SI" after gathering major tech CEOs including Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Dario Amodei to sign what he called a "morally binding" AI safety pledge. The rebranding effort has drawn mockery from tech industry insiders and prompted California Governor Gavin Newsom to issue a counter-order maintaining the "AI" terminology.
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a slate of AI workplace protection bills, including the No Robo Bosses Act, which prohibits AI systems from independently firing or disciplining workers. The legislation represents California's effort to regulate AI in the workplace as federal action remains limited.
