In December, the Trump administration signed an executive order that neutered states’ ability to regulate AI by ordering his administration to both sue and withhold funds from states that try to do so. This action pointedly supported industry lobbyists keen to avoid any constraints and consequences on their deployment of AI, while undermining the efforts of consumers, advocates, and industry associations concerned about AI’s harms who have spent years pushing for state regulation.

Trump’s actions have clarified the ideological alignments around AI within America’s electoral factions. They set down lines on a new playing field for the midterm elections, prompting members of his party, the opposition, and all of us to consider where we stand in the debate over how and where to let AI transform our lives...

The post As the US Midterms Approach, AI Is Going to Emerge as a Key Issue Concerning Voters appeared first on Security Boulevard.

In December, the Trump administration signed an executive order that neutered states’ ability to regulate AI by ordering his administration to both sue and withhold funds from states that try to do so. This action pointedly supported industry lobbyists keen to avoid any constraints and consequences on their deployment of AI, while undermining the efforts of consumers, advocates, and industry associations concerned about AI’s harms who have spent years pushing for state regulation.

Trump’s actions have clarified the ideological alignments around AI within America’s electoral factions. They set down lines on a new playing field for the midterm elections, prompting members of his party, the opposition, and all of us to consider where we stand in the debate over how and where to let AI transform our lives.

In a May 2025 survey of likely voters nationwide, more than 70% favored state and federal regulators having a hand in AI policy. A December 2025 poll by Navigator Research found similar results, with a massive net +48% favorability for more AI regulation. Yet despite the overwhelming preference of both voters and his party’s elected leaders—Congress was essentially unanimous in defeating a previous state AI regulation moratorium—Trump has delivered on a key priority of the industry. The order explicitly challenges the will of voters across blue and red states, from California to South Dakota, scrambling political positions around the technology and setting up a new ideological battleground in the upcoming race for Congress.

There are a number of ways that candidates and parties may try to capitalize on this emerging wedge issue before the midterms.

In 2025, much of the popular debate around AI was cast in terms of humans versus machines. Advances in AI and the companies it is associated with, it is said, come at the expense of humans. A new model release with greater capabilities for writing, teaching, or coding means more people in those disciplines losing their jobs.

This is a humanist debate. Making us talk to an AI customer-support agent is an affront to our dignity. Using AI to help generate media sacrifices authenticity. AI chatbots that persuade and manipulate assault our liberty. There is philosophical merit to these arguments, and yet they seem to have limited political salience.

Populism versus institutionalism is a better way to frame this debate in the context of US politics. The MAGA movement is widely understood to be a realignment of American party politics to ally the Republican party with populism, and the Democratic party with defenders of traditional institutions of American government and their democratic norms.

This frame is shattered by Trump’s AI order, which unabashedly serves economic elites at the expense of populist consumer protections. It is part of an ongoing courting process between MAGA and big tech, where the Trump political project sacrifices the interests of consumers and its populist credentials as it cozies up to tech moguls.

We are starting to see populist resistance to this government/big tech alignment emerge on the local scale. People in Maryland, Arizona, North Carolina, Michigan and many other states are vigorously opposing AI datacenters in their communities, based on environmental and energy-affordability impacts. These centers of opposition are politically diverse; both progressives and Trump-supporting voters are turning out in force, influencing their local elected officials to resist datacenter development.

This opposition to the physical infrastructure of corporate AI is so far staying local, but it may yet translate into a national and politically aligned movement that could divide the MAGA coalition.

Any policy discussions about AI should include the individual harms associated with job loss, as employers seek to replace laborers with machines. It should also include the systemic economic risks associated with concentrated and supercharged AI investment, the democratic risks associated with the increased power in monopolistic and politically influential tech companies, and the degradation of civic functions like journalism and education by AI. In order for our free market to function in the public interest, the companies amassing wealth and profiting from AI must be forced to take ownership of, and internalize, these costs.

The political salience of AI will grow to meet the staggering scale of financial investment and societal impact it is already commanding. There is an opportunity for enterprising candidates, of either political party, to take the mantle of opposing AI-linked harms in the midterm elections.

Political solutions start with organizing, and broadening the base of political engagement around these issues beyond the locally salient topic of datacenters. Movement leaders and elected officials in states that have taken action on AI regulation should mobilize around the blatant industry capture, wealth extraction, and corporate favoritism reflected in the Trump executive order. AI is no longer just a policy issue for governments to discuss: it is a political issue that voters must decide on and demand accountability on.

Japan’s election last month and the rise of the country’s newest and most innovative political party, Team Mirai, illustrates the viability of a different way to do politics.

In this model, technology is used to make democratic processes stronger, instead of undermining them. It is harnessed to root out corruption, instead of serving as a cash cow for campaign donations.

Imagine an election where every voter has the opportunity to opine directly to politicians on precisely the issues they care about. They’re not expected to spend hours becoming policy experts. Instead, an ...

The post Team Mirai and Democracy appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Japan’s election last month and the rise of the country’s newest and most innovative political party, Team Mirai, illustrates the viability of a different way to do politics.

In this model, technology is used to make democratic processes stronger, instead of undermining them. It is harnessed to root out corruption, instead of serving as a cash cow for campaign donations.

Imagine an election where every voter has the opportunity to opine directly to politicians on precisely the issues they care about. They’re not expected to spend hours becoming policy experts. Instead, an AI Interviewer walks them through the subject, answering their questions, interrogating their experience, even challenging their thinking.

Voters get immediate feedback on how their individual point of view matches—or doesn’t—a party’s platform, and they can see whether and how the party adopts their feedback. This isn’t like an opinion poll that politicians use for calculating short-term electoral tactics. It’s a deliberative reasoning process that scales, engaging voters in defining policy and helping candidates to listen deeply to their constituents.

This is happening today in Japan. Constituents have spent about eight thousand hours engaging with Mirai’s AI Interviewer since 2025. The party’s gamified volunteer mobilization app, Action Board, captured about 100,000 organizer actions per day in the runup to last week’s election.

It’s how Team Mirai, which translates to ‘The Future Party,’ does politics. Its founder, Takahiro Anno, first ran for local office in 2024 as a 33 year old software engineer standing for Governor of Tokyo. He came in fifth out of 56 candidates, winning more than 150,000 votes as an unaffiliated political outsider. He won attention by taking a distinctive stance on the role of technology in democracy and using AI aggressively in voter engagement.

Last year, Anno ran again, this time for the Upper Chamber of the national legislature—the Diet—and won. Now the head of a new national party, Anno found himself with a platform for making his vision of a new way of doing politics a reality.

In this recent House of Representatives election, Team Mirai shot up to win nearly four million votes. In the lower chamber’s proportional representation system, that was good enough for eleven total seats—the party’s first ever representation in the Japanese House—and nearly three times what it achieved in last year’s Upper Chamber election.

Anno’s party stood for election without aligning itself on the traditional axes of left and right. Instead, Team Mirai, heavily associated with young, urban voters, sought to unite across the ideological spectrum by taking a radical position on a different axis: the status quo and the future. Anno told us that Team Mirai believes it can triple its representation in the Diet after the next elections in each chamber, an ostentatious goal that seems achievable given their rapid rise over the past year.

In the American context, the idea of a small party unifying voters across left and right sounds like a pipe dream. But there is evidence it worked in Japan. Team Mirai won an impressive 11% of proportional representation votes from unaffiliated voters, nearly twice the share of the larger electorate. The centerpiece of the party’s policy platform is not about the traditional hot button issues, it’s about democracy itself, and how it can be enhanced by embracing a futuristic vision of digital democracy.

Anno told us how his party arrived at its manifesto for this month’s elections, and why it looked different from other parties’ in important ways. Team Mirai collected more than 38,000 online questions and more than 6,000 discrete policy suggestions from voters using its AI Policy app, which is advertised as a ‘manifesto that speaks for itself.’

After factoring in all this feedback, Team Mirai maintained a contrarian position on the biggest issue of the election: the sales tax and affordability. Rather than running on a reduction of the national sales tax like the major parties, Team Mirai reviewed dozens of suggestions from the public and ultimately proposed to keep that tax level while providing support to families through a child tax credit and lowering the required contribution for social insurance. Anno described this as another future-facing strategy: less price relief in the short term, but sustained funding for essential programs.

Anno has always intended to build a different kind of party. After receiving roughly $1 million in public funding apportioned to Team Mirai based on its single seat in the Upper Chamber last year, Anno began hiring engineers to enhance his software tools for digital democracy.

Anno described Team Mirai to us as a ‘utility party;’ basic infrastructure for Japanese democracy that serves the broader polity rather than one faction. Their Gikai (‘assembly’) app illustrates the point. It provides a portal for constituents to research bills, using AI to generate summaries, to describe their impacts, to surfacing media reporting on the issue, and to answer users’ questions. Like all their software, it’s open source and free for anyone, in any party, to use.

After last week’s victory, Team Mirai now has about $5 million in public funding and ambitions to grow the influence of their digital democracy platform. Anno told us Team Mirai has secured an agreement with the LDP, Japan’s dominant ruling party, to begin using Team Mirai’s Gikai and corruption-fighting Mirumae financial transparency tool.

AI is the issue driving the most societal and economic change we will encounter in our lifetime, yet US political parties are largely silent. But AI and Big Tech companies and their owners are ramping up their political spending to influence the parties. To the extent that AI has shown up in our politics, it seems to be limited to the question of where to site the next generation of data centers and how to channel populist backlash to big tech.

Those are causes worthy of political organizing, but very few US politicians are leveraging the technology for public listening or other pro-democratic purposes. With the midterms still nine months away and with innovators like Team Mirai making products in the open for anyone to use, there is still plenty of time for an American politician to demonstrate what a new politics could look like.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in Tech Policy Press.

Politicians fixate on the global race for technological supremacy between US and China. They debate geopolitical implications of chip exports, latest model releases from each country, and military applications of AI. Someday, they believe, we might see advancements in AI tip the scales in a superpower conflict.

But the most important arms race of the 21st century is already happening elsewhere and, while AI is definitely the weapon of choice, combatants are distributed across dozens of domains.

Academic journals are flooded with AI-generated papers, and are turning to AI to help review submissions. Brazil’s ...

The post Is AI Good for Democracy? appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Politicians fixate on the global race for technological supremacy between US and China. They debate geopolitical implications of chip exports, latest model releases from each country, and military applications of AI. Someday, they believe, we might see advancements in AI tip the scales in a superpower conflict.

But the most important arms race of the 21st century is already happening elsewhere and, while AI is definitely the weapon of choice, combatants are distributed across dozens of domains.

Academic journals are flooded with AI-generated papers, and are turning to AI to help review submissions. Brazil’s court system started using AI to triage cases, only to face an increasing volume of cases filed with AI help. Open source software developers are being overwhelmed with code contributions from bots. Newspapers, music, social media, education, investigative journalism, hiring, and procurement are all being disrupted by a massive expansion of AI use.

Each of these is an arms race. Adversaries within a system iteratively seeking an edge against their competition by continuously expanding their use of a common technology.

Beneficiaries of these arms races are US mega-corporations capturing wealth from the rest of us at an unprecedented rate. A substantial fraction of global economy has reoriented around AI in just the past few years, and that trend is accelerating. In parallel, this industry’s lobbying interests are quickly becoming the object, rather than the subject, of US government power.

To understand these arms races, let’s look at an example of particular interest to democracies worldwide: how AI is changing the relationship between democratic government and citizens. Interactions that used to happen between people and elected representatives are expanding to a massive scale, with AIs taking the roles that humans once did.

In a notorious example from 2017, US Federal Communications Commission opened a comment platform on the web to get public input on internet regulation. It was quickly flooded with millions of comments fraudulently orchestrated by broadband providers to oppose FCC regulation of their industry. From the other side, a 19-yearold college student responded by submitting millions of comments of his own supporting the regulation. Both sides were using software primitive by the standards of today’s AI.

Nearly a decade later, it is getting harder for citizens to tell when they’re talking to a government bot, or when an online conversation about public policy is just bots talking to bots. When constituents leverage AI to communicate better, faster, and more, it pressures government officials to do the same.

This may sound futuristic, but it’s become a familiar reality in US. Staff in US Congress are using AI to make their constituent email correspondence more efficient. Politicians campaigning for office are adopting AI tools to automate fundraising and voter outreach. By one 2025 estimate, a fifth of public submissions to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were already being generated with AI assistance.

People and organizations are adopting AI here because it solves a real problem that has made mass advocacy campaigns ineffective in the past: quantity has been inversely proportional to both quality and relevance. It’s easy for government agencies to dismiss general comments in favour of more specific and actionable ones. That makes it hard for regular people to make their voices heard. Most of us don’t have the time to learn the specifics or to express ourselves in this kind of detail. AI makes that contextualization and personalization easy. And as the volume and length of constituent comments grow, agencies turn to AI to facilitate review and response.

That’s the arms race. People are using AI to submit comments, which requires those on the receiving end to use AI to wade through the comments received. To the extent that one side does attain an advantage, it will likely be temporary. And yet, there is real harm created when one side exploits another in these adversarial systems. Constituents of democracies lose out if their public servants use AI-generated responses to ignore and dismiss their voices rather than to listen to and include them. Scientific enterprise is weakened if fraudulent papers sloppily generated by AI overwhelm legitimate research.

As we write in our new book, Rewiring Democracy, the arms race dynamic is inevitable. Every actor in an adversarial system is incentivized and, in the absence of new regulation in this fast moving space, free to use new technologies to advance its own interests. Yet some of these examples are heartening. They signal that, even if you face an AI being used against you, there’s an opportunity to use the tech for your own benefit.

But, right now, it’s obvious who is benefiting most from AI. A handful of American Big Tech corps and their owners are extracting trillions of dollars from the manufacture of AI chips, development of AI data centers, and operation of so-called ‘frontier’ AI models. Regardless of which side pulls ahead in each arms race scenario, the house always wins. Corporate AI giants profit from the race dynamic itself.

As formidable as the near-monopoly positions of today’s Big Tech giants may seem, people and governments have substantial capability to fight back. Various democracies are resisting this concentration of wealth and power with tools of anti-trust regulation, protections for human rights, and public alternatives to corporate AI. All of us worried about the AI arms race and committed to preserving the interests of our communities and our democracies should think in both these terms: how to use the tech to our own advantage, and how to resist the concentration of power AI is being exploited to create.

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Times of India.

I just noticed that the ebook version of Rewiring Democracy is on sale for $5 on Amazon, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Google Play, Kobo, and presumably everywhere else in the US. I have no idea how long this will last.

Also, Amazon has a coupon that brings the hardcover price down to $20. You’ll see the discount at checkout.