Anthropic and OpenAI waged a $27 million proxy war in a Manhattan congressional race. The winner told them both to get lost.
https://fortune.com/2026/06/26/anthropic-openai-ny12-proxy-war-no-winners-election-super-pac-donations/
295 points · 17 comments · view on lemmy.world
17 Comments
nieceandtows@programming.dev · 64 pts · 40d
Nice! AI is the new ponzi scheme, but 'stakeholders', including the governments are in too deep to stop it.
anomnom@sh.itjust.works · 9 pts · 39d
No, this is the plan, they win either way, scarcity of compute for the masses or cheap stock buyups if it crashes.
BeMoreCareful@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 39d
The information control is the real key.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world · 36 pts · 40d
Regardless of letter by the name, absolutely no amount of money can buy as many votes as anyone would get by not taking AI money...
No one actually wants this shit except the politicians who have been bribed to make it happen no matter what.
Pushing this hard on one of the only issues that actually has widescale support is going to really backfire. Even people who see AI is inevitable, none of them want datacenters anywhere near them.
What's fucking crazy, is no one is trying to build out in Alaska.
Cold as fuck, sparsely populated, huge tax breaks for everyone, and I gotta assume there's major internet connections they could tap into when it crosses continents at the shortest point.
Or like Japan building underseas by thermal vents, but in America they build them in fucking neighborhoods, likely knowing it will crash all surrounding property values giving them easy expansion down the road.
roofuskit@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 40d
There are exactly zero undersea cables from Alaska to Asia. I think the reasons should be obvious. There is one to Alaska from the lower 48.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 40d
Yeah, looks like Anchorage goes to Seattle, and then to Japan.
https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/acs-alaska-oregon-network-akorn
Nastybutler@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 40d
Not yet
And while this article has an estimated completion date of this year, current projections have it pushed out to 2029
hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org · 2 pts · 39d
They are putting them in Alaska (the governor is even working to attract more), but sparsely populated Alaska doesn't currently have the energy infrastructure to support a major build-out of data centers there.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 39d
That's the neat part...
No area does.
When they go in residential areas, peoples faucets go dry and their energy rates skyrocket.
Because there's not enough infrastructure for the data centers and the population. So they just take it from the population.
impairedimperator@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 39d
Cold as fuck and sparsely populated is another way of saying expensive as shit to do anything.
They build in neighborhoods because it is cheap.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 39d
Buddy...
For a lot of this large scale shit, it's easier to get it to somewhere in Alaska close to a port than the middle of small town America and definitely in residential areas of major metro areas.
They prefer small towns adjacent to major metros because thats where the bribes are cheapest for tax breaks and property deals.
Again, this is all corrupt capitalism making the decisions. Those decisions won't be good for anyone except the people paying for them or getting paid to make them.
That's why it's "cheap" if we enforced regulations and zoning, it wouldn't even be an option.
Like, arguing that gas is cheaper than an EV, but you only care about price at pump and not all the gas subsidizes we have to pay because of fossil fuel lobbyists.
Gas is "cheaper" but only because oligarchs are making it the cheapest option.
We can just make environmentally prudent decisions the cheapest via regulations.
That's literally the point of environmental regulations and why Cleveland hasnt had any rivers catch fire in almost 60 years. It would be "cheaper" to handle industrial waste like that again if it wasn't for regulations.
impairedimperator@lemmy.zip · 0 pts · 39d
Yeah. Exactly. Like I said: they build it in neighborhoods because it is cheap.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 39d
Welp, any further attempts to explain the finer points on anything else will probably end up the same as this did...
Best of luck
impairedimperator@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 39d
Like I said. I agree with your explanation.
My point is simple: when you say "it's only cheap because..." Every CFO in the world stopped listening after the word "cheap"
Fishnoodle@lemmy.world · 15 pts · 40d
It seems kind of apparent to me that despite their wealth, these people just aren't that bright. They throw money around like it's nothing... There has to be a way we can grift them. Maybe create local level voting 'blocks' where you get thousands of people to basically sign on to a charter where they will vote in line with the group, and they just need to pay like 5 million to the block, which then gets divided to everyone in the block.
But here's the fun part... People can just do whatever the fuck they want to do, and even vote against that candidate. There would be no legal recourse. Just get the money up front paid to the llc front you make for the block. Distribute, then do your thing. As they get more desperate they may try shit like that.
BozzyBuzzard@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 39d
Subscription article, but this rules!
XLE@piefed.social · 4 pts · 39d
https://archive.is/FNIBW