💻 Tech Quarterly: OpenAI’s political brain

TECH LOOKAHEAD

Tech time in Washington

OpenAI’s Chris Lehane takes Washington (again)

Who’s up, who’s down?

Winners and losers in the spectrum fight

Your cheat sheet for kids’ protection bills

THE TOP

Tech time in Washington

Lawmakers have used the first half of this year to take arguably the biggest swipe at tech policies in a long time, possibly ever.

Congress is on the verge of enacting policies that will likely fundamentally alter the wireless industry, artificial intelligence and competition with China. And lawmakers are just getting started.

Last time we came to you with a quarterly edition, the new Congress and the administration were just getting their feet wet. For the past three months, the Hill has been doggedly advancing Republicans’ top agenda items in their massive, veto-proof reconciliation package.

For tech (and for us), that meant digging into the spectrum debate and the handling of state AI rules almost every day. These provisions became the single most important issue for lawmakers such as Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

And when we weren’t writing about spectrum and AI, we were reporting on TikTok, export controls on advanced chips, gig taxes, kids’ protection, intellectual property and titanic corporate fights like the one between Apple and Meta.

We’re in the business of reporting on powerful people, institutions and industries in Washington and how their efforts to achieve their goals will impact public policy.

So for this quarter’s edition, we talked with Chris Lehane, the Clintonian operator who has turned his political savvy into Silicon Valley’s secret weapon, to learn more about the AI industry’s relationship with the nation’s capital.

Lehane now works for OpenAI, and he has a theory for how the United States can become an AI leader and the industry can avoid the techlash that beset Google and its peers. His goal starts with construction permits and involves as many people as possible using ChatGPT.

Of course, no wrap-up of this last quarter would be complete without our guide to all the players in the spectrum debate. Then there’s an issue that never really went away, but we bet is going to jump into high gear again when the reconciliation debate ends: protecting kids online.

Fear not! With all that, we’re still sending you this quarterly edition with the Power Matrix, our guide to who’s up and down in tech.

— Ben Brody

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THE BIG INTERVIEW

OpenAI’s Chris Lehane takes Washington (again)

Chris Lehane says he wakes up worried “at 3 a.m. literally every night.”

Lehane is OpenAI’s vice president of global affairs. He’s in charge of policy issues for the artificial intelligence firm that’s made outreach to Washington, D.C., central to its strategy for winning the next millennium. And, needless to say, he has a lot on his mind.

So what’s rousing Lehane from slumber? This is what he told us during a morning sitdown last week:

The second thing keeping Lehane awake? The geopolitics, especially whether the United States or China will become the undisputed leader in AI.

Making the case that AI can benefit wide swaths of the country while helping the United States outcompete China is this old political hand’s central message for a city that looks little like it did when he left government service more than a couple of decades ago.

From Washington to the Valley. Lehane was a hard-charging aide in the Clinton White House who has brought his aggressive style to the private sector. In recent years, he’s worked out West and became a key tech executive at Airbnb and a crypto investment firm.

Intensified by his wiry frame and tendency to pose rhetorical questions, Lehane’s manner is excitable, expansive, bordering on evangelistic.

Over coffee, he said his desire to help as many Americans as possible — by getting them to use AI products — came from the lessons he learned in the executive branch.

“The most important thing in politics is, do you get up every day and actually worry about and think about how you’re going to help move the middle class forward,” Lehane says.

Lehane said getting ChatGPT and other algorithms into Americans’ hands isn’t just a moral or economic issue. He described it as the key to mitigating the type of political backlash that has enveloped many Big Tech companies in recent years.

After all, people are hearing about (and sometimes even seeing firsthand) job losses, deteriorating mental health, bots getting far too chummy with kids and even potentially the softening of our species’ cognitive powers.

Dealing with these issues, and whatever backlash they prompt, means the AI industry has “to really put these tools in people’s hands right now,” Lehane said. That way, they can experience the benefits early and often, he argued.

Still, Lehane says it’s important to “really be straight up” about “cohorts that potentially get displaced.” In other words, people will lose their jobs (though fewer than will gain them, in his accounting).

Build, baby, build: Bringing AI to the masses brings Lehane back to a theme he’s hammering in Washington: the need for infrastructure, like the $500 billion Stargate project OpenAI and its partners are already constructing in Texas.

“When it comes to building out infrastructure, it is really the… amount of time it actually takes to get approvals to be able to go build,” Lehane says.

Permitting is the key issue, he said, because billions in capital is staying on the sidelines when investors lack clarity about when their returns will be coming in.

Beating China. Lehane hints OpenAI will soon have an answer to China’s DeepSeek, the open-weights model that, earlier this year, shook confidence that the world will build its AI on U.S. systems.

“How many countries in the world can we make sure we’re putting… AI that is informed and infused by democratic values into their hands?” Lehane says.

China competition is an idea AI companies have deployed to argue for going faster, investing more in their projects and regulating them less. After all, both parties worry about Beijing’s intentions.

“AI tends to be an issue that transcends partisan politics,” Lehane said.

Trump’s Washington: The politics around AI puts Lehane and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in an interesting spot. The president and his allies prize loyalty above all else.

Altman has clearly gotten that message. While Altman feuded with President Donald Trump’s ally-turned-enemy-turned-whatever Elon Musk earlier this year, he has been supportive of the president’s tech agenda. He also makes sure to pitch the benefit of his company’s projects in a way Trump loves: jobs.

But what about Lehane — the Democratic operative-turned-Silicon Valley politics whisperer? Not your typical profile of a successful Trump-era Washington operator. Lehane leans in on the idea that his company’s goal of making the United States a leader in AI is something everyone in Washington can support.

Lehane’s strategy in the capital, he said, involves being forthright about what’s next and making initial proposals to solve issues of, say, permitting or energy or controversial content. Showing off a bit and using interest in OpenAI to convene policy discussions is part of his Washington plan, too.

“The innovation technology itself, people are incredibly interested and attracted to, so they do come in,” he says.

Ultimately, Lehane seems to have set OpenAI the task of being as important to AI policy as Altman and his crew are to the digital future.

“How do you actually start to think about this?” Lehane said of how the government should oversee AI. “Can you come up with ideas and solutions that are as transformative as the technology?”

— Ben Brody

THE POWER MATRIX

Who’s up, who’s down?

— Ben Brody and Diego Areas Munhoz

BATTLE FOR AIRWAVES

Winners and losers in the spectrum fight

Senate Commerce Committee Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told us he’s reached a “resolution” with a handful of GOP military hawks on the spectrum language in the party’s reconciliation package.

After much infighting, they’ve agreed on a proposal that would renew the FCC authority until 2034 and make 800 megahertz of new spectrum auctionable. Key to sealing the deal is that the proposal will now ensure that certain frequencies under Pentagon control will not have to be shared with commercial users, according to Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D).

Rounds, who led the charge to protect Defense Department use of certain spectrum frequencies, said Tuesday he has “signed off” on the deal.

With the GOP now seemingly fully behind Cruz’s spectrum proposal, let’s look at who won and who lost in this policy fight.

Winners.

Cruz. The spectrum provision is a huge win for Cruz. He told us this month that when he told Speaker Mike Johnson earlier this year that he wanted to do spectrum in reconciliation, the speaker didn’t believe it was possible.

Well, looks like he got it done. Getting the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, GOP hawks and wireless carriers all on the same page marks the biggest accomplishment of his chairmanship so far.

Hawks. We can’t forget defense-minded GOP Sens. Deb Fischer (Neb.), Rounds, Tom Cotton (Ark.) and Roger Wicker (Miss.).

They set out to protect the military spectrum from auctions even as Cruz and the powerful wireless industry pressured them to cave. They didn’t.

Wireless. The three major wireless carriers — AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile — are ecstatic about the GOP spectrum plan.

For a long time, they’ve pushed to make more airwaves available for auctions so they could boost their 5G service in the United States. The GOP bill will be a financial boon for the industry.

Losers.

Cable. Perhaps no industry stands more to lose if the spectrum part of the reconciliation bill becomes law than the cable industry.

Its wireless competitors are getting new resources, and the fate of cable’s own spectrum is unknown.

AT&T CEO John Stankey told us in a recent interview that he’d like to see the Citizens Broadband Radio Service band, used by cable companies and others, turned into high-power exclusive use.

Republicans didn’t exclude CBRS from auctions, as the cable industry had requested, and now it could be fair game for an auction.

Democrats. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) often sided with the GOP hawks to oppose the spectrum auctions, raising national security concerns.

Cantwell also bought into the CBRS fight and has also warned of an impact in aviation safety. But like the cable industry, she lost this battle too.

Wi-Fi. Big Tech and major manufacturers had asked Congress to exclude the 6 GHz band, used for fast Wi-Fi, from auctions.

The House bill did exclude those frequencies, but the Senate proposal, which is the one likely to become law, doesn’t have the carve-out.

Stankey expressed some interest in turning that band into exclusive use. Companies using 6 GHz for Wi-Fi will now have to take their fight to the FCC when it begins to conduct the auctions.

–Diego Areas Munhoz

COUNTING ON KIDS

Your cheat sheet for kids’ protection bills

Some day soon, the heady days of reconciliation will be a memory. Once they are, a tech issue we expect to go big again is protecting kids online.

Here are the bills that you may have forgotten about, but their supporters certainly haven’t.

KOSA. The Kids Online Safety Act would regulate social media design for the youngest users and impose a “duty of care” for those kids on platforms. It’s a top issue for a lot of youth advocates on and off Capitol Hill.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), the KOSA sponsor who might be wrapping up her time in Congress, told a rally on Monday that she’d spoken with House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.) about the bill earlier in the day.

Neither side had much to say on the specifics, but Guthrie told us Tuesday that the panel could start moving a KOSA measure after July 4.

We’ll remind you that KOSA now has Apple as a supporter. Still, things appear more divided than ever in the House.

COPPA 2.0. The bipartisan bill to boost online privacy protections for teens is due to get a markup in the Senate Commerce Committee today.

The measure, which would extend to teens the protections that already exist for kids under a prior law known as COPPA, did, however, advance through committee last Congress, too.

Sen. Ed Markey’s (D-Mass.) bill also got a boost from Google yesterday.

KOSMA. The Kids Off Social Media Act has already moved through the Commerce Committee, in part because the bipartisan measure is cosponsored by panel Chair Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

Cruz told us he views KOSMA as the best way to regulate social media and his priority in the space.

The bill would formally prohibit users under age 13 from using social media and punish platforms that let them on. It’s worth noting current privacy rules have made it so that most websites try not to have kids on them anyway.

STOP CSAM. The measure from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) to deal with child exploitation material recently made it through the Judiciary Committee.

It’s another bill that’s fallen short in the past, but Durbin is retiring, and he may want to make it a final-term priority.

App store age verification. The push to get Apple and Google to verify users’ ages is in its earlier stages. The issue is moving quickly in states, however, and it’s backed by a powerful (if uneasy) coalition of outside forces, from kids’ groups to Meta.

Speaking of states, we’re also keeping an eye on the issue of warning labels for social media, which is getting traction in multiple states.

— Ben Brody