Hello and welcome to Regulator, a newsletter for Verge readers who are political junkies, and Washington insiders hooked on technology. If this email has been forwarded to you but you’re not a subscriber, sign up here so you can get that pure, uncut Regulator every Wednesday, straight from the source (aka me).
I was taking Friday off in Maine when two major pieces of tech news dropped: first, the White House released its framework for a comprehensive national AI bill with the intent of passing it through Congress. (Hayden Field, our AI reporter, has a thorough analysis of it here.) Second (and clearly more important), Polymarket opened the Situation Room, a pop-up bar in Mount Vernon Triangle that was supposed to be a room for “monitoring the situation” on, literally, a wall of television screens.
According to a report from NBC Washington’s Gary Grumbach, it did not go well at all. Friday apparently got off to a poor start, closing at 9PM due the giant wall of situation-monitoring television screens —the very point of the bar — not working. (The screens were still on the fritz on Saturday afternoon, and according to Wired reporter Makena Kelly, Polymarket provided guests free Champagne as an apology.)
A colleague of mine attended for a bit on Friday before everything shut down, and described it as full of young professionals still with their work badges and backpacks, “honestly not much different from any other kind of work mixer or happy hour.” Apart from a jazz band, a giant light-up globe and one working television screen — “a long table that looked like shuffleboard but was actually a screen that people looked down on” — my colleague spotted Josh Tucker, Polymarket’s head of growth, in the VIP area on an outdoor seating patio, though it was rather sparse. “It was also raining so [I don’t think] anyone wanted to be out there,” he suggested. The entire event, in his estimation, was “monumentally stupid.”
(As someone who’s covered blockchain-based restaurants and utter shitshows, I deeply regret that I could not attend. But please send all tips for the next restaurant opening, or anything perhaps of greater political and societal consequence, to tina.nguyen+tips@theverge.com.)
Red on red violence, AI edition
For months, I’ve written about the growing rift inside the MAGA coalition between the tech right that’s become deeply influential in Donald Trump’s White House, and the conservative movement, an activist coalition of influence groups driven more by family values and Christian ideology than simple loyalty to Trump. But what was once a simmering tension has now erupted into visibility and formality. On Monday, just days after the White House announced the AI legislative framework, a group of Republicans and conservative activists announced the launch of the Alliance for a Better Future (ABF), with the goal of taking a right-wing approach to fight the AI and tech industry’s growing political influence. The members are pretty high-powered in conservative circles: Michael Toscano from the Institute for Family Studies, Brad Littlejohn, the president of programming at American Compass, and longtime conservative political operator Tim Estes.
But within hours, it drew fire from another high-powered Republican: Nathan Leamer, an alumnus of the GOP-aligned digital agency Targeted Victory, a former policy adviser to FCC chairman Ajit Pai, and the executive director of Build American AI, an advocacy group connected to the pro-AI industry super PAC Leading the Future. (Major donors to the $100 million committee include Andreessen-Horowitz, OpenAI president Greg Brockman, and Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale.) He specifically took issue with the fact that Max Tegmark, a prominent AI safety advocate and the founder of the influential Future of Life Institute (FLI), had retweeted ABF’s announcement and positioned the group as a counter to the equally-influential Andreessen Horowitz crowd.
Let’s set aside the issue of who’s funding what for now and talk about the Alliance for a Better Future itself. I used to cover right-wing politics at a pretty in-depth level, and I can definitively say that the backgrounds of members of this AI skeptical think tank are a big deal:
- Most readers will recognize staffers from groups like the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank whose influence dates back to the Reagan era. More recently, they were the driving force behind Project 2025, a massive collaboration with other influence groups to write an ideologically consistent policy agenda that could be implemented by the next Republican president.
- Many of the staffers are also from groups that participated in Project 2025 — American Compass, the American Principles Project, and American Moment. Others are from the actual GOP party apparatus, such as the Republican Governors Association, and from the MAGAworld influence groups like America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank.
- Given their backgrounds working for Republican elected officials, free market and religious think tanks, and going to conservative-aligned colleges, it’s safe to say that anyone who’s a staffer at this organization is deeply enmeshed in the conservative network. (The conservative movement, it should be said, predates the Trump-centric MAGA movement by decades, and there are still pretty significant ideological rifts between the two tribes.)
That said, when I reached out to Leamer for comment, he pointed out a significant distinction: The foundation was composed of staffers from these organizations, but the institutions themselves were not officially endorsing ABF. “The Heritage Foundation is not running ads against the president’s White House AI framework,” said Leamer, citing the organization’s longstanding “one voice” policy: when Heritage endorses something, that means all its employees endorse it. And after his tweet, two of ABF’s board members, Jon Schweppe and Joel Thayer, went out of their way to say that they were working in their personal capacity, and that their views did not represent those of their employers.
After Regulator was published, I received this response to Leamer’s allegations from ABF’s CEO Janet Kelly, flatly denying that FLI was funding them. “We are supported by people who can’t be bought by Big Tech billionaires,” she told The Verge in a statement. “But we know tech’s little keyboard warriors are desperate to spread lies because they don’t have the guts to look parents in the eye about how their benefactors are leaving children exposed.”
Is it a full-blown right-wing civil war yet? Not exactly, but with the establishment of this splinter group, I wouldn’t be surprised if we got there. I don’t doubt for a second that Leamer and the White House have, indeed, worked with these groups (and perhaps some of these individuals) in the past about AI issues. But whenever conservatives begin accusing each other publicly of taking dark money, whether the money’s from FLI or a16z or the Kochs or Mercers or Club for Growth or literally any number of groups, I can imagine Ronald Reagan sobbing over the death of the Eleventh Commandment (“Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican”). These days, there’s really no such thing as friendly collaboration among right-wing interest groups, and barring extraordinary circumstances (or the Democrats controlling the White House), it’s difficult enough to get them united behind a singular policy goal. It’s even harder when the rift is over longstanding conservative issues like child safety and family values, and front-of-mind populist issues like job security.
Clarity for Clarity: The crypto markets were absolutely rocked this week when the White House released compromise language for the Clarity Act, the crypto market structure bill currently stalled in Congress following Coinbase withdrawing its support earlier this year. The key issue: the new bill strictly curtails stablecoin yields and bans stablecoin rewards programs, a huge win for traditional banks worried about consumer flight. Now it’s back to Congress for even more markup shenanigans, probably in April.
Influencer wars: FBI Director (and influencer) Kash Patel’s girlfriend, country singer and influencer Alexis Wilkins, had previously been accused of being a Mossad agent. This week, she laid out a 13-post X thread where she claimed that she was the target of a foreign influence disinformation campaign. Which country was attacking her? She didn’t say, but she did claim that Tucker Carlson, Joe Kent, and Candace Owens were being paid off to smear her.
Glass cliff watch: Status reported Tuesday that last quarter, under Bari Weiss’s leadership, CBS Evening News hit its lowest ratings ever in both total audience and in the 25–54 key demographic. (This would be a good time to resurface my colleague Liz Lopatto’s column from October that spells out exactly what happens to female executives appointed by tech investors to manage dying assets.)
Never in a million years would I have ever placed “will Laura Loomer meet the Dalai Lama” as a bet on Polymarket, but apparently I should have:
Update, March 25: Added comment from ABF’s CEO.