Ask HN: Impact of US Elections on AI?
9 points by talmr a day ago | 11 comments
First off, apologies for brining up politics. Unfortunately, it is relevant to the conversation.

The US midterm elections just concluded, and with the “blue tsunami” I would like to know opinions of people in AI.

What will the impact be? I’m not politically active, so I’m curious to know what folks think the future looks like.

Open source? Data centers? Space based compute?

  • Terr_ a day ago |
    The main place I can imagine changes involves laws around consumer-protection, privacy, etc. that might affect how AI models are used, but those would also need enough votes to get past a Presidential veto.

    > Data centers?

    Most of the datacenter stuff will continue to at the state and local level, zoning and permitting etc. Federal effects will likely be limited. For example any change in EPA rules affecting whether the companies can get special exemptions for not-so-temporary gas turbine power-plants. Of course, that needs either legislation or someone in the EPA willing to change regulations who won't get fired by Trump.

    > Open source?

    I doubt there'll be much movement there, because the day-to-day stuff is tied to control of the Executive branch, many tech-improvement things already fell victim to White House Republicans' orgy of destruction in 2025. [0] I doubt they'll reverse direction soon.

    > Space based compute?

    No change to the engineering, so still a boondoggle fantasy no matter who controls congress.

    [0] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/04/nx-s1-5317569/a-federal-effic...

    • giantg2 a day ago |
      The link provided is talking about government services, not really open source, or is there something I'm missing?

      Are there any serious bills about consumer protection and data privacy at the federal level? I haven't seen any come up, but maybe they were in the background until after this election. Neither party has had a good track record on privacy so I'll be interested to see if any large scale privacy bill is suggested or if it will be more niche oriented for specific topics.

      • Terr_ 19 hours ago |
        > The link provided is talking about government services, not really open source, or is there something I'm missing?

        For that example government-tech-improvement group, here's a copy of their policy from when it was still active before Trump took office [0]:

        > This is a copy of the 18F open source policy. The official document lives in GitHub. If you would like to comment or suggest a change to the policy, please do so there.

        > [...]

        > The default position of 18F when developing new projects is to:

        > 1. Use Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), which is software that does not charge users a purchase or licensing fee for modifying or redistributing the source code, in our projects and contribute back to the open source community.

        > 2. Develop our work in the open.

        > 3. Publish publicly all source code created or modified by 18F, whether developed in-house by government staff or through contracts negotiated by 18F.

        [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20241127174937/https://18f.gsa.g...

  • everylostbit a day ago |
    In my mind, it just adds one more factor to the overall "risks" side of the scale for the commercial market side of Ai as a whole. A lot of people think a significant correction is inevitable, and such a significant change in the political landscape probably is going to have an effect in the medium and long term. For the short term, I personally don't think it will make much of a difference.
  • dachworker a day ago |
    The issue with data centers is mostly because they want to build fast. There is enough space for data centers otherwise.
  • Tryvrsakjo10 a day ago |
    Not much will change with the advent of the blue wave, in the big, beautiful bill there is a section written which allows for deregulation of AI for 10 years, so the datacentres are still going to be built there's too much money at stake to inhibit or halt AI now.
  • giantg2 a day ago |
    Very little changes with most elections. I don't see any reason this one will be different. The data center issues will mostly be handled at the state and local level, and so will vary accross the country. I haven't really heard federal level candidates campaigning on the topics you asked about, or anything technology related in general.
  • yulaow a day ago |
    The only risk I see is that, when/if the bubble will pop, there will be far less will to save companies from bankruptcy with government money, even if deemed too big to fail