The AI Proxy War Came North

The picture emerging from the unofficial primary election results is already the one Alaska Republicans and the far-right slop blogs have spent a year telling everyone would never happen.

Two Democrats were sitting on top of the governor's race until pro-education rockstar Tom Begich, facing pressure from the Alaska Democratic Party and political consultants, announced he was withdrawing from the governor's race.

It's worth noting that the two Democrats pulled 43.3 percent of the vote between them, while the top Republicans are scraping...well...much less.

For comparison, Begich's campaign received 34,172 votes, raised more than $1.3 million, with more than 93% of those campaign contributions coming from Alaskans.

Labor-backed Click Bishop withdrew from the governor's race, and in a crazy plot twist, Treg Taylor's wife Jodi Taylor filed to run with Candice English. Jodi Taylor, you might recall, penned an op-ed to Must Read Alaska confessing her plot to misuse public education dollars in violation of the Alaska Constitution. So, that's fun!

Kreiss-Tomkins is in first place with the biggest wad of cash raised in the race at over $2 million, with about 80 percent of that coming from outside of Alaska and a serious chunk from tech donors, including a cluster of employees at the AI company Anthropic.

JKT's explanation (which came after blowback) for that money was a sudden proposed moratorium on new data centers, because apparently his Outside AI-affiliated donors are worried about AI too! Read that again slowly. The AI money is here to protect us from the AI. But it is worth noting, I think, that in a state where voters just overwhelmingly weighed in on unlimited campaign donations, running as the guy funded by Silicon Valley's "conscience" was definitely a choice.

And remember also when JKT insisted all the Anthropic staff money he took was about AI safety, not anything so crass as buying influence? Politico Playbook recently reported something that may complicate that narrative - namely that Anthropic-backed Public First Action is dropping $2.5 million on a broadcast buy across Florida to boost Republican Senator Ashley Moody. Anthropic gave them $20 million in February, another $20 million in July, and is - thus far - the only publicly disclosed donor.

Playbook frames the Florida buy as part of Anthropic's broader strategy of spending millions to push supposedly tougher AI rules and counter rival groups funded by OpenAI leaders and investors who want a lighter touch, which is a polite way of saying two San Francisco factions are running a proxy war through American elections and we are standing in the blast radius.

It's the part that should maybe bother us.

It's true that Public First Action is intentionally "bipartisan," run by a Democrat and a Republican, and it has already spent for Marsha Blackburn and Pete Ricketts alongside House Democrats. But that's because political party is a rounding error to these people. One issue moves the money, and everything else is negotiable. That means the checks sitting in JKT's account aren't Democratic money that just happens to come from tech workers. That's AI-sourced money that happened to land on a Democrat, and if the most useful Alaskan on AI policy the next election cycle turns out to be a Republican, the same network will 100% write the same checks to him or her without blinking - but the memo on the check may very well read differently.

None of these AI folk with their wads of cash are courting us as Alaskans. We have stranded gas, lots of cold air, minerals, and oh, look - an underwater data center scheme was filed with federal regulators off Nikiski, and the goal is to sink AI servers into the Cook Inlet.

So yeah, the AI money is definitely going to save us from the AI. It is totally going to protect the Inlet servers from boiling the ocean, not overwhelm our already wonky electric grid that will supposedly power all these expected AI centers, and make Alaska the cheapest place on the continent to run an AI model. Color me skeptical. 😒

I guess all we have to do is trust that the people writing the checks want the same thing we do. Right up until the day they don't.