Upfront: One of my housemates works on Connie Chan’s campaign, and I have attended campaign events of hers. Nobody on the campaign accessed this piece in any capacity before it was published, or influenced any content within it. Opinions and analysis are my own.
The U.S. House seat representing San Francisco, the global capital of AI, is without an incumbent for the first time in four decades; Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi is retiring after 20 terms in Congress. It’s a very tight race to replace her between California State Senator Scott Wiener and San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan. Wiener, with endorsements including the San Francisco Chronicle and California Democratic Party, finished first in June’s primary. Chan came in second, weeks after Pelosi endorsed her. Former Chief of Staff to AOC and early Stripe engineer Saikat Chakrabarti, who has since endorsed Chan, finished third.
This summer, as AI dominated the news cycle, Wiener and Chan both intensified its place in their platforms. It was the dominant topic in both debates this month, and is featuring heavily in both campaigns’ closing arguments.
I reached out to both candidates and campaigns, hoping to discuss their AI regulation platforms in detail. I spoke with Chan last weekend. Wiener and his staff did not respond to multiple requests for comment. I still welcome the chance to speak with him.
Wiener and Chan’s messaging on AI is mostly similar. Both say they’re in favor of federal regulation. Both say tax policy should redistribute wealth derived from AI back to the public. Both say that when AI agents break the law, their parent companies should be held civilly and/or criminally liable.
Wiener’s angle is experience. He talks up his bill, SB 53, California’s AI regulation law that passed last year (after Gov. Newsom vetoed his first attempt, SB 1047). SB 53 protects whistleblowers, requires companies to publicly disclose their safety frameworks and report critical safety incidents, and created CalCompute.
Anthropic endorsed SB 53. OpenAI also supports it. Neither supported SB 1047. After the Hugging Face hack, SB 53’s safety reporting requirement did not trigger, in the first high-profile test of the bill’s safeguards. Chan, in debates, has called it a “watered-down” law. Wiener calls that characterization preposterous.
Chan’s angle is grounded in labor. Her message focuses on AI’s impact on jobs, and wants unions to play a role in AI regulation and deployment decisions, among other pro-labor policies. She repeatedly refutes Wiener’s staked claim of the territory, saying his donors and his actions do not match his message of taking on the industry and regulating AI’s negative impacts.
The report that Public First Action, who says they’re a bipartisan organization to educate Americans on AI issues, gave $3.5 million to a pro-Wiener PAC prompted him to repeat three times in Tuesday’s debate: “There is no Anthropic money in this race.” By the brilliant design of political action committees, he’s right — Anthropic didn’t donate to him or his PAC directly. It would have been a disaster for him if it did, which is the kind of scrutiny PACs are supposed to shield. Anthropic did give $40 million to Public First Action though, and specified the money it gave PFA could only be spent on education and policy efforts, and could not be spent on political races.
But, as Mission Local put it: “Still, money is fungible.”
As I see it, one of the most defining and unbelievable moments of this race came just months before when Wiener’s campaign created ConnieChan.ai, a chatbot he said was a parody of Chan, and that claimed to speak for her. It was a wildly inappropriate violation, and was only taken down—along with the billboards across the city promoting it—when it was met with fierce backlash that its responses were steeped in racism and sexism, mocking her accent and questioning her citizenship. Wiener’s original statement on it was defensive, calling the criticism “classic deflection.” It took weeks of public consensus being clearly against what he’d done for him to apologize to Chan appropriately—in a debate, when she brought it up. He then called it a “terrible mistake,” and said he took full responsibility.
Chan told me her campaign has not used AI, nor does she use AI in her capacity in City Hall. She reiterated their only encounter with AI use on the campaign trail was Wiener’s chatbot, and said, “We do not use AI, because it’s just not necessary for us.”
She said in this month’s KQED debate that regulating the AI industry should not be a framework of competition with other countries, but a framework of protecting the future. I asked her if she sees those as mutually exclusive.
“You hear the industry is sort of pushing Congress, pushing the White House to approach AI in a way that’s about how we can stay competitive against other countries, including China,” she told me. “I think right now the approach to regulating AI is being driven by the industry, and that is in the framework of profit, and competition, and that ultimately truly is benefiting the tech billionaires, and it’s not necessarily benefiting the working people, and really American people in general. And also, we have seen the impact of these data centers on our environment and, and the cost to every household.”
Chan, unlike Wiener, is in favor of a national data center moratorium — though, notably, Wiener is in support of the local data center moratorium in San Francisco.
I asked her what her nonnegotiable is for specific regulation at the federal level.
“Protection of workforce and safety,” she said. “I’m in support of banning superintelligence developments, because again — the industry has not addressed and explained to us why that actually is necessary at all. And then when it comes to automation is where I believe we need to have workers at the table to push for the regulation around automation and having human oversight.”
She brought up cybersecurity concerns, and the OpenAI model hacking into Australia’s healthcare system. She reiterated that the company that developed the model should be held legally responsible if it commits a crime. She also says consequences after the fact are not proactive enough.
“I think we hear a lot of politicians, including politicians like Scott Wiener, talk about—they’re really proud of the fact that they have come up with the idea of a kill switch, or what happens, what to do when something catastrophic happens, or someone dies or is injured from these incidents. I think that’s not wise. It is unwise to wait until something catastrophic happens to manage,” she said. “We should, again, at the developmental phase, require approval, require inspection of these technologies.”
Chan says she supports Sen. Bernie Sanders’s proposed bill that would give the American public direct ownership of AI companies, and create an independent sovereign wealth fund via a one-time 50% tax on the stock of frontier AI companies. It would put an estimated $7 trillion toward public programs like healthcare and housing.
“It’s not just the AI industries though,” she added. “It’s the technology that many companies end up utilizing… I think they too need to pay that tax, so that it doesn’t become [an] incentive to just simply use the technology to replace the workforce.”
She also voiced support for Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s proposed National AI Charter Act, which, in part, would restructure how AI companies can operate and how they’re monitored, impose comprehensive safety regulations federally with strong labor and user protections, prevent tech monopolies, and establish a public fund from tax receipts and civil penalties.
Wiener’s policy page says the unprecedented use of AI by the executive branch and across sectors of federal government should be met by Congress “step[ping] up its own adoption of AI, especially to ensure adequate oversight of executive branch uses of AI.”
Chan told me, “These are really problematic, when we allow these sectors [she named finance, transportation, healthcare, and the military] to use AI, and that’s similar to the federal government as well.” She’s open, circumstantially, to AI systems with human oversight in the federal government, but draws a line at superintelligence, especially in the military.
I asked if she’s developed any personal or professional relationships with leaders in big tech or frontier AI.
“No personal relationships. And look, I am an elected leader. My door is always open to talk with anybody. Whether someone in the industries or workers, I’m interested in having those conversations. But what I do believe is that [the] AI industry should not regulate and police itself, and we should absolutely not trust people who are bankrolled by the industry.”
“In fact, I would prefer in Congress to have to subpoena these CEOs, having them come before us and having them walk us through their thinking around developing the technology, especially around superintelligence.”
I live here in San Francisco, I’ve watched closely as data centers have negatively impacted multiple places I’m from, and I’m a tech reporter. AI regulation is a prominent issue to me as a voter. I’m paying attention to it in races around the country, especially in states I’ve lived in, like Virginia, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
Only election day will tell for sure, but it seems when it comes to AI, candidates know what voters want to hear: Most Americans — indiscriminate of political party — think AI is developing too fast, and are frustrated that the industry has reached this point with zero federal regulation.
At face value, if you’re in the majority who want some kind — any kind — of federal regulation on the AI industry, both Chan and Wiener are offering changes. I wish I’d had the chance to ask Wiener more about his relationship with big tech, why he initially thought the chatbot was acceptable, and why he only supports a data center moratorium locally instead of nationally. I’m not trying to hide that I have concerns about each of those things. They don’t match the tone he takes on AI in his platform, or his message to voters.
For more from Wiener, Chan, and on AI’s role in the San Francisco U.S. House race:
KQED: San Francisco Is Ground Zero for AI. How Would Congressional Candidates Push for Regulation?
October 13th Mission Local Debate
SF Standard: AI group pours millions into race for Pelosi’s seat. Its pick: Scott Wiener