philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

A.I. Is Coming for Politics

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Sometime in the not-too-distant future, Thiel and his tech allies may well have no need to win an election to exert control of the United States and other nations.

As artificial intelligence — led by Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, OpenAI and Anthropic — drives to become the nation’s dominant industry, one of the most pressing questions is how technology is affecting, if not supplanting, politics, potentially diminishing the centrality of elections. ...

In the three years since Acemoglu and Johnson wrote, it has become apparent that A.I. not only poses a threat to a wide range of jobs but also has the potential to capture markets and political systems, especially if given free rein to do so without legislative or regulatory supervision. ...

It has become clear that this knowledge is a powerful tool, a nonviolent weapon without the requirement of declaring war. And sometimes a violent weapon, as we have seen in the ongoing wars in Europe and the Middle East. ...

“A.I. development is just the latest installment of the increasing power of platform companies,” Jack Balkin, a professor of constitutional law and the First Amendment at Yale Law School, argued by email. ...

Because the emerging algorithmic society runs on computing infrastructure, data collection, data analysis and prediction, these platform companies enjoy new forms of power unlike any we have previously seen. Their technological power allows them both to surveil, govern and control private parties and to influence the actions of governments. ...

In the first, “Benchmarking Political Persuasion Risks Across Frontier Large Language Models,” Zhongren Chen, Joshua Kalla and Quan Le, all of Yale, conducted experiments comparing two means of changing voter opinion: through campaign ads and through A.I. large language models at Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and xAI.

Which one won? A.I.: “We find that L.L.M.s outperform standard campaign advertisements, with heterogeneity in performance across models.”

In other words, A.I. is superior to media consultants. ...

... A.I. large language models can identify with high precision the identity of men and women who post anonymously on the internet. ...

The report prompted speculation on X that the most threatened jobs are predominantly held by Democratic-leaning voters, so I asked Anthropic’s Claude whether that was true. Claude replied:

The honest answer is: Yes, the demographic profile of A.I.-exposed workers — college-educated, white-collar, female-skewed — does align more with the Democratic coalition than the Republican one as it stands today. But it’s not a clean partisan story. ...

The more precise framing may be less “this hurts Democrats” and more “this disrupts the professional class that has increasingly become the Democratic coalition’s core.” ...

... organizations experimenting with A.I. will figure out how to make it work for them, leading to sudden announcements about new strategies or large-scale shifts in which kinds of employees companies value most. ...

What Mollick’s essay suggests to me is that individual men and women are steadily losing agency to unpredictable and increasingly autonomous forms of artificial intelligence that are acquiring powers over routine decisions, markets and politics, often without our knowledge. ...

See the full story here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/17/opinion/ai-economy-trump-future.html