Ask HN: Impact of US Elections on AI? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Impact of US Elections on AI?

9 pointstalmr12 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?

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...

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.

> 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...

Did the policies around those principles change, or did the work just stop?

Is that an honest question? I think the phrase "orgy of destruction" along with a link to pro-open-source developers getting fired from a conservative witch-hunt should be pretty clear.

Both: The policy is void because the group is gone and the work isn't happening because most of the people to do it were fired.

__________

In case you (or someone else) truly just missed the news: When Trump took office he illegally [0] appointed his biggest donor Elon Musk to bring in private randos [1], with the brag that they could easily cut $2,000 billion in "waste". They then set about ideologically dismantling and firing a bunch of the government agencies [2] and terminating contracts based on "woke" keywords [3] before it imploded [4] and failed to achieve even a fraction of its promised actual cost-cutting. [5]

[0] https://www.reuters.com/legal/judges-consider-barring-musks-...

[1] https://projects.propublica.org/elon-musk-doge-tracker/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_federal_agencies_targeted_b...

[3] https://abcnews.com/Politics/judge-doge-grant-terminations-u...

[4] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/04/doge-july-4-white-h...

[5] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvg0rg9wmvlo

Seems like you're just turning this into a political grievance. It seems other teams are still supportive of open source policies and it was just that one team that was shut down.

https://www.gsa.gov/directives-library/gsa-open-source-softw...

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.

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.

Especially as even with the supermajority the Dems don't have enough seats to beat the filibuster or presidential veto. They're not passing any laws without Republican support.

The issue with data centers is mostly because they want to build fast. There is enough space for data centers otherwise.

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.

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

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