San Francisco is the AI capital of the world. The technology being built in our backyard will reshape every industry, every economy, and every aspect of daily life, and Congress has done absolutely nothing to govern it.
The future of this technology isn’t up to the VCs and CEOs — it's up to the people. We have the power to shape the future of this technology, we just need to use it. Scott is the first American legislator to prove he can take on Big Tech and pass sweeping AI guardrails to protect the public. Now he’s taking that fight to Congress.
The most transformative technology in human history should benefit everybody. In Congress, Scott will set common sense guardrails on AI development and spread the benefits of AI far and wide, working to:
Build government capacity to meet the challenges and promise of AI.
The public is put at severe risk when all AI expertise is concentrated exclusively in the private sector. AI is poised to create massive changes in healthcare, energy, finance, education, manufacturing, and more industries that are subject to critical public oversight. Meeting this challenge will require a major investment in federal AI capacity.
To ensure the federal government can keep pace with the rapid changes AI will bring to our world, Scott is proposing to restore the U.S. Digital Service with a new mandate to advise all federal agencies on the benefits and risks AI poses to their respective sectors. The federal government must compete for top AI talent to keep pace with the rapid progress of industry, and the advisors must be compensated accordingly.
Congress must also begin to use AI to exercise its traditional oversight role of the executive branch. The executive branch is deploying AI across a massive range of departments at unprecedented levels, but Congress is currently struggling to keep up. Checks and balances require that Congress step up its own adoption of AI, especially to ensure adequate oversight of executive branch uses of AI. Congress should also empower agency inspectors general with AI to better identify and respond to executive branch waste, fraud, or violations of law.
Rein in executive branch abuses of AI.
The Trump Administration has shown a brazen desperation to use AI for large-scale violations of the law. They have taken unprecedented steps to interfere in the private market in an attempt to bully AI labs into handing them autonomous weapons to attack civilians and conduct mass surveillance. Scott will fight to stop them from using AI to violate laws or Americans’ constitutional rights by pursuing vigorous oversight of the use of AI in the executive branch, channeling San Francisco’s AI expertise to ensure foundational American values guide our country’s use of AI.
Guard against catastrophic risk from AI.
Rapidly expand unemployment benefits to meet the rising wave of AI job displacement.
Anxiety about AI is lower in Europe than in the US, and the reason is obvious: their social safety net is stronger. If AI creates waves of unemployment, Europeans know they will still have health insurance and wage support.
The United States must move with all possible haste to shore up and expand unemployment insurance and other key social safety net planks—not as a complete solution, but as a no-risk emergency step to ensure people’s basic needs are met if larger and larger numbers of people face job displacement from AI.
For the same reason, the rapid pace of AI advancement makes passing Medicare For All and other efforts to bolster our broken healthcare system all the more urgent. If large numbers of workers become rapidly displaced from the workplace, ensuring they have access to affordable healthcare is an absolute imperative.
Use tax policy to ensure broad distribution of AI’s benefits.
AI could create massive economic value, but unless something changes those gains will go directly to a relatively small number of corporations rather than workers and the broad public. To fund programs designed to address labor displacement, Scott will push to tax companies benefiting from AI, ensuring they pay their fair share and share the gains from AI broadly.
Critically, that means going beyond taxing the AI labs themselves to taxing other companies using AI to capture massive profits. For example, if pharmaceutical companies generate unprecedented profits by using AI to create scores of new drugs, they should be subject to an AI or robot tax.
Make AI's infrastructure pay its way.
Data centers powering the AI revolution are consuming electricity at a scale that strains the grid and drives up utility costs for everyone else. Ratepayers shouldn't subsidize Big Tech's compute bills.
In addition, smart land use planning can ensure data centers are sited in appropriate locations without impeding our critical need to build millions of new homes.
Combat AI-powered misinformation and deepfakes with enforceable federal standards.
AI-generated disinformation is already distorting elections, non-consensual deepfake imagery is weaponized daily against women and girls, and synthetic media is eroding the basic shared reality that democracy depends on. Congress has passed one narrow deepfake law. Scott will push for a comprehensive federal framework covering disclosure requirements for AI-generated political content, real civil and criminal penalties for weaponized deepfakes, and platform accountability for the amplification of synthetic disinformation.
Make a generational investment in public AI infrastructure.
Scott will revive the National AI Research Resource and building on CalCompute (a publicly owned AI compute cluster created by Scott’s AI legislation), giving startups, universities, and public interest researchers the resources to build AI that benefits everyone — breaking Big Tech's stranglehold on the computing power that determines who gets to compete in this industry.
Fund federal AI safety and alignment research as aggressively as we fund the technology's development.
Scott championed a major state science funding initiative after Trump gutted federal research agencies. In Congress, he'll fight to restore and expand federal investment in AI safety science, so that the government — not just the companies building these systems — has the independent expertise to evaluate and govern them.
Block Big Tech's preemption gambit.
The House passed a ten-year moratorium on state AI regulation — a brazen giveaway to the industry that would strip every level of government of the ability to act while Congress does nothing. Scott will fight that preemption and defend states' right to govern when Washington won't.
The platforms know exactly what they're doing. Internal research at Facebook showed their own algorithm was making people angrier and more radicalized. TikTok's recommendation engine pushes eating disorder content to vulnerable teenagers within minutes of account creation. X has become a megaphone for hate groups since content moderation collapsed. These aren't bugs — they're business decisions, optimized for engagement at the expense of users and democracy. And Congress has let it happen.
Big Tech has spent hundreds of millions convincing Congress to look the other way when it comes to your data privacy. That ends when Scott gets to Washington.
In the year 2026, Congress still has not passed a net neutrality law. Thanks to Scott’s passage of Senate Bill 822, California has the nation’s strongest net neutrality protections in the nation. In Congress, Scott will fight for a fair and open internet that allows small enterprises to compete on an even playing field with Big Tech giants.
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