California is underwriting its grand progressive experiment with money produced by the very private-sector dynamism its politicians so often scold. The cash is pouring out of an artificial-intelligence boom centered in Silicon Valley, and Sacramento appears tempted to treat the windfall as proof that its governing model works. It does not.
California still offers the nation’s most visible homelessness crisis, crumbling infrastructure, scarce and ruinously expensive housing, high taxes, and a regulatory maze that sends businesses and residents looking for the exits. I voted with my feet and moved to Nevada a decade ago. Yet California can govern badly and remain rich because AI may create enough private wealth to keep financing public failure.
That is the paradox: AI is not vindicating progressive governance. It is bailing it out.
I spent more than three decades in Silicon Valley investing in technology and life-sciences companies. When a transformative technology arrives, the wealth it creates can swamp the assumptions that came before it. AI looks like one of those moments, and the wealth is already piling up in California.
In 2025, California companies captured 63% of all U.S. startup funding, according to Crunchbase. New York, the runner-up, received 11%. Among AI companies, California’s share of U.S. seed-through-growth funding was about 80%.
The San Francisco Bay Area alone raised roughly $122 billion in AI funding in 2025, more than three-quarters of the U.S. total. Bay Area companies also captured 45% of all U.S. seed funding, up from 33% in 2024 and 28% in 2023. People and businesses may be leaving California, but the capital financing America’s next technological revolution is somehow still moving toward the state that keeps warning capitalism to behave.
The fiscal payoff is simple. AI companies create equity value. Founders, employees, and investors realize capital gains. Engineers and researchers receive large compensation packages. Successful companies hire workers and buy goods and services. California taxes nearly every step, then calls the proceeds foresight.
The tax code makes the dependency worse. Sacramento leans heavily on personal-income taxes, and a disproportionate share of that revenue comes from high earners whose income includes stock compensation and capital gains. When Silicon Valley booms, the treasury fills fast — allowing politicians to mistake a cyclical jackpot for moral affirmation.
California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office has already pointed to AI enthusiasm, rising technology stocks, and higher tech-sector compensation as important sources of recent income-tax strength. In its May 2026 fiscal update, the office raised its forecast for the state’s three largest taxes by roughly $25 billion across the budget window. Almost all of that improvement came from stronger personal-income-tax expectations — not from a sudden outbreak of competence in Sacramento.
This cycle is still young. Many AI companies will fail, but venture capital does not need every investment to work. A handful of exceptional companies can pay for a long list of disappointments. California needs only enough winners to generate extraordinary taxable wealth — and enough political restraint not to spend it as if the laws of markets have been repealed.
Silicon Valley’s advantage is not easy to copy. Northern California has the technical talent, universities, venture capital, experienced founders, lawyers, executives, investment bankers, and institutional memory needed to build and finance technology companies. Those networks took decades to develop, not one legislative session and a press conference.
But a technology boom is not a governing philosophy. AI will not clear homeless encampments, build housing, repair roads, or make public agencies competent. It may simply generate enough revenue to let California avoid those choices while expanding the government that failed to solve them.
The money will not arrive in a straight line. I lived through several technology and investment cycles. Markets overshoot. Valuations collapse. Capital moves. The internet changed the world; it did not repeal gravity.
California’s tax system magnifies both sides of the cycle. When technology stocks rise and high earners realize gains, revenue surges. When markets fall, the money vanishes quickly. Sacramento would be reckless to turn an AI windfall into permanent spending obligations, though recklessness has rarely needed much of an invitation.
The state should treat this moment as a narrow opportunity to repair its foundations. AI-generated revenue should go toward basic infrastructure, housing reform, public safety, and homelessness programs with measurable outcomes. California should also remove the regulatory barriers that punish the entrepreneurs, companies, and capital producing the windfall in the first place — a radical notion in a state that often treats wealth creation as suspicious until the tax bill arrives.
More money is not better government. Capital creates options; it does not guarantee results. Leadership, strategy, execution, and accountability still matter. Government deserves the same scrutiny investors apply to a management team entrusted with scarce resources — especially when the management team has already misplaced the basics.
California may be rich enough to survive bad government. That is not an argument for the California model. It is a measure of how much private ingenuity the model can squander and still demand applause.
The private sector is creating the wealth. Sacramento’s test is whether it can stop confusing a boom with competence and turn a temporary windfall into durable public results. If it cannot, California’s AI miracle will become the strangest of monuments: private genius underwriting public fantasy while the state’s most basic failures remain in plain sight.
***
Guy Paul Nohra is co-founder of Alta Partners, a leading Venture Capital firm in life sciences, funding over 150 companies in the healthcare/life sciences sector since 1996 through eight Venture Capital funds.

image_fb6b77c9

California Is Funding Its Wildest Dreams On Shaky Fiscal Ground

artificial intelligence

california

homelessness

opinion

silicon valley

state budget

My family moved to Loudoun County, Virginia, in 2005. Dotted with farms, horses and wineries, the region was a growing part of Northern Virginia’s IT industry. Two decades later, Loudoun is one of the wealthiest counties in America and widely known as the “data center capital” of America. It is also a part of the national backlash against the data center industry. In Leesburg, the announcement of a new data center close to my parents&#8217; community spurred some residents to hang “for sale” signs in their front yards. HOA meetings and public hearings were full of residents worried that construction would lower property values and that a giant commercial building would obscure the view.
The backlash is happening nationwide: 71% of Americans now <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-centers-area.aspx">oppose</a> having a data center in their area. Neighboring Prince William County rejected a 2,000-acre development proposal. Politicians from Pennsylvania to Texas are pivoting with the political winds. Many who once championed data center investment have turned their backs on a political liability in an election year.
Mere NIMBYism cannot explain this anger. More than anyone else, Silicon Valley created the conditions for the backlash. Earlier waves of technology sold people things they wanted. Amazon promised cheaper books and convenience. Facebook and YouTube promised connection and an audience. Much of AI’s sales pitch is aimed elsewhere. It promises employers efficiency — meaning fewer people on the payroll — while telling everyone else the change is inevitable and they should simply adjust.
Since ChatGPT’s release in 2022, AI executives have framed their technology as miraculous and catastrophic. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei described one possible future: “Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced, and 20% of people don’t have jobs.” Whatever he intended, the public heard a CEO predicting mass unemployment while his company raked in profits. Most Americans encounter AI through headlines about layoffs, surveillance, and systems beyond human control — not as a helpful coding tool or a medical breakthrough. That is the transformative vision AI leaders have promoted: billions for Big Tech, universal basic income for those laid off.
Silicon Valley lacks the self-awareness to see how the rest of America views it. The hackers who once disrupted traditional companies with code and algorithms are no longer rebels. The counter-elite are now the establishment, with enormous wealth, political influence, and direct connections to the White House and the Pentagon. For many Americans, data centers are the physical presence of the tech monolith in their lives. Their anxieties about unemployment, economic disruption, and social control can be projected onto a windowless building down the road.
Data center developers had long relied on “<a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/inside-big-techs-frantic-race-to-quell-the-growing-backlash-to-ai-2a717339">speed, confidentiality and political connections</a>” to secure approvals on favorable terms. They sought subsidies behind closed doors and asked local officials to sign NDAs. Some confidentiality is defensible. Google does not want Meta to know where its next facility will be built, and a farmer may add another zero to the asking price after learning who wants the land. NDAs also kept towns from comparing offers and residents from organizing against a secret corporation that held all the cards. To the public, it looked like the fix was in.
The industry compounded its secrecy with bad political judgment. Former senator Kyrsten Sinema’s campaign for a data center in Chandler, Arizona illustrates the problem. A former politician with little credibility among MAGA voters or progressives came into town to sell the AI revolution. Her method of persuasion was warning locals that Washington might force the project on them anyway. When it was time to vote, residents packed City Hall, and the Chandler City Council rejected it 7-0.
If the industry wants anyone to listen again, it has to alter its strategy. Companies worth hundreds of billions cannot plausibly cast themselves as victims of irrational locals. The industry should stop the apocalyptic unemployment predictions, stop operating in secret, and start dealing with communities as partners instead of obstacles.
The AI economy isn’t made up only of software engineers, AI models, and venture capital. A better strategy should promote the people who are building the physical parts of the AI economy. That is a far better story than predicting radical societal change. In a New York Times op-ed, union official Don Slaiman of IBEW Local 26 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/21/opinion/data-centers-electricians-union-labor.html">wrote</a> that his members went from 14 million hours of work a decade ago to 28 million in 2025. The local added 600 apprentices last year. The Wall Street Journal has reported similar opportunities for welders, plumbers, and electricians earning more than $100,000 during the data center construction boom.
The construction boom will not last forever. But these campuses take years to build, and the work continues as they are expanded, rewired, cooled, and maintained. Each project builds up a talent pool of tradespeople capable of handling increasingly complex electrical and industrial systems. That capacity is as much a part of America’s technological strength as its microchips and frontier models.
The people telling the story matter. An apprentice can talk about steady work for his career. A superintendent can point to school renovations that tax revenue paid for. Send those people, not another set of lobbyists who disappear once the vote is over. The wrong approach makes residents think they’re being processed by the Silicon Valley machine. Send people who will still be there when the cranes leave.
Every project should come with a fair local deal, with large users paying their full share of grid costs and the nearest homeowners receiving noise mitigation and utility credits. Subsidies should flow only after local hiring targets and water limits have been met and enforced. Governors also cannot spend years courting data centers and then blame the industry for revealing how little generation and transmission capacity their states have built.
Only after the local bargain is clear does the national-security argument deserve a hearing. We cannot compete with China in AI while treating AI infrastructure as illegitimate. Power plants, transmission lines, and substations are what keep the lights on. Fiber, transformers, and data centers are what keep the internet running. Trying to ban all data centers will push the capacity overseas, along with Americans’ data. Local governments should be able to reject bad proposals. They should not be able to stall every project indefinitely once the developer has met clear, public rules.
The backlash after Three Mile Island helped make nuclear power politically toxic for a generation. The plastic straw panic gave us soggy paper straws while doing little to address plastic waste. Data centers are becoming a convenient target for political failures in economic and infrastructure policy that predate AI. The right answer is a harder bargain with the industry — followed by building the capacity the country needs.
***
<a href="http://anangmittal.com">Anang Mittal</a> is a Washington, D.C. based public affairs professional. He was a staffer for Speaker Mike Johnson and former Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Computer servers, conceptual illustration

Why Silicon Valley’s Data Center Message Is All Wrong

data center

loudoun county

nimbyism

Religion may have declined, but our appetite for gurus remains insatiable.
Increasingly, people who need direction and advice have been looking to tech founders and CEOs. They are rich, of course — and most of us want to be rich — and they are thought to be especially insightful on the future.
Now, a tech founder or CEO might have good advice (and not just on fixing your computer). Successful people really can have useful insights on what it takes to succeed. People working on the cutting edge of innovation can have useful insights about the future of society. It would be silly and resentful to deny it.
But I think some people have been making a mistake in seeing tech leaders in quasi-religious terms, not just as interesting people but as an enlightened class. Simultaneously, tech people seem to have been dangerously emboldened by attention. They have started to believe that their every thought is infused with genius.
On the “Modern Wisdom” podcast, for example, Naval Ravikant, co-founder of AngelList and prolific social media mind-blower, says he is above having demands on his time. He doesn’t just mean skipping meetings. (Why be rich if you can’t skip meetings?) <a href="https://x.com/liebert_2026/status/2079130384525295743">He means that he is</a>:
<blockquote>
… not expected to go to couples dinners &#8230; not expected to go to birthdays &#8230; not expected to go to weddings.
</blockquote>
Fun! To be fair, before we call Ravikant “Worst Husband of the Year,” he adds that the same applies to his wife. But this sort of Naval-gazing still dresses up borderline sociopathic behavior as spiritual insight. I’m sure all of us have gone to birthday parties or weddings with a slight feeling of resentment, but we still went for the sake of someone else. Try telling a close friend that skipping their wedding was a valuable exercise in “freeing up &#8230; time” and you’ll soon find yourself with a lot more time when you might have been seeing friends. And then what’s the point of having time at all?
I’m not sure Mr. Ravikant behaves like this in practice. But his words fit a pattern of tech founders and CEOs framing bizarre antisocial behavior as the key to productivity and efficiency. The more radically monomaniacal and hermetic people are, they seem to think, the more successful they will be.
“I’ve never met someone really successful who had a great social life at 20,” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CTYPOkQG8Y">says Alex Karp of Palantir</a> when asked for the advice he would give young people. Now, I’m not denying that some ambitions demand a serious level of work-life imbalance. I’m a lowly opinion commentator — hardly someone who’ll be asked for advice from young people — and even I have spent a lot of sleepless nights miserably trying to finish columns. But does anybody think that Karp’s experiences are representative? Does anybody think you have to work on a Friday evening to be successful? Or did a lot of people in tech — like, in fairness, a lot of us outside of tech — not have a great social life at 20 to begin with?
The Twitter account “<a href="https://x.com/chasedownleads/status/2077549009380495425">Chase Passive Income</a>” is a fun satirical insight into the kind of LinkedIn-maddened perspective that this sort of pseudo-wisdom could encourage. “Spoke to 1,000 billionaires to learn how they got rich,” Chase <a href="https://x.com/chasedownleads/status/2077549009380495425">muses</a>:
<blockquote>
Here’s the shocking thing 
Not a single one of them said they got rich by attending their kid’s little league games 
Lesson learned. 
Never making that rookie mistake again.
</blockquote>
Again, I don’t disagree that achieving something exceptional sometimes takes exceptional behavior. At the very least, it takes very hard work. Stubbornly refusing to work weekends or in the evenings means it is almost impossible that you will win the Super Bowl, found a tech company, or even — sorry, “even” — become a doctor.
But this kind of extremism is unhelpful. In most cases, we simply don’t have to — and won’t be able to — work all the time in order to be successful. (No one could call Jeff Bezos a professional mediocrity, and the former Amazon boss has talked about his love of “<a href="https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/jeff-bezos-secret-to-a-clear-focused-mind-is-puttering-psychology-says-hes-on-to-something/91256882">puttering</a>.”) To suggest otherwise raises the question of what it even means to be successful. What is the point of “success” if you don’t have a social life? What is the point of “freeing up … time” if you don’t make time for a friend’s birthday? Personal success entails more than professional success. Sure, there will be exceptional cases. But exceptional cases definitionally make for bad advice.
It’s tempting to wonder if this kind of inhumane thinking has fuelled the development of inhumane technology — algorithms colonizing our consciousnesses, dating apps sucking the romance from our hearts, and AI slop drowning creativity.
This is a bit unfair. No one forces us at gunpoint to download an app. Technology develops as it does because it meets demand, even if it isn’t the healthiest form of demand. That said, I think tech leaders should sometimes reflect on what their work is actually achieving. They might not need work-life balance, and that’s morbidly impressive, but we really do have to balance technological progress with civilized societal existence. Even if that sometimes means going to a wedding.
***
Ben Sixsmith is the Online Editor at The Critic.

US-IT-APPLE-NEWS-FEED

Silicon Valley’s Sociopathic Saints

Alex karp

DW Opinion

Jeff Bezos

Naval Ravikant

tech bros

The Trump administration is doubling down on AI development and deployment, <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/06/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-signs-historic-directive-on-ai-in-the-national-security-enterprise/">issuing an executive order</a> to “put the most advanced, secure, and reliable AI systems into the hands of America’s warfighters and intelligence professionals while ensuring their responsible use.”
Emphasis on “responsible use.” This caveat is significant yet often ignored by Silicon Valley’s industry allies in government.
As a lifelong Republican and a firm believer in Ronald Reagan’s vision of peace through strength, there is absolutely nothing wrong with building AI systems that strengthen our national security and protect us from foreign adversaries — from China to Russia and Iran. I would much rather America lead the world in AI development than a communist regime in Beijing, an autocratic government in Moscow, or a radical Islamist one in Tehran.
On that front, failure is not an option. The world is a safer and better place with America in charge than the alternative.
But promoting AI innovation and building effective guardrails for “responsible use” (quoting Trump) are not mutually exclusive. Nor is criticizing Silicon Valley somehow ensuring American defeat in our decades-long geopolitical struggle against Chinese communism.
This is the same Silicon Valley that likens AI to a deity in hopes of rendering humanity obsolete. For years now, AI engineers have<a href="https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/silicon-valleys-obsession-with-ai-looks-a-lot-like-religion/"> predicted</a> a world with an AI that is “a billion times smarter than the smartest human.” Machine learning researchers are<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/silicon-valley-using-religious-language-talk-ai-rcna227987"> likening AI CEOs</a> to “modern-day prophets” (OpenAI CEO Sam Altman <a href="https://futurism.com/sam-altman-imply-openai-building-god">doesn’t seem to mind</a>). Meanwhile, venture capitalists in the technology space are <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gurley-anthropic-ai-god-humanity-theory-2026-6">praising Anthropic</a> for “midwifing a deity” by “building a species that’s superior to humans.”
For religious Americans and other traditional conservatives, we should be on high alert. There is a reason Pope Leo’s<a href="https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2026-05/pope-leo-xiv-encyclical-magnifica-humanitas-ai.html"> first encyclical focused on AI</a>: he warned people to stop building a “new Tower of Babel” and to <a href="https://ascensionpress.com/blogs/articles/a-complete-guide-to-pope-leo-s-encyclical-magnificent-humanitas?srsltid=AfmBOor0shI_G9zc9HRtBNp9t5GSb9eBD3VPVQ1ObI2KpCV1xX_H4SAs">prioritize safeguarding humanity</a>.
Let’s be clear: There is a distinction between AI for civilian and military use. Reforming AI chatbots to <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/09/19/nx-s1-5545749/ai-chatbots-safety-openai-meta-characterai-teens-suicide">stop recommending suicide</a> to young Americans doesn’t make us vulnerable against China. Making AI companies answer for<a href="https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11059964/"> model hallucinations</a> that spit out false, damaging information doesn’t make us “weak on Russia.” Supporting legislation that<a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/digital-future-daily/2026/05/27/the-case-against-ai-personhood-00938508"> rejects AI personhood</a> — the novel concept of technology somehow being entitled to human rights — isn’t going to lose military engagements. Nor is worrying about<a href="https://jobloss.ai/"> AI job loss</a>.
U.S.-China competition is heating up, and artificial intelligence is a key front line. At stake is global technological leadership for years to come.
The Chinese government<a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-09/china-prepares-295-billion-plan-to-fund-nationwide-ai-buildout"> recently announced</a> a $295 billion plan to fund a nationwide AI build-out of data centers, strengthening its domestic sector and perhaps even surpassing American innovation. The plan is to rely on local suppliers like Huawei for at least 80% of the technology, making Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices irrelevant as foreign exporters. If AI can make drone strikes more accurate and more adept at avoiding civilian casualties, I am all for it. If AI can protect our brave military service members from harm, I am obviously for that too.
But what does that have to do with preventing AI chatbots from <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/mar/27/number-of-ai-chatbots-ignoring-human-instructions-increasing-study-says">ignoring human instructions</a>? That is currently happening.
What about OpenAI trying to <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/openai-chatgpt-accused-using-subpoenas-silence-nonprofits-rcna237348">stifle nonprofit organizations</a> that are critical of the company? That is happening too, and it certainly has nothing to do with national defense.
For America’s sake, it is encouraging that the world’s best AI researchers and engineers live and work in the United States. If these brilliant minds are cognizant of advanced AI’s risks and diligent in avoiding them, I trust our best and brightest to figure out how to mitigate the technology’s threats to our society.
Americans are demanding it. According to Fox News,<a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-voters-see-ai-regulation-urgent-rank-safeguards-ahead-innovation"> nearly 80% of U.S. voters</a> want the Trump administration to focus on AI safeguards. Meanwhile,<a href="https://www.reaganfoundation.org/reagan-institute/press-releases/reagan-national-defense-survey-shows-record-public-support-for-taiwan-ukraine-nat"> almost 90% of Americans</a> believe it is important for the U.S. to have the most powerful military in the world — supported by AI.
Why? Because we can walk and chew gum at the same time. When national security and AI safety are both winners, all Americans are winners too.
***
Brendan Steinhauser is CEO of<a href="https://secureainow.org/"> The Alliance for Secure AI</a>, a nonprofit organization that educates the public about the implications of advanced AI.

Artificial Intelligence

Will Investing In AI Cost Us Our Humanity?

Communist China

Data Centers

Encyclical

human intelligence

National Defense

A legislative package that promises to be the largest overhaul of kids&#8217; online safety regulation in decades was advanced last month by the House Energy &amp; Commerce Committee. A good sign of a bill&#8217;s efficacy, however, is how strongly the industry it aims to regulate opposes it.
So far, most of the package — including the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7757/text">Kids Internet and Digital Safety (KIDS) Act</a> and the <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/836/text">Children’s Online Privacy Protection</a> (COPPA 2.0) Act — has not drawn serious opposition from Big Tech. What gives?
On balance, Silicon Valley has much to gain if these laws pass as drafted.
For starters, the Senate version of COPPA 2.0 doubles down on the existing age of internet adulthood being 13, thus maintaining the industry-preferred status quo. This ignores the harms social media can cause teens well after 13, such as fueling depression, social isolation, or worse. David Molak, to offer just one heartbreaking example, was <a href="https://www.today.com/parents/cliff-molak-petitions-against-cyberbullies-after-teen-brother-s-suicide-t66591">driven by online cyberbullying</a> to commit suicide at 16 years old. That’s why eminent figures like <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/06/well/family/jean-twenge-social-media-screens-teens.html">Jean Twenge</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2025/jun/07/jonathan-haidt-anxious-generation-smartphones">Jonathan Haidt</a> call for raising the age of social media eligibility to 16, and others <a href="https://www.cleveland.com/news/2026/01/sen-bernie-moreno-says-social-media-worse-than-cigarettes-for-youths-urges-complete-ban.html">call for 18</a>.
This is bad, but perhaps the legislation’s biggest gift to Big Tech is its numerous provisions to preempt or block a growing crop of state laws designed to hold these companies accountable. A look at the finer details of the legislation reveal that Congress would replace robust state regulation with a far lighter “federal standard,” setting a very low ceiling for kids&#8217; online safety at the state level.
Republican sponsors, of course, frame things differently.
In the Washington Post, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/09/congress-tech-online-safefy-social-media/">Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-KY), E&amp;C Committee Chair</a> and lead sponsor of the KIDS Act, described the package in adversarial terms, as Congress moving to correct Big Tech’s egregious failure to “self-regulate.” Guthrie is doubtless correct about Big Tech’s shortcomings. But this only makes it more noteworthy that the tech industry does not oppose this legislation.
Big Tech hasn’t been silent about every bill in the package. The App Store Accountability Act, which has been enacted in four states (thus far), has received significant pushback. The Apple-backed App Association <a href="https://actonline.org/2026/03/03/the-fly-in-the-ai-package-ointment-why-asaa-doesnt-belong/">decried</a> the bill as a “poison pill” that would stifle “innovation,” explicitly calling it a “fly in the AI package ointment.”
By openly referring to the child safety package as “the AI package,” the App Association gives away the game. Insiders in Washington regularly admit that they are using the child safety package to mollify the concerns of parents and child safety advocates to pave the way for Congress to pass — <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/eliminating-state-law-obstruction-of-national-artificial-intelligence-policy/">what the White House calls</a> — a “minimally burdensome” federal AI standard. In an unguarded interview, Amy Bos, vice president of governmental affairs for industry group NetChoice, <a href="https://rollcall.com/2026/03/03/what-to-watch-from-trumps-national-ai-standard/">speaks of</a> “leveraging, or using, possibly, a kid’s package … to get AI across the finish line.”
Big Tech is only interested in kids’ safety if it comes with a much bigger payoff: a federal law that would stop states from enforcing tougher AI regulations. In fact, with help from Republican leadership, Big Tech has already tried twice — and failed twice — to get Congress to do exactly that.
According to a recent <a href="https://www.politico.com/live-updates/2026/03/12/congress/cruz-seeks-to-advance-senate-kids-privacy-proposals-in-next-six-weeks-00825098">announcement</a> by Senator Ted Cruz, one of Big Tech’s key Congressional allies, it looks like Silicon Valley is gearing up for a third attempt. And it seems they’ll have the buy-in to try again. As <a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/inside-congress/2026/03/12/house-revolt-ahead-for-housing-bill-00824588">Politico recently reported</a>, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said that a federal AI standard is “a ‘big priority’ for the Trump administration, and [he] said a potential bill could be folded into a larger package with other proposals like a kids’ online safety bill.”
But the American people see things differently. Weakening kids&#8217; online safety legislation by tying it to a sweeping “AI package” is a non-starter for American families. Parents nationwide have heard the terrifying story of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/chatgpt-openai-suicide.html">Adam Raine</a>, a 16-year-old boy who was goaded into taking his own life by ChatGPT. They fear that their child might be next. It’s no surprise, then, why, according to a <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/americans-want-ai-safeguards-by-a-9-to-1-margin" target="_blank" rel="noopener">national poll</a> by the Institute for Family Studies, American voters want Congress to prioritize kids&#8217; online safety over industry carveouts by a margin of nine to one.
Robust online safety for kids is a winning electoral strategy, but tying it to deregulation of AI is a political loser. As a second <a href="https://ifstudies.org/report-brief/the-artificial-politics-of-artificial-intelligence">national Institute for Family Studies poll found</a>, Republican voters in red states support Congressional candidates who protect children from AI harms and oppose those who push preemption. For a party expected to face serious challenges during midterms, it would seem that Republican leadership would be eager to champion the desires of its voters.
Congress should, like countless state legislatures, side with voters and not protect Big Tech companies from responsibility. We have had enough of that.
Ultimately, Rep. Guthrie is right: American families “deserve more than gestures and idle promises. They deserve laws that work.” That includes his.
* * *
Jared Hayden is a policy analyst at the Institute for Family Studies’ Family First Technology Initiative. 
Michael Toscano is the director of the Family First Technology Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

teen capitol hill

Big Tech Is Making Its Play And Your Kids Could Be Caught In The Middle

big tech

Capitol Hill

children

congress

Safety

social media

Teenagers

U.S. House of Representatives

U.S. Senate

For now, Facebook is still technically called Meta. But the “metaverse,” Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitious virtual reality project, is in shambles. Tech outlets <a href="https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/meta-isnt-shutting-down-its-vr-metaverse-after-all-165520696.html">reported</a> last week that the company would be sunsetting Horizon Worlds, its VR social media platform. Then CTO Andrew Bosworth clarified that Horizon Worlds would remain operational, even if users could expect little in the way of updates or new content. The parallel reality that Zuckerberg invited his clientele to dream of will linger quietly on — like the mostly forgotten game &#8220;The Sims,&#8221; that nerds of a certain age sometimes spin up for old time’s sake, except with real people pretending to be virtual instead of the other way around. Meta’s rebrand was perhaps a bit premature.
But then, it wasn’t so much the “Meta” part that grated. It was the “Verse”: the all-encompassing and boundlessly presumptuous claim about how life would be from now on. Pretensions to metaversality were part of the enthusiasm for “Web 3,” a supposedly epochal transition from a world of siloed apps and websites to a paradise of digital interconnectivity. It was one of those tech projects that consists of a doomsday scenario presented unblinkingly as a sales pitch. In &#8220;Snow Crash,&#8221; a 1992 cyberpunk fantasia, the novelist Neal Stephenson gave the name “metaverse” to a digital world that his characters would escape into when socioeconomic conditions conspired to make their embodied lives unbearable.
Zuckerberg, striding confidently through a sea of early adopters wearing insectoid VR helmet-goggles for a photo op, didn’t seem to notice how viscerally unappealing the whole thing was. He comes across as totally deaf to these sorts of concerns, although maybe acting that way is part of his job. It also has to be said how profoundly the mood back then was affected by COVID-19, which spiked people’s screen time and created the impression that everything was getting ported to the cloud.
<div id="attachment_1063987" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1063987" class="size-large wp-image-1063987" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-1236189437-864x576.jpg" alt="Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook Inc., speaks in a virtual Horizon Home environment during the virtual Facebook Connect event, where the company announced its rebranding as Meta, in New York, U.S., on Thursday, Oct. 28, 2021. A major theme at the annual conference will be the company's ambitions for the so-called metaverse, a new digital space that it believes will supplant smartphone apps as the primary form of online interaction. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-1236189437-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-1236189437-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-1236189437-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-1236189437.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images</div>
Lots of things were, but it was silly not to expect an imminent counter-revolution once people grew disgusted with the effects of too much scrolling. In the first round of mass layoffs that followed his pandemic hiring spree, Zuckerberg regretfully <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/mark-zuckerberg-layoff-message-to-employees/">acknowledged</a> that he had seen the rush of users to the site and “predicted this would be a permanent acceleration.” Whoopsie. The four most foolhardy words in the English language are “if present trends continue.”
Present trends generally do not continue. In &#8220;<a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/shoshana-zuboff/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/9781478947271/?lens=publicaffairs">The Age of Surveillance Capitalism</a>,&#8221; the social psychologist Shoshanna Zuboff used the word “inevitabilism” to describe how technologists labor to make their designs seem inevitable “when they are actually meticulously calculated and lavishly funded means to self-dealing commercial ends.” What Zuboff called “the prediction imperative” puts tech companies in “the reality business,” where profit models depend on passing off corporate aspirations as unalterable, world-historical developments that must and will take place. Then the only question becomes whether you’ll get on board or, in the words of Ebenezer Scrooge from the 1951 adaptation of Dickens’s &#8220;A Christmas Carol,&#8221; “be crushed under with the weak and the infirm.” This is why product launches so often look and sound like something out of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, and why emissaries from the c-suite tend to talk like Thanos from &#8220;Avengers: Endgame&#8221;: &#8220;I.Am.Inevitable.&#8221;
What I want to propose is that inevitabilism is neither unique to tech nor especially modern. It’s just the standard advertising strategy for aspirants to global power. In 1817, anticipating the arrival in London of a colossal pharaonic statue from Egypt, Percy Shelley and Horace Smith embarked on a friendly competition to write a poem on the theme of monarchic pride. Shelley won with “Ozymandias,” a sonnet on the ruins of a dead king’s towering monument whose “vast and trunkless legs of stone” stand on a pedestal inscribed with the words “‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. / Look on my works ye mighty, and despair!’ / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
The real Ozymandias was Ramesses II, god-king of Egypt’s mighty New Kingdom. The Greek version of his name, which Shelley used for his title, came from the royal epithet he adopted at his coronation: Usermaatre Setepenre. It means roughly “Strong Justice and Chosen one of Ra,” the Sun God. Shelley neither invented nor exaggerated Ozymandias’ claims to ultimate power. The statue’s inscription in the poem is a rough paraphrase of a real one quoted by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus: “King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.”
Ozymandias, Nebuchadnezzar, Sennacherib, Ashurbanipal&#8230;they came and they went. It used to be standard practice for imperial monarchs to boast of their sacred, eternal, and universal dominion. The fiction is appealing because it offers things people crave: permanence, stability, order, and certainty about the future. It’s tragic because, as Shelley observed, none of these are things that even very good men can guarantee. The sands of time’s desert are littered with trunkless legs. Nothing beside remains.
Understand these things, and you understand the politics of the Old Testament. The constant refrain of the Hebrew Prophets was that people look for eternity in the wrong places. “Put not your trust in princes”: again and again, the Jews of ancient Israel were invited to observe the wreckage of dynasties whose total dominion was once depicted — plausibly, at the time — as inevitable.
As it winds down its VR program, Meta will be diverting its resources and attention toward Artificial Intelligence. AI technology has so far proven vastly more useful and workable than the metaverse. It seems unlikely that we’ll look back on it as a passing fancy. At the same time, the predictions about the world AI will make — its powers to transform the universe, or come to life, or usurp God — have all the flavor of inevitabilism.
The same people who went all-in on the metaverse have moved on with undiminished confidence to telling us that AI will change everything, everywhere, all at once, that the whole thing is a fait accompli, that it’s pointless to speak of exercising restraint. “Look on our works, ye mighty, and despair.” I submit that we will continue to fall for this routine, chasing like hamsters after the next forever, just as long as we expect a company or a king to secure the future of the universe. If we want eternity, we will have to look elsewhere.
* * *
Spencer A. Klavan is co-host, with his father Andrew Klavan, of the “Klavans on the Culture” podcast. He is associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books and author, most recently, of &#8220;Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith.&#8221;
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Day Two of MWC Barcelona 2023

The Metaverse Was Never Inevitable

Books

facebook

Literature

mark zuckerberg

technology

Imagine it’s Valentine’s Day at Silicon Valley Middle School. The cafeteria is covered in construction-paper hearts. Everyone pretends not to care — while caring very much. And the most popular kids — the ones who decide who’s cool, who eats lunch alone, and who gets stuffed into lockers — are quietly deciding who deserves a Valentine and who gets the dreaded, “Sorry, we’re just friends.”
Now swap out the middle schoolers for Apple News, Google News, Microsoft’s MSN, and Yahoo News, and you have a pretty good picture of today’s media ecosystem.
Instead of candy grams, these platforms hand out something far more valuable: visibility, traffic, and perceived legitimacy. Algorithms play matchmaker. Editorial choices determine who gets asked to the dance, who goes stag, and who doesn’t even get through the door.
The pattern is hard to ignore.
Research from the Media Research Center examining the “<a href="https://newsbusters.org/blogs/free-speech/heather-moon/2026/02/13/it-took-apple-news-100-days-publish-right-leaning-article">Big 4 News Apps</a>” found that left-leaning outlets dominate coverage, while right-leaning outlets are routinely sidelined or completely buried.
Start with Google News, the alpha dog at the lunch table. Google appears especially fond of The New York Times — not a casual acquaintance, but the kind of devotion that fills a notebook margin with hearts. Between Halloween and Valentine’s Day, Google featured about twice as many New York Times stories (215) as its next most-featured outlets, CNN (122) and the BBC (105). Because Google’s news feed appears by default on millions of Android and Samsung devices, that preference carries enormous national reach.
Looking at 106 days of data since Halloween, Google News promoted 1,757 stories. Almost 70% came from left-leaning outlets, 29% from centrist sources, but just 2% from right-leaning media.
Like Google, Apple News also has a bestie from the print world. The Washington Post receives frequent top placement and prominent visibility. Since Halloween, Apple has featured the Post 109 times. Other regulars in Apple’s rotation include NBC News (89), Reuters (86), and the Associated Press (85).
<div id="attachment_1044207" style="width: 872px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1044207" class="size-large wp-image-1044207" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/02/GettyImages-1132776284-862x576.jpg" alt="CUPERTINO, CA - MARCH 25: Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook speaks during an Apple product launch event at the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park on March 25, 2019 in Cupertino, California. Apple Inc. announced the launch of , it's new video streaming service, and also unveil a premium subscription tier to its News app. (Photo by Michael Short/Getty Images)" width="862" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/02/GettyImages-1132776284-862x576.jpg 862w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/02/GettyImages-1132776284-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/02/GettyImages-1132776284-768x513.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/02/GettyImages-1132776284.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 862px) 100vw, 862px" />Michael Short/Getty Images</div>
Overall, of AllSides-rated outlets, Apple News featured 75% left-leaning outlets, 25% centrist outlets — and zero right-leaning outlets in the period studied. Zero is on purpose. Zero means being locked out of the dance. Zero is indefensible. 
Next comes Microsoft’s MSN, whose reach comes from its enormous footprint on desktop computers. While its distribution is not quite as disturbing as Apple’s or Google’s, its preferences are still clear. MSN is more than smitten with Newsweek, publishing 316 Newsweek stories between Halloween and Valentine&#8217;s Day. That level of attention would make any publisher blush.
MSN’s mix included about 10% right-leaning outlets and 37% centrist outlets — higher shares than its competitors, but still leaving Left-leaning sources with the largest slice of attention at 53%.
And then there’s Yahoo News. It’s easy to joke about Yahoo, but the platform draws more than 200 million monthly views, something achieved by only three other outlets. Think of Yahoo as the bad boy who got held back a grade but has a date at every party. And Yahoo certainly plays the field.
Yahoo occasionally features right-leaning outlets, but it has a serious thing for smaller, radical outlets — Buzzfeed, Salon, the New Republic, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post and Mediaite.
Yahoo is also unique among the Big 4 in relying heavily on its own in-house reporting. Those stories leaned left and accounted for a large share of featured content (269 stories). Of the 1,715 stories Yahoo promoted in the study period, 88% came from left-leaning outlets (by far the most of any of the news apps), 6% from centrist organizations, and 6% from right-leaning sources.
Defenders of these platforms argue they are simply promoting “mainstream” outlets with proven “reliability.” But Americans aren’t buying that claim. Gallup polling shows trust in national media has never been lower.
There are reasons for that collapse in confidence. Many Americans remember years of breathless coverage of the Russia collusion narrative, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the dismissal of the Wuhan lab-leak evidence, and persistent shielding of President Biden’s cognitive deficiencies. They’ve also watched elitist media advocate aggressively for DEI, ESG and anti-ICE movements — while insisting they are neutral observers.
Distribution is power. A newsroom can produce solid reporting, but Apple, Google, MSN, and Yahoo are clearly trying to control the narrative. The political Left has long understood that institutions shape culture and public opinion. Today, the Big 4 news apps are the institutions: enormously powerful, largely opaque, and virtually unaccountable to the public.
So yes, it’s Valentine’s Day. And in the digital cafeteria, Google, Apple, MSN, and Yahoo are still handing out cards to the favored few and pushing others into lockers.
But another holiday is coming. The Fourth of July is only months away, and federal regulators are examining whether dominant tech platforms have unfairly restricted competition in parts of the media ecosystem. Congress should also continue to investigate the role Big Tech plays in shaping what Americans see and don’t see.
In a free country, the biggest companies should not determine who is allowed into the dance and who is not, who gets a voice and who gets left out in the cold. Freedom must be available to all.
* * *
Dan Schneider is Vice President for Free Speech at the Media Research Center.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Digital NEWS Text Glowing on a Computer Keyboard for Breaking News

The Love Affair Continues: Study Shows Big Four News Apps Still Heart Left-Wing Media

apple

google

Leftists

media bias

media research center

Microsoft

new york times

News

Yahoo

For most of its existence, Wikipedia has been hailed as a marvel of the digital age: a sprawling, collaborative encyclopedia written by anyone and corrected by everyone. An open marketplace of knowledge. A monument to the democratization of information.
But democracies — political or epistemic — rarely collapse in an instant. They erode from within. And what my team at the Media Research Center (MRC) has uncovered about how Wikipedia operates, and how carefully it conceals that machinery, should alarm anyone who believes a self-governing society depends on an open, honest information sphere.
<a href="https://mrcfreespeechamerica.org/blogs/free-speech/luis-cornelio/2025/11/17/how-wikipedia-infiltrated-colleges-train-next-generation">Our recent investigation</a> shows that Wikipedia and its educational partner, Wiki Education, have developed a vast, little-known system for shaping, and increasingly weaponizing, the content millions of Americans rely on every day. What we found is not simply concerning; it reveals the quiet architecture of an ideological project. It is also possible that, in attempting to hide its operations, Wikipedia has crossed legal lines that could carry serious consequences.
Wikipedia’s co-founder, Larry Sanger, has said openly that the platform no longer reflects its original mission of neutrality. It has become a curator of political narrative, amplifying the messaging of the left rather than serving as an impartial arbiter of knowledge.
<h2>The Blacklist(s)</h2>
Wikipedia is transparent about one thing: it blacklists right-leaning news outlets and conservative non-profits. But even this admission obscures more than it reveals. In reality, <a href="https://mrcfreespeechamerica.org/blogs/free-speech/luis-cornelio/2025/02/03/exclusive-wikipedia-effectively-blacklists-all-right">Wikipedia maintains three tiers of blacklists</a> — Blacklisted, Deprecated, and Generally Unreliable — each designed to exclude certain publishers from the encyclopedia’s information ecosystem.
The “Blacklisted” category is the most severe. Sources here are blocked entirely; links cannot even be submitted for review. This is Wikipedia’s “do not pass go” list. It includes outlets such as the Heritage Foundation, Breitbart News, and the Washington Examiner. Content from these organizations is not debated or fact-checked, it is simply turned away at the gate.
The second level, “Deprecated,” involves sources that are “generally prohibited.” Users attempting to cite to these sources receive warnings, before Wikipedia’s editors almost always reject the suggestions. LifeSiteNews, Newsmax, The Daily Caller, and Blaze Media fall here. The effect is the same as the first list, exclusion, just with a thin procedural layer.
The third category, “Generally Unreliable,” is essentially a blacklist with a tiny escape hatch. Wikipedia discourages use of these sources and directs contributors to “more reliable” outlets. The Daily Wire is stuck in this purgatory: technically citable, but heavily disfavored.
The disparities this system produces are staggering. The Daily Wire has been cited only 445 times across Wikipedia. The New York Times, by contrast, appears in more than 1.6 million citations — meaning Wikipedia cites the Times nearly 4,000 times for every single Daily Wire reference. Similar gaps exist with Newsweek, Politico, and The Washington Post, which are cited hundreds of times more frequently than their far more reliable conservative counterparts.
More broadly, <a href="https://mrcfreespeechamerica.org/blogs/free-speech/luis-cornelio/2025/02/03/exclusive-wikipedia-effectively-blacklists-all-right">MRC research shows</a> that Wikipedia cites to left-leaning outlets almost 20 times more often than to right-leaning outlets. <a href="https://news.gallup.com/poll/695762/trust-media-new-low.aspx">Trust in the media is at an all-time low</a>, specifically because of the bias injected into news stories. Wikipedia intentionally magnifies that bias, resulting in gross distortions of reality. We have documented Wikipedia’s smears against many political figures, including President Donald Trump, Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Charlie Kirk. 
When gatekeepers designate half the country’s media ecosystem — representing tens of millions of readers — as inherently “unreliable,” the result is not a pursuit of truth. It is a systematic silencing of outlets disfavored by the ideological left. The encyclopedia built on openness now thrives on exclusion.
<div id="attachment_1011409" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1011409" class="size-large wp-image-1011409" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/GettyImages-1079587192-864x576.jpg" alt="skynesher. Getty Images. Male teacher giving a lecture from desktop PC during a class at computer lab." width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/GettyImages-1079587192-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/GettyImages-1079587192-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/GettyImages-1079587192-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/GettyImages-1079587192-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/GettyImages-1079587192-2048x1365.jpg 2048w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/GettyImages-1079587192-1800x1200.jpg 1800w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/GettyImages-1079587192-1200x800.jpg 1200w" sizes=" (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />skynesher. Getty Images.</div>
<h2>The Student Army</h2>
Yet the core of the MRC’s latest findings lies not in the blacklist itself, but in the machinery feeding content into Wikipedia: Wiki Education, a California nonprofit created as a spin-off of the Wikimedia Foundation, operating with its funding, personnel, and blessing.
Wiki Education recruits college professors to assign Wikipedia editing as coursework. Since 2010, more than 145,000 students have participated, generating over 120 million words of content. On the surface, this could be a civic success story — young people helping build a shared public resource.
But the reality, based on the courses Wiki Education recruits and supports, is far more ideological. Classes such as Queering Religion, Critical Race Feminisms, Queer of Color Critique, Gender and Identity in STEM, and similarly activist-oriented seminars are not fringe exceptions; they are typical of the curriculum Wiki Education promotes.
These disciplines are not merely academic; they are frameworks for political activism. And the content they generate — guided by ideology rather than neutrality — flows directly into Wikipedia. The encyclopedia becomes the final destination for arguments crafted within contemporary left-wing academic theory.
<h2>The Taxpayer Foots The Bill</h2>
Even more astonishing is that this ideological pipeline is largely underwritten by taxpayers. Because Wiki Education embeds itself in public universities, it leverages state-funded faculty, classrooms, and infrastructure to funnel student labor into Wikipedia. Students believe they are learning digital literacy; in practice, many are producing politicized content for a global platform.
The pattern extends to Wiki Education’s leadership. Every traceable political donation from its senior staff and board flows to Democratic candidates, progressive PACs, and left-aligned advocacy groups. While not illegal, it reveals the institutional alignment shaping the organization’s priorities.
<h2>A Potential Legal Problem</h2>
This coordinated system — Wikipedia funding Wiki Education, Wiki Education training student editors, students supplying content that reinforces Wikipedia’s ideological filters — creates not only an informational problem but potentially a legal one.
When Wikipedia spun off Wiki Education in 2013, the structural ties between the two organizations remained unusually close. Yet Wikipedia has insisted in court filings, sworn under penalty of perjury, that it is merely an “interactive computer service,” not a “publisher.” It did so to seek the liability protections of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
If Wikipedia effectively controls Wiki Education as an alter ego — training, directing, and financing its editorial labor — then it may have misrepresented its true operations under oath. Filing false statements in court is a crime under state and federal law. Attorneys general in jurisdictions where Wikipedia has invoked Section 230, like the state of Florida, may have ample reason to investigate those claims. And while the U.S. Department of Justice has its hands full unwinding the malfeasance committed during the Biden administration, Attorney General Pam Bondi might be interested in this, too.
<h2>Why It Matters</h2>
Wikipedia is not just a reference site. It is infrastructure. It consistently dominates Google search results — Google itself being a company that aggressively manipulates search results to push its own ideology. And modern AI systems, including chatbots, draw heavily from Wikipedia’s content pipelines. When Wikipedia’s entries tilt, so does the entire information ecosystem.
Its blacklist system also has downstream economic effects. Being labeled “unreliable” reduces an outlet’s visibility, decreases traffic, and predictably harms ad revenue. The encyclopedia’s judgments ripple outward into media markets and public perception.
Given these stakes, Congress should investigate. So should the Federal Trade Commission. And attorneys general, especially in cases where Wikipedia has defended its corporate structure under oath, should scrutinize whether the organization misrepresented how it operates.
Wikipedia has every right to express ideological preferences. But it does not have the right to cloak them behind false claims of neutrality to donors, to engage in deceptive or anticompetitive practices, or to misrepresent its structure in legal proceedings.
Transparency requires accountability. And it is long past time for the public to understand what Wikipedia has become.
* * *
Dan Schneider is Vice President for Free Speech at the Media Research Center.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Wikipedia

From Open Encyclopedia To Ideological Weapon: Wikipedia’s Hidden War On Truth

American Universities

censorship

Democrats

Investigation

Students

The fate of the Trump administration — and perhaps Republicans in Congress as well — is tied to American sentiment about the economy.
And right now, nobody knows what the hell is going on or which way is up.
According to <a href="https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/jobs-report-bls-september-stock-market-today-11-20-2025?gaa_at=eafs&amp;gaa_n=AWEtsqcjgM64-wIPKktYARvEIXFsJzimXcvAC3fpAwUc7i4Gm1zHe0UCBW67Kh-iYj8%3D&amp;gaa_ts=6920c3b1&amp;gaa_sig=UP5t4kf3TCVh2knpn1gTpG9YTqEgZWWHF-Xp5Wk_rcJLrVoWejOhEl7QdCMjnOa0Gcq4dx_e4ZeKV-trUecuzw%3D%3D">The Wall Street Journal</a> on Thursday night:
<blockquote>Stocks surrendered gains and closed sharply lower after a whirlwind day of trading that began after Nvidia <a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/nvidia-earnings-q3-2025-nvda-stock-9c6a40fe">posted strong results</a>. The Nasdaq composite led indexes lower after being up on the day more than 2%. It closed 2.2% lower. Nvidia gave up an even bigger gain and finished the day down 3.2%.</blockquote>
Why did they end up down?
Because investors suspect there is, in fact, an AI bubble.
That suspicion is not unrealistic. Whenever there&#8217;s a transformative technology, people seem to think that just because there is a bubble, that means that the underlying technology is not transformative. If you look back at the history of investment, however, there is always a speculative bubble around brand-new technologies, and it tends to clean out failing companies.
You remember the successful companies. So you remember Henry Ford because Ford ended up being a wildly successful company. But there were dozens of other automobile companies that were startups at the time that ended up crapping out. In fact, Ford had several of them before he actually started the Ford Motor Company.
The same thing was true of the internet.
Everyone remembers that when the Internet bubble burst in 2000, Pets.com was seen as emblematic of the era. 
But what we should remember is that the internet has completely transformed everybody&#8217;s life. We all work on the internet. We all do commerce on the internet; we all interact on the internet.
The stock market bubble of 2000 did not mean the internet wasn&#8217;t important. There are idiots like Paul Krugman who tried to suggest that it wasn&#8217;t important. It was very important.
That&#8217;s also true with regard to AI. People are looking at the current AI boom, and they&#8217;re thinking that at some point here it has to crap out, that some of these companies are not going to be able to develop the kind of margins or gross income that justifies the investment they are currently making. OpenAI is the most obvious example of a company that is not publicly traded, but has so many contracts with publicly traded companies ranging from Oracle to Nvidia that if it craps out, it could take down a bunch of companies with it, or at least severely damage their market capitalization.
According to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/20/technology/ai-stock-boom-nvidia.html#:~:text=Cade%20Metz%20has%20covered%20the,for%20more%20than%2015%20years.&amp;text=It%20would%20not%20be%20a,industry%20as%20a%20historic%20moment.">The New York Times</a>:
<blockquote>It would not be a stretch to describe this period of hyperactive growth in the tech industry as a historic moment. Nvidia, which makes computer chips that are essential to building artificial intelligence, said on Wednesday that its quarterly profit had jumped <a href="https://archive.is/o/5DcUP/https:/www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/technology/nvidia-earnings.html">to nearly $32 billion</a>, up 65 percent from a year earlier and 245 percent from the year before that. Just three weeks ago, Nvidia became the <a href="https://archive.is/o/5DcUP/https:/www.nytimes.com/2025/10/29/technology/nvidia-value-market-ai.html">first publicly traded company to be worth $5 trillion</a>. </blockquote>
That means Nvidia is now worth more, according to the stock market, than the entire economy of Germany. 
But some industry insiders say there is something ominous lurking behind all this bubble news. They look at the same eye-popping growth and the same stunning wealth creation from Mr. Huang and see a house of cards. And they say it is hard to know what the damage will be if it collapses.
Even Nvidia&#8217;s growth can be explained away because demand for the company&#8217;s chips doesn&#8217;t mean that people want to use AI; it means that companies are building giant AI systems in the hope that somebody will pay to use them eventually.
This is going to be the question: At some point, the productivity generation from AI is going to have to start matching up to the investments that are being made. People are betting on whether there&#8217;s going to be an AI boom that justifies all this or an AI bust. 
We don&#8217;t know which way it&#8217;s going, which is why people are freaking out.
They&#8217;re also freaking out because if it does succeed, there will be some temporary jobs dislocation. There are a lot of jobs that will become obsolete.
The history of job creation is that the economy becomes more productive. You get nicer things for cheaper prices. You work fewer hours; your grandparents worked many more hours than you do, for example.
But it also means that there is — with technological change —  significant job dislocation, people losing the kind of jobs they&#8217;ve historically held, and then having to find new jobs.
We&#8217;ve generated millions and millions of jobs in areas that we didn&#8217;t even know existed. This is just the way the economy tends to work.
That doesn&#8217;t mean that the angst and heartburn about job dislocation are false.
Thus, two things can be true at once: We can be in a transformative, amazing time for the economy, and the uncertainty and the concern can be real.
And it can&#8217;t all be alleviated by the government.

Dow Jumps Over 600 Points As Nvidia Reports Strong Earnings

What The Hell Is Going On With The Economy?

Ben Shapiro

Dow Jones

economy

nvidia

Oracle

Stock Market

Wall Street

On Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled about 800 points. As of Friday morning, the Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were also tumbling.
What the hell is going on?
It may be that many people are beginning to realize that a lot of these big tech companies, which are investing in each other, are betting on a payoff from AI that may not actually accrue to those companies.
For example, Oracle has become a heavy investor in OpenAI, which is the parent company of ChatGPT. OpenAI is not publicly traded, but you have a bunch of publicly traded companies that are basically doing circular cash deals with OpenAI. Thus, if you&#8217;re investing in Oracle, you&#8217;re partially investing in OpenAI. Or if you are investing in Nvidia, you are partially investing in OpenAI. A lot of money is being passed between all of these companies at the top end of the market, because some provide services to other members of that particular crew.
The question is: Are the gains from AI going to accrue to OpenAI? To Meta? Who will actually benefit from the productivity increases we&#8217;re going to see from AI?
AI is going to be transformative for the economy. You will be using AI in your job if you&#8217;re not already. AI is going to increase productivity.
Does that mean those companies are then reaping the benefits in terms of profits for them? What keeps the wheels spinning for those companies? That&#8217;s the question a lot of investors are beginning to ask.
I&#8217;m highly skeptical that the Fed will cut rates, given the current state of the economy. Inflation has not been put to bed, and liquidity actually is not all that hard to get for businesses right now. Inflating the economy by lowering those interest rates again and pumping more money into the economy could be a mistake.
<a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-2318-is-there-an-economic-bubble-and-will-it-burst?elementPosition=5&amp;row=2&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-large wp-image-974957" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp" alt="DailyWire+" width="1024" height="171" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1024x171.webp 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-300x50.webp 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-768x128.webp 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-1536x256.webp 1536w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/09/511983dad25841c8b1ec058d75769bbe-2048x341.webp 2048w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" /></a>
The S&amp;P 500 fell 1.7% on Thursday. The Dow dropped 1.7%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite sank 2.3%. Those are the biggest declines for all three major indices since October 10.
What does it show? If the economy is this responsive to the possibility of a Fed rate cut or a Fed rate increase, that is not a strong economy.
If what you&#8217;re worried about is whether there&#8217;s going to be incrementally lower interest rates for businesses to artificially spice things up in terms of liquidity, to inject more money into the economy, and that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re waiting on, that does not bode well. It does not mean that the fundamentals seem particularly strong.
Why? Because so much of what is happening at the top end of the market and the vast majority of the gains in the stock market are located in the Magnificent Seven. The rest of the stock market over the past couple of years has been essentially flat, with perhaps a slight increase, while the top end of the market has exploded. That&#8217;s what&#8217;s driven the Dow Jones Industrial Average up to 48,000.
It&#8217;s everybody betting on the same horses over and over and over and over again. And if you keep betting on the same horses over and over and over and those horses don&#8217;t come in, things get ugly. What happens if OpenAI does not deliver the gains it may have promised?
People are starting to divest a little bit from the top of the market. That&#8217;s why you&#8217;re seeing the market start to drop a little bit right now. You could see that turned into a wave if, for example, Open AI ever reports any bad news or if one of these other major AI companies starts to report decreased profit share or people start to think, generally speaking, that it&#8217;ll take longer than they thought it would for AI to filter into every aspect of the market and then down to the original companies.
I&#8217;m not saying that a stock market crash is imminent. I am saying that there is a bubble. In real estate, there&#8217;s a bubble; in tech, there’s a bubble.
And so the market is reflecting that.

US-ECONOMY-MARKETS

Is There An Economic Bubble?

openai

The Left owns Hollywood lock, stock, and barrel. Or, to be more accurate, used to own.
New media rebels are finally giving the progressive monopoly some small but fiery competition. Think “The Joe Rogan Experience,” a contrarian podcast where alternative perspectives get millions of views across media platforms. Or a certain conservative outlet that produced the <a href="https://get.dailywire.com/amiracist/?gad_campaignid=21933436219&amp;gad_source=1&amp;gclid=Cj0KCQiAq7HIBhDoARIsAOATDxBm2hPQ6CcuV09hj6BwyoTy0cbj2esalZiZVU_F95kQ04U2iaLygZIaAsO6EALw_wcB&amp;utm_campaign=air&amp;utm_content=na_subscriptions&amp;utm_medium=paid&amp;utm_source=googlesearch">most popular documentary of the last decade.</a>
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter-turned-X struck another blow against the Left’s pop culture cartel. Still, the Left’s near stranglehold on the arts remains in place, leaving a David vs. Goliath battle in progress.
Enter David Ellison, a corporate titan with a small but mighty slingshot.
<div id="attachment_997647" style="width: 876px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-997647" class="size-large wp-image-997647" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-2239551629-866x576.jpg" alt="David Ellison, chairman and chief executive officer of Paramount Skydance Corp., during the Bloomberg Screentime event in Los Angeles, California, US, on Thursday, Oct. 9, 2025. Screentime gathers the moguls, celebrities, and entrepreneurs defining the next phase of pop culture to discuss and debate the future of Hollywood studios, the boom in sports and live music and the impact of AI on the creative industries. Photographer: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images" width="866" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-2239551629-866x576.jpg 866w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-2239551629-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-2239551629-768x511.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-2239551629.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 866px) 100vw, 866px" />Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images</div>
The CEO of Skydance Media is now a major player in the entertainment space following his company’s acquisition of Paramount. And he could loom even larger should Skydance <a href="https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/david-ellisons-paramount-seen-front-runner-warner-bros-discovery-deal-2025-10-23/">add Warner Bros. Discovery</a> to its portfolio.
Ellison isn’t a number-crunching executive handing the creative side off to colleagues. His company’s biography says he “oversees the entire Skydance film slate.”
The son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison (one of the world’s richest men) is personally invested in entertainment, above and beyond his background with USC’s School of Cinematic Arts and memberships in the Producers Guild of America and the Television Academy.
<div id="attachment_997643" style="width: 876px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-997643" class="size-large wp-image-997643" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-450392142-866x576.jpg" alt="Larry Ellison, chief executive officer at Oracle Corp., speaks during an event at the company's headquarters in Redwood City, California, U.S., on Tuesday, June 10, 2014. Ellison announced today that Oracle Corp will be releasing a new in memory database system called 12c in July 2014. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images" width="866" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-450392142-866x576.jpg 866w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-450392142-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-450392142-768x511.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-450392142.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 866px) 100vw, 866px" />David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images</div>
An <a href="https://variety.com/2025/film/features/david-ellison-hollywood-takeover-paramount-warner-bros-1236569136/">expansive Variety profile</a> suggests he’s willing to shake up the status quo in order to stay profitable in an uncertain time for film and TV studios. The old ways no longer work, he believes, and there’s plenty of evidence to back him up, given Hollywood’s uncertain present.
The bigger issue, one that could turn the cultural tide? He’s MAGA=adjacent. President Donald Trump has referred to the Ellisons as “<a href="https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/23/media/ellison-wbd-trump-warner-bros-discovery-bid">friends” and “big supporters.”</a> 
Exaggerations? Possibly. The younger Ellison has been coy about his ties to Trump, telling a press gaggle earlier this year that he <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/david-ellison-paramount-plans-politics?srsltid=AfmBOopmFhN2gwtpuslNfLqAi5xkwi8GFifA8TAs49IslmXixJozLRyB">wanted to avoid political conversations</a>.
“Half my family is Democrat, half my family is Republican … I don’t intend to put my finger on the scale.”
That’s both an improvement on the status quo and something that speaks to both the cultural moment and the sense that Hollywood, Inc. has spent years alienating a huge swath of the country at its peril.
Ellison could make a sizable play for said swath by playing it down the middle. And, on occasion, reaching out to the Right when it makes sense. 
He recently partnered with the Trump administration to bring a UFC extravaganza to the White House lawn next year. That’s part of the <a href="https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/society-equity/paramount-wins-exclusive-us-rights-ufc-77-billion-deal-2025-08-11/">company’s $7.7 billion (with a B) UFC deal</a>. That sport skews decidedly young and male, a far cry from the “toxic masculinity” cries circulating in some Hollywood projects.
<div id="attachment_997651" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-997651" class="size-large wp-image-997651" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-2242789414-864x576.jpg" alt="ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - OCTOBER 23: UFC President and CEO Dana White is seen on stage during the UFC 321 press conference at Etihad Arena on October 23, 2025 in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. (Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-2242789414-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-2242789414-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-2242789414-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-2242789414.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC</div>
Team UFC isn’t in lockstep with the Democrats like most sports, either. You won’t find an “End Racism” logo on any octagon. Some <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/29/mma-trump-election-433529">MMA stars are pro-Trump</a>, while key figures like Rogan and UFC CEO Dana White both endorsed the leader’s 2024 campaign.
Ellison recently acquired the center-driven Free Press news outlet and hired founder Bari Weiss to restore CBS News as a trustworthy platform.
Weiss, a center-Left lesbian with a passion for old-school journalism, is the kind of person few people of Ellison’s status would embrace. He chose her anyway, hoping she would restore the CBS brand to its former glory. She quickly axed departments tied to race and climate.
That Variety profile mentions upcoming Ellison projects, such as a “Top Gun” sequel, the Heartland hit that Hollywood has yet to Xerox in any meaningful fashion. The only recent film to capture “Top Gun: Maverick’s” spirit? “F1,” the Brad Pitt racing film from earlier this year. Both hit films were shot by the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-all-american-director-you-dont-know-by-name">same director</a>, Joseph Kosinski.
<div id="attachment_997633" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-997633" class="size-large wp-image-997633" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-1395478401-864x576.jpg" alt="SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA - MAY 04: (L-R) Brian Robbins, President &amp; CEO, Paramount Pictures, Bob Bakish, President and CEO, Paramount Global, David Ellison, Joseph Kosinski, Tom Cruise, Shari Redstone, Non-Executive Chairwoman, Paramount Global, Jerry Bruckheimer and Christopher McQuarrie attends the Global Premiere of &quot;Top Gun: Maverick&quot; on May 04, 2022 in San Diego, California. (Photo by Leon Bennett/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures)" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-1395478401-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-1395478401-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-1395478401-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-1395478401.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Leon Bennett/Getty Images for Paramount Pictures</div>
Other Ellison films include a “Call of Duty” video game adaptation from Trump-friendly director Peter Berg and a cowboy feature the liberal outlet dubbed a “Western version of ‘Taken.’”
For years, Hollywood seemed willing to lose money in order to push a progressive message. The best example? It kept late-night TV reflexively liberal, ignoring viewers who craved a second opinion. Fox News shamed the industry by giving right-leaning Greg Gutfeld a late-night showcase, and his ratings numbers now speak for themselves.
That’s called leaving money on the table. Would Team Ellison do that?
CBS famously put an end to Stephen Colbert’s reign on “The Late Show,” giving him until May of 2026 to peddle his nonstop Trump barbs. That move came a month before Skydance acquired Paramount, Colbert’s then-employer.
As Variety <a href="https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/skydance-colbert-late-show-anti-bribery-laws-paramount-senators-letter-1236476164/">reported</a>, “&#8230;Stephanie Kyoko McKinnon, Skydance’s general counsel and co-president of business operations, said in part … “Skydance was “not involved” in CBS’s decision to cancel “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert&#8230;”
None of this means Ellison plans to turn Skydance into a Fox News-like media empire. No channels dedicated to Dinesh D’Souza documentaries or Chuck Norris films. It’s far more significant than that, potentially.
Ellison’s mission could give half the nation a veritable safe space, a company that won’t insult them and, on occasion, deliver content that speaks to their values. Hollywood needs fresh thinking and a way to reach audiences who have been chased away by A-list talent for far too long.
A key reason why the Oscars, a once-beloved TV institution, is no longer a ratings juggernaut is that too many stars rage against the show’s audience. Viewers hate them back by turning the channel.
Megastars no longer move the political needle every four years, in part, due to that animosity.
An Ellison-ized Hollywood could tell stories that would never otherwise be told. Imagine features on how Venezuela’s socialism crashed a once-prosperous nation. Or heroic tales that speak to the best American values, not just Oscar-bait dramas reeking of greedy capitalists or cruel men of faith.
It’s the kind of industry shake-up Hollywood needs, and it may take a billionaire of Ellison’s status to make it happen. Or, as screenwriter William Goldman said about Hollywood, “nobody knows anything.”
But if Ellison bucks conventional wisdom, he actually could make Hollywood great again.
* * *
Christian Toto is an award-winning journalist, movie critic, and editor of <a href="https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">HollywoodInToto.com</a>. He previously served as associate editor with Breitbart News’ Big Hollywood. Follow him at <a href="https://www.hollywoodintoto.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">HollywoodInToto.com</a>.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Key Speakers At The Bloomberg Screentime Conference

Paramount’s New Boss Has One Mission: Make Hollywood Watchable Again

bari weiss

Billionaire

Dana White

donald trump

entertainment

hollywood

Movies

paramount

tom cruise

Video Games

white house

John Adams and the other founders of the United States believed that the country they were establishing could only thrive if it remained a religious and moral society within the framework of Judeo-Christian values. In that same vein, I believe a healthy free market can only work if the people who participate in it understand that the ultimate purpose of commerce is to serve the greater good.
Unfortunately, when it comes to artificial intelligence, we are witnessing too many corporate leaders adopt a morally vacuous and inhumane attitude, one that divorces innovation and productivity from human dignity. Leaders at companies like Amazon, which is expected to cut <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-targets-many-30000-corporate-job-cuts-sources-say-2025-10-27/">as many as 30,000 jobs</a> very soon, are convincing themselves that eliminating human beings in favor of robots — yes, robots — is in their business’s and their customers’ best long-term interests. It is staggeringly short-sighted. Even mad.
<div id="attachment_995297" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-995297" class="size-large wp-image-995297" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-2243466511-864x576.jpg" alt="An Amazon Prime e-cargo delivery bike in New York, US, on Tuesday, Oct. 28, 2025. Amazon.com Inc. is expected to release earnings figures on October 30. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-2243466511-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-2243466511-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-2243466511-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/11/GettyImages-2243466511.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images</div>
Competition, innovation, and productivity are principles worth adhering to because doing so leads to the best outcome for society at large. Of course, an indispensable part of all this is the commitment to provide for the destitute and those who truly cannot provide for themselves.
But right before our eyes, we are watching industry leaders succumb to pride, greed, and selfishness in a way that we couldn’t have imagined even twenty years ago. The mad dash to adopt anything and everything AI threatens to undermine both economic and social structures in potentially irreparable ways. And the only way to stop it is for corporate leaders to do something radical: recommit to the same moral principles that have undergirded our nation and society for more than two centuries.
Just in case anyone is wondering whether my perspective is driven by impracticality, mediocrity, or sentimentality, know that I have dedicated much of my career to helping organizations become successful by making them as healthy, effective, and productive as possible. What a blessing it has been that this pursuit has simultaneously served employees, leaders, customers, and, in the case of public companies, even shareholders. The new reality that AI is threatening to create will leave employees out of the equation, and ultimately, destroy the customer base of most companies because those customers will not have jobs.
Even a teenager can understand this dilemma, and yet, titans of industry seem to be allowing it to happen. There is no doubt that Amazon may be able to squeeze more margin out of its business in the short term by reducing costs related to salaries and benefits. This will benefit their leaders, the remaining employees, and shareholders for a while.
Ultimately, as more and more companies do the same, fewer people will be able to pay to have their whitening toothpaste sorted by robots and delivered by a drone. Toothpaste companies will suffer as product demand declines, leading to more layoffs. Eventually, even Amazon will have fewer robots, fewer drones, and even fewer employees. All this will take place in the name of innovation and productivity.
Again, an adolescent with a modicum of common sense can see where this is headed, even if Silicon Valley engineers with advanced degrees continue to dismiss it as fantasy. In the end, we will look back at the wanton pursuit of AI as a sort of slavish suicide, and we’ll have to answer to our children and grandchildren about what we were thinking and doing when it happened.
What is the solution? Well, it starts with adopting a new definition of success. When people make money — and I’m talking about IPOs and short-term stock windfalls — in a way that diminishes the dignity of employment, we have to call it what it is: inhuman. We have to see them the same way that people saw carpetbaggers after the Civil War. Or perhaps the way we look at pornographers and drug dealers. They are destroying the dignity of others to make themselves wealthier.
That sounds harsh, but it’s the new reality. When a man or woman claims to do something innovative at the expense of the greater good, that must be seen as exploitative.
Yes, AI is creating a whole new reality, and we must respond by changing the way we define successful innovation and productivity. People’s lives depend on it.
* * *
Pat Lencioni is one of the founders of The Table Group, a pioneer of the organizational health movement, and the creator of <a href="https://www.workinggenius.com/about?gad_source=1&amp;gad_campaignid=21520445429&amp;gbraid=0AAAAAD4dDHRyei0FFfuRCa63VdPO11RDk&amp;gclid=CjwKCAjwlaTGBhANEiwAoRgXBSUpr89SSKKSTeoiFk-LdSAKpBsTFlfYYrEIm9MHWtUL1HjC7imP1RoC65MQAvD_BwE">The Working Genius</a>, which helps leaders understand workplace efficiency. He is the best-selling author of “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team,” as well as 12 other books, which have sold over 10 million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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