Andrew Doris

I mostly tweet about AI and U.S. foreign policy. Opinions are my own. Go Mets and Packers.

[Olivia H. Scharfman @OliviaHelenS]

I'm so libertarian I think people should probably be allowed to personally own tanks, and I still don't think we should be able to mail-order bioweapons.

[Andrew Doris @AndrewDoris1]

A signatory list this impressive screams consensus. Screening has been a no brainer for a long time and Congress is out of excuses for why it hasn't acted yet.

[Alec Stapp @AlecStapp]

No one should be able to order a bioweapon through the mail.

@IFP & @JoinFAI are proud to co-lead an open letter calling for mandatory DNA synthesis screening & recordkeeping.

Signatories include:

- Sam Altman, CEO & Co-Founder, OpenAI

- Dario Amodei, CEO & Co-Founder, Anthropic

- David Baker, Director, Institute for Protein Design; 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recipient

- Patrick Collison, CEO & Co-Founder, Stripe

- Paul Graham, Founder, Y Combinator

- Demis Hassabis, CEO, Google DeepMind; 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recipient

- Emily Leproust, CEO & Co-Founder, Twist Bioscience

- Lawrence Lessig, Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard Law School

- Gerald W. Parker, former Special Assistant to the President for Biosecurity and Pandemic Response

- Mustafa Suleyman, CEO, Microsoft AI

- Alex Tabarrok, Professor of Economics, George Mason University

- Alexandr Wang, Chief AI Officer, Meta; Founder, Scale AI

- Christine E. Wormuth, President & CEO, Nuclear Threat Initiative; 25th Secretary of the Army

Read the letter and see the full list of signatories: https://t.co/BwZiJXw3JT

Many DNA synthesis companies voluntarily screen orders to mitigate biosecurity risks, but no law requires them to do so.

Leaders in AI, biotech, life sciences, national security, and the nucleic acid synthesis industry agree that Congress should act to strengthen safeguards against biological threats.

@deanwball put it well in the WSJ:

“If you’re synthesizing the stuff that yields biological life and viruses, we’re asking you to screen to see whether it is dangerous in some way. That seems like a reasonable thing for society to insist upon.”

[Doug Calidas @DougCalidas]

🚨 Hearing Obernolte-Trahan AI preemption text circulating in advance of public release at 11am.

- Preempts all state laws touching AI development. States retain the ability to regulate AI deployment. This is the a16z proposal, to the letter, which civil society (labor, civil rights, kids safety, AI safety advocates) have opposed all along. It's the industry wish-list.
- 3 year sunset
- Rehash of much of Obernolte/Lieu bill (to bury the controversial preemption provisions in 300 pages of uncontroversial text)

Game on.

[Tyler Johnston @tyler_johnston]

A few months ago, I found an anonymous sockpuppet account linked to the OpenAI/a16z super PAC. Now, @TaylorLorenz and I have uncovered two more — and they're even more brazen than the first.

https://t.co/TJHAABeq2A

[Sam Pancher @SamPancher]

Vivemos tempos incríveis

[Garrison Lovely is in the bay @GarrisonLovely]

The trump admins ai czar warning of Orwellian government overreach is…damn I wish there were a word for this.

[Jay Shooster @JayShooster]

While it's almost impossible to imagine this happening today, it's great to know that heroes like David Sacks stand ready to prevent hypothetical future governments from one day seeking to use AI for mass surveillance.

[The Midas Project @TheMidasProj]

https://t.co/TsF28536Ir

[Nathan Calvin @_NathanCalvin]

This comment today from Chris Lehane in Punchbowl that people should treat the Super PAC Leading the Future as "an independent thing that runs on its own" from OpenAI is a pretty hard claim to swallow given that:

(1) OpenAI's president Greg Brockman gave $25 million to LTF, and said he plans to give another $25 million.

(2) Brockman justified the donations to LTF to WIRED as "in service of OpenAI's founding mission."

(3) The WSJ reported in their exclusive announcing Leading the Future that OpenAI's global affairs head Chris Lehane was involved in early conversations with A16z's head of government affairs Collin McCune (alongside Greg Brockman) about how to shape industry-friendly policies, which the article strongly implies resulted in the decision to start LTF.

(4) Josh Vlasto, one of the two co-lead of Leading the Future, also worked closely with Chris Lehane when Vlasto served as the main spokesperson for the Crypto Super PAC Fairshake network - the Super PAC that Chris Lehane effectively created and helped run when he was at Coinbase (where Lehane still sits on the board!). The structure of LTF bears significant similarity to what Lehane helped set up with Fairshake.

(5) In this aformentioned interview with Chris Lehane in Punchbowl, he declines to name any areas where OpenAI differs from LTF - saying in fact that what LTF is pushing for "would be ideal if you could wave a magic wand."

(6) NYT Journalist Teddy Schliefer puts it well why OpenAI might want to pick and choose when to distance themselves from LTF:

"The whole point of having an executive or founder donate to politics in a "personal capacity" is that you can have it both ways. If the company wants to wash their hands of it, you can say "Hey, he and his wife are doing this on their own." But the company can also claim the execs' donations as their own if convenient..."

In sum, this arrangement of funding + distancing can help let OpenAI get the best of both worlds - LTF can play the ruthless bad cop, who earlier this month when confronted with evidence of engaging in widespread astroturfing that "we'll continue to... build the coalition needed to advance a national regulatory framework [preempt state laws] using every tool at our disposal" - and OpenAI can receive the benefits of what LTF is pushing for, without being explicitly affiliated.

People in DC are used to these sorts of arrangements and distancing, and look at their funding and personnel and treat LTF as a representative of OpenAI. But OpenAI can continue to say to press that they have nothing to do with whatever skullduggery LTF is engaged in. Hard to believe that Lehane, a man who the NYT called "a master of the political dark arts" is unaware of the benefit from playing this both ways.

[Nathan Calvin @_NathanCalvin]

Great to see more love for 'Radical Optionality' by Christoph Winters and Charlie Bullock at LawAI.

The whole paper is very worth reading, but this handy chart of robustly helpful policies we can move on today is an excellent quick encapsulation of their approach.

[Garrison Lovely is in the bay @GarrisonLovely]

There have been several high profile incidents of OpenAI and a16z's super PAC Leading the Future (and its affiliate Build American AI) engaging in pretty egregious astroturfing. But it's also notable that part of why we know about the astroturfing is that it was conducted in an incredibly sloppy and slapdash manner for an organization with effectively unlimited cash.

Some examples:

• LTF by their own admission says a "third party vendor" they paid used a fake AI journalism platform "Acutus Wire" with stories written by bots, complete with a "Michael Chen" emailing apparently dozens of folks asking for comment and engagement on their AI written stories. This was found out by the Midas Project partially because the poorly coded Acutus website explicitly included a javascript file on the webpage which talked about "suggested questions for the *AI interviewer* to ask."

• The journalist @TaylorLorenz found out about a program where Build American AI paid up to $5,000 per Tik Tok video to promote its content w/o disclosing the source of the payment. Lorenz writes: "WIRED first learned about the campaign after this article’s author was invited by SM4 to participate." So to be clear — Build American AI's vendor reached out to a well known journalist asking her to participate in its astroturfing campaign.

• Campaign Legal Center recently filed a complaint to the FEC about Leading the Future potentially not complying with (pretty generous and relaxed!) election disclosure rules. In the complaint, it discusses the fact that Leading the Future's Democratic and Republican sub entities (Think Big and American Mission) paid the vast majority of their disbursements to LLCs created on the same day as one another, and do not appear to have any other clients. From the complaint: "Both LLCs were formed on the exact same day—October 30, 2025—and both identify their addresses as mail centers in Nevada. Neither LLC has a website or other digital footprint, nor do they appear to have other clients, despite being reported by Think Big and American Mission, respectively, as the payees for a full suite of consulting and advertising services... The overall record therefore indicates that these LLCs are not bona fide commercial vendors that provided the services attributed to them by Think Big and American Mission, but rather serve as payment clearinghouses for the super PACs to illegally conceal the true recipients of over $10.5 million in super PAC payments."

• To close with a small issue, but my personal favorite: Build American AI ran ads on this platform that said we should "Put People over Profit" (a rather completely absurd thing for a massive anti regulation Super PAC to say). But in the (AI generated?) image they included for the ad about people over profit, it shows the money *outweighing* the people!

The combination of functionally infinite money and crippling incompetence is a bit surprising, but not something that will necessarily last.

As I wrote in my forthcoming book Obsolete (see bio): "The industry has a bottomless pit of money, which it uses to reward capitulation and punish resistance. But money is essentially its *only* advantage. AI’s reformers have the ideas, the principles, and the public sympathy. To overcome the money, we need to harden that sympathy into organization—to upend the political calculus, to make capitulation hurt worse than resistance."

[Tom Steyer @TomSteyer]

I’m grateful for the Secure AI Project’s endorsement and their commitment to increasing transparency and safeguarding Californians from risk.

My AI plan ensures all people of this state profit from the AI boom.

Together, we can build an economy where progress and fairness move together.

[Thomas Woodside 🫜 @Thomas_Woodside]

Two new roles just opened in the California government to help implement SB 53, the nation's first frontier AI law! Both are in the Department of Technology (CDT), which recommends changes to SB 53's key definitions.
1️⃣ Emerging Technology Program Manager
2️⃣ AI Policy Fellow

[Nathan Calvin @_NathanCalvin]

"An OpenAI spokesperson says that OpenAI has no corporate affiliation with Leading the Future or Build American AI and has “not provided funding or any other support to them.”

OpenAI's President Brockman previously told Wired these activities were in service of OAIs mission!

[Andrew Doris @AndrewDoris1]

@TheFatAmerican @TheMindScourge Reminds me of a quote from former MLB player Bob Uecker:

"It's easy for guys to hit .300 and stay in the big leagues. Hit .200 and try to stick around as long as I did; I think it's a much greater accomplishment. That's hard."

[Lewis Bollard @Lewis_Bollard]

This is shocking: the House Rules Committee just blocked a vote on stripping the Save Our Bacon Act from the farm bill.

The SOB Act, buried deep in the farm bill, would wipe out state bans on pork from crated pigs, condemning millions to a lifetime in gestation crates.

We were getting very close to having the votes to pass Rep. Luna’s bipartisan amendment to strip the SOB Act from the bill on the floor of the House.

Then pork industry lobbyists got to work. Behind closed doors, they got Rules Committee leadership to stop a vote entirely and protect the SOB Act from the scrutiny it can’t survive.

The only option now is to kill the whole rotten farm bill. Please call your representatives at [phone] and tell them to vote NO.

[Tyler Johnston @tyler_johnston]

Interesting that Leading The Future hasn't tried to blame a third party vendor for their anonymous sockpuppet yet.

It'll be harder to claim "no knowledge" of this one, given the merely 89 followers of the @DoomerDaylight account include:

@theannabrockman (Wife of Greg Brockman, donated $25m to LTF)
@JVlasto (Co-lead of LTF)

[Thomas Woodside 🫜 @Thomas_Woodside]

OpenAI warned us about this 7 years ago!

[Nathan Calvin @_NathanCalvin]

@tedlieu is this true and would this bill preempt state AI protections?

Why do you differ from these comments from Representative Liccardo on why he would not be signing onto Representative Obernolte’s bill?

From Punchbowl:

“Liccardo said on Thursday that he couldn’t endorse the bill because it didn’t meet the “critical requirements” he needed in place to support allowing the federal government to preempt state laws on AI.

“If we’re going to preempt state regulation, we need to have clear conditions that ensure that there is a race to the top, to safety,” Liccardo said."

[The Midas Project @TheMidasProj]

https://t.co/7Cck3zycsG