AI Isn’t Just Being Built. It’s Being Negotiated
Despite the fact that Australia has always punched well above it’s weight globally (or perhaps in part because of that) Australians have still always kept an eye on American culture. US sports leagues, Hollywood entertainment, New York style…and for modern business owners and tech entrepreneurs that means keeping tabs on what’s happening in Silicon Valley.
Australia has established a strong presence on the tech scene, but most of the frontier breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are still coming out of American labs and companies. What’s interesting lately, though, is that for tech, the most significant signals are starting to come out of Washington DC. Artificial intelligence has crossed a threshold in the United States, and by extension everywhere else. The technology story has become (dramatically) a political one as well.
US politics might feel like a messy reality show that you’d rather ignore, but if you’re in the technology industry these days, for better or worse it’s a show you should probably be tuning into.
You can already see it in the alliances and arguments forming around AI in the US. Bernie Sanders has been openly sceptical about the economic impact of AI, warning that automation could concentrate wealth at the top and wipe out the middle class. He’s also pushed for stronger guardrails around how large tech companies deploy automation, arguing that productivity gains should translate into higher wages and shorter working hours rather than mass job displacement. His concern isn’t just that jobs will change, it’s that the economic upside could pool at the top while the middle gets squeezed dry.
At the other end of the political guardrails spectrum, Trump has recently taken aim at companies like Anthropic (specifically Anthropic), questioning how much influence AI developers should have over national infrastructure and public life. He likes to frame advanced AI as a “national asset,” and argues that companies building frontier models should sit under government oversight and stay aligned with U.S. priorities.
The recent Anthropic drama exposed how much tension was building between politicians and AI companies. It wasn’t just a policy disagreement, it was a full-on standoff.
Anthropic basically drew a line and said they didn’t want their models used for things like autonomous weapons or mass civilian surveillance. The Pentagon’s response was blunt: remove the restrictions or you’re out.
At the same time, reports were coming out that Claude had already been used in real military operations, including the Venezuela raid and ongoing activity in Iran. So Anthropic ended up in a middle ground where the company was trying to set ethical boundaries, while the technology was already embedded deep enough that those boundaries became…negotiable. Trump’s response was, predictably, to escalate.
Anthropic was labelled a national security “supply chain risk”. Contracts were cut. Federal agencies were told to stop using their systems. The reasoning was that if a private company can decide how these models behave, then it can also decide when they don’t.
One of the most advanced AI systems in the world was technically banned, but still deeply embedded in the infrastructure it was built for. Military teams don’t want to lose it, and replacements are still years out. AI has already become too integrated and too strategically important to cleanly separate from policy.
Bernie and Trump come from completely different perspectives, of course. Bernie cares about labour and economic disruption. Trump cares about corporate power and national control over influential technology. But both end up at the same underlying reality: artificial intelligence is becoming too important to remain a purely private project.
When technologies start to shape productivity and national competitiveness, politics inevitably moves in. The Biden administration’s executive order on AI required companies building advanced models to share safety testing results with the government before public release. It also set expectations around security and transparency for systems that could touch national infrastructure.
It happened to the railroads. Telecommunications and the internet went through their own versions of it as well. AI is just the latest iteration.
For business leaders around the world, this shift matters more than it might initially appear. Policy decisions and disagreements in the United States will influence how models are trained, how data can be used, what safety standards emerge, and which companies are allowed to operate globally. Those choices will ripple into every other market, Australia included.
Australian companies often treat American politics as a distant spectacle. But when it comes to artificial intelligence, ignoring the political layer is most likely a strategic mistake. The rules that emerge from Washington will shape the infrastructure that ambitious businesses everywhere end up building on.
If you’re serious about deploying AI in your business, watching the political debate isn’t optional, it’s part of reading where the technology is heading.
The smartest companies will be following the breakthroughs coming out of US labs and the political arguments alongside them, even when that’s mentally draining.
If you want a sense of how quickly this conversation is evolving, a few podcasts worth listening to include:
