Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition:
- AI is on the ballot.
- Anthropic discloses its Q3 results and even more massive spending plans.
- Investors push Anthropic to lower valuation target as its IPO math looks tough.
- Palantir reports record revenue growth.
- Report: U.S. intelligence believes Chinese spy targeted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
- A new way to ‘program’ AI models.
- AI lab employees offer chilling video testimonials on the tech’s big risks.
It’s election day in the U.S., of course, and in many places AI is on the ballot.
Voters in dozens of states and local municipalities from California to Maine are deciding on measures that could impact the construction of hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of data center projects. Bloomberg has a great breakdown of the measures by type and state. Overall, there are at least 41 ballot initiatives involving data centers, according to election tracking site Ballotpedia. My native Ohio has the most pending, with 21 measures in total, including 11 that would either ban construction or force a pause in further data center developments.
Among the most closely watched municipalities is Piqua, a 20,000-person city in west central Ohio, where Meta is planning to spend $1 billion to construct a data center with a capacity of up to 1.4 gigawatts. Meta promises the project will bring 1,000 construction jobs to the area, but local opposition is running high. Voters there will be deciding today whether to recall the mayor and two city commissioners who have supported the project. There’s also a $2 billion AWS data center project on the ballot in Sunbury, Ohio, as well as a $10 billion AWS project on the ballot in Adams County, Ohio.
With a majority of Americans being more fearful than hopeful about AI, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll, many data center projects could be in trouble. In the second quarter of 2026 alone, at least 45 data center projects worth some $68 billion were disrupted due to local opposition, according to a report from Data Center Watch, a research project run by the company 10a Labs. These trends could spell trouble for the leading AI companies, which are increasingly compute constrained, as well as for the neocloud companies that have sprung up to provide AI compute. (For more on the risks facing the neoclouds, see my colleague Beatrice Nolan’s essay in last Thursday’s Eye on AI.)
Many AI industry leaders are belatedly saying data center developers made a mistake in trying to rush many of these projects to market without doing enough to ensure political buy-in from the communities in which they are located. OpenAI has recently been trying to convince people to support data center projects by rebranding them as “compute campuses”—although it’s not clear that alone will do much.
When Bea and I recently sat down with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in London, he told us, “before we bring in massive amounts of investment into a small community, I think we have to go first and let the community know what we’re planning to do. Partner with the community, invest in the community, and if the community really doesn’t want us to be there, find another community.” He said that he thought the industry now realizes this and has changed its approach. “Everybody is much more mindful about it,” he said. “I’m hoping we turn the tide on [data centers].” But this belated “hearts and minds” strategy from the AI industry and its data center partners may be too little, too late.
All of this certainly heightens tensions around Anthropic’s upcoming IPO. In an updated prospectus made public on the SEC website yesterday, the company disclosed even more infrastructure and compute commitments than it had in its initial S-1 filing, with the figure now totaling some $895 billion. The company also revealed that it had to spend $5 billion in the third quarter to source short-term computing capacity to meet demand, saying that the added spending was one of the major reasons its adjusted operating margin fell to 15% from 19% in the prior quarter. Anthropic wants to lock in data center capacity on a longer-term basis, and even build out its own data centers through its new “Anthropic Direct” project, to lower some of these costs. But there’s a debate about whether the data center capacity Anthropic and its rivals such as OpenAI need will actually be available on the time scales they require, due to problems getting data centers built and connected to the grid. In fact, some think that Anthropic may be committing to buy more capacity from neoclouds than it actually needs precisely because it is assuming some portion of it won’t ever get delivered.
A vibe shift on Capitol Hill—but what will make it into law?
If the midterms result in a Democratic-controlled Congress, as seems possible, even likely if the polls prove correct, then AI policy could shift dramatically. The Democrats are far more likely to try to enact some kind of federal AI regulation. Before the election, the bipartisan Frontier Act looked like the bill that had the best odds of passing. But a new Congress will rejuggle that calculus and could open the path to other bills.
Of course, any legislation that Congress does pass faces a likely veto from President Trump, who has been steadfast in his opposition to AI regulation. That means it will still require a bipartisan bill with very broad support to have any hope of garnering the two-thirds majority in both houses needed to override a veto. This probably still favors a bill that looks like the Frontier Act, but you never know.
Another thing we may see in a Democratic-controlled Congress: a new wave of investigations into the leading AI companies and the safety and security protocols they’re implementing. Already Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has written to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to demand answers to questions about the risks the company disclosed in its IPO prospectus. Expect much more of this if the Democrats retake the Senate.
Will AI play a role in trying to manipulate the vote?
Another thing to watch for in the midterms will be what role, if any, AI plays in attempts at election interference, political misinformation, and manipulation. For years, experts have been concerned about deepfakes and other AI-generated content being used in this way. Increasingly, AI is being used to create political advertisements, as well as satirical social media memes, that can influence, or at least reinforce, people’s perceptions of candidates. But in most cases, it is clear that this political communication is AI-generated and the effort is aimed more at persuasion than deception. So far, in U.S. elections, true deepfakes have not proved decisive.
The AI-focused publication The Transformer ran a piece in which it asked Anthropic’s Claude model how it would try to manipulate the midterm elections and it came up with an 11-page dossier on how to run an AI-powered influence campaign aimed at suppressing voter turnout. Interestingly, one tactic it did not pick up on, but which experts increasingly warn about, is poisoning the data that AI chatbots use to answer questions. This can take the form of trying to shift how an AI chatbot will answer questions about a candidate, their background and positions. But more insidiously, it can include efforts to mislead people about the mechanics of voting in their state, such as whether they can register to vote online.
Also concerning are attempts to suppress the vote in certain districts with misinformation about problems at specific polling stations. And any attempts by AI-powered hackers to influence the election would present even more problems. OpenAI and Anthropic both announced that they have stood up war rooms to try to guard against bad actors using their models for political dirty tricks today. We’ll see what they report.
With that, go out and vote! And here’s more AI news.
Jeremy Kahn
jeremy.kahn@fortune.com
@jeremyakahn
Before we get to the news, just a reminder to check out the latest episode of our vodcast, Fortune AI Weekly. This week, Beatrice Nolan and I dissect Anthropic’s S-1, discuss a disturbing new lawsuit against OpenAI, and new research from Anthropic on how AI can impact professionals’ judgment. You can check out the vod here on YouTube.
Also, if you want to find out what’s really happening in AI and learn more about how you can use this transformative technology to supercharge your business, join me and my colleagues for Fortune Brainstorm AI San Francisco. We have an amazing line up of speakers for you, including OpenAI President Greg Brockman, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, AI luminaries Fei-Fei Li, currently cofounder and CEO of World Labs, and Andrew Ng, currently cofounder and CEO of LearnVector, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, LinkedIN cofounder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman, and many many more. The conference is taking place December 7-8. You can apply to attend here.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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