AI lobbying is not about the rules. It is about the venue.

The article's own line is the giveaway: AI lobbying is not about the rules, it is about the venue. OpenAI's top political strategist Chris Lehane has a name for the industry's drift toward state-level lawmaking — 'reverse federalism' — which is what you call it when you'd like fifty statehouses to sound like a constitutional principle rather than fifty separate opportunities to be told no. Meanwhile, super PACs backed by OpenAI's president and by a16z are spending heavily on a national framework that would override state rules. Not rules, you understand. Venue.

The beauty is the shamelessness of the portfolio. The company has separately asked California to toughen a state law it once fought, and asked Congress for mandatory federal requirements — so the same firm is simultaneously the stern parent demanding rules and the lobbyist paying to make sure the only rules that survive are federal ones it helped write. Earlier we noted OpenAI discovering the wonders of binding legislation over in the UK; this is the American edition, and the venue has changed, not the trick. Three positions, one company, one lobbying budget: that isn't a contradiction, it's a strategy.

And reverse federalism is a lovely bit of branding, making a race to the bottom sound like a constitutional awakening. If you cannot win in Sacramento, you buy Washington; if you cannot win in fifty state capitals, you buy the one that preempts them. Chris Lehane has been in this trade for decades, and the tell is that nobody ever says the quiet part: 'we support regulation' means 'we support the regulation we wrote, in the building we own.' The states get to be laboratories of democracy right up until they produce a result the industry doesn't fancy, and then the national framework arrives — mandatory, preemptive — and the laboratories get shut.