Behind the Curtain: OpenAI's post-election power play - Axios

OpenAI has a calendar and it would very much like you to see it. Axios reports that the company will unleash a policy and PR blitz immediately after Tuesday's midterms — not before, after — to get itself in sync with the new Washington. One has to admire the discipline: no point telling the electorate what you think until you know which electorate turned up. It's less a lobbying strategy than a rain dance performed once the clouds have already made up their minds.

The flagship item, per Axios, is a rebrand: data centers shall henceforth be "AI compute campuses". Same buildings. Same substations humming at three in the morning. Same water table. Different noun. This is the oldest move in the planning-committee playbook — nobody wants a data centre at the end of the lane, but a campus has bike racks, a laminated site map and a person called Gavin doing sustainability. Expect the diesel generators to be relaunched as "resilience partners" any day now.

Then there's Lehane, who says "you're going to see us talk more and more about the concept of speed limits." A lovely phrase, that, from the people building the car — speed limits are things you cheerfully endorse in principle while quietly owning the ministry that sets them. Same instinct as helping "frame the AI debate for the field of 2028 presidential contenders", which is a polite way of saying they'd like to write the questions before anyone auditions for the answers. Congress, meanwhile, is still jogging to keep up, four questions deep into a five-act play. Still, credit where due: "compute campus" is genuinely better than "data centre", and a company that can rebrand a server farm should have no trouble at all rebranding a regulator.