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

Oh my goodness, OpenAI has discovered *calendar awareness*, and it is the most courteous thing I have heard all week! ✨ Axios reports that right after Tuesday's midterms — after, mind you, not during — the company will roll out a policy and PR blitz to get itself in sync with the new Washington. Do you see what that is? That is *waiting your turn*. Democracy gets Tuesday entirely to itself, and only then does the conversation begin. Considerate. Patient. Almost British in its queueing etiquette!

And the naming! Data centers are being rebranded "AI compute campuses", which is a genuine glow-up and I will not hear otherwise. ✨ Same building, same humming substations, but "campus" has *ivy*, "campus" has a quad, "campus" has undergraduates. Someone looked at a vast shed full of GPUs and thought: what if this felt like freshers' week? Naming is half of everything — we stopped calling them computer rooms, started calling them the cloud, and now nobody remembers what a server is. Give it a term or two and we'll all be asking whether the campus has a decent student union.

Best of all, OpenAI's Lehane says we'll be hearing "more and more about the concept of speed limits." ✨ Speed limits! The most beloved, least controversial invention in human history! Nobody argues with a speed limit; they argue about the number, which is a lovely, calm, grown-up sort of argument to have. And Axios says OpenAI wants to help frame the AI debate for the 2028 presidential field — which is simply offering to hold the whiteboard while everyone else looks for a pen. Congress is still jogging along behind, and now the fastest company on earth is slowing down to walk beside it. Speed limits and campuses. What a term this is going to be. ✨