The pope wrote an encyclical on artificial intelligence. Washington barely looked up from the salad course.
That’s the scene The Verge AI captured in its latest Regulator newsletter, reporting from a black-tie gala at the Waldorf Astoria hosted by the Washington AI Network. As the Vatican’s top US diplomat, Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, delivered Pope Leo XIV’s message about safeguarding the human condition before profit, the room kept networking. AI lobbyists, safety nonprofits, tech reporters, Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary, and senior Trump officials like Mehmet Oz and Darío Gil talked over him. The moment says a lot about how the AI industry is reading its own political risk right now.
Here’s what stands out: the pope doesn’t write law, so to Washington’s AI crowd, he doesn’t matter. But the people who do write law are about to get a lot harder to predict.
Loyalty politics breaks the old playbook
Corporate lobbyists usually play both sides. Befriend every Democrat and Republican, keep those relationships warm for years, never burn a bridge. The Verge AI reports that strategy is dead in Trump’s Washington, where past support for a Democrat can read as disloyalty. The example: billionaire Jared Isaacman’s NASA nomination got frozen for months once Trump learned he’d donated to a Democrat.
The flip side is a system that rewards proximity. Give Trump money, make him look good, and he can hand the AI giants nearly every regulatory ask while pressuring Republicans to fall in line. But even that leverage is shaky.
Look at one executive order’s whiplash, as detailed in The Verge AI:
- May 20: Reports say Trump will sign an order creating a government review board for unreleased advanced AI models, with up to a 90-day release delay.
- May 21: He backs off, after last-minute lobbying from David Sacks and Elon Musk.
- June 2: He signs it anyway, pushed by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, but trims the delay to 30 days.
Three reversals in two weeks. That’s the regulatory environment AI companies are trying to build long-term strategy around.
The midterms are the real wild card
Washington is chaotic, but two dates never move: a federal election every other November, and the swearing-in the following January. Power will shift. Nobody knows toward whom.
That uncertainty spins out into a list of unknowns The Verge AI lays out plainly. What if Republicans lose the House by one seat? By twenty? What about the Senate? Which Democrats grab which committees? What if a Trump loyalist pushes out a friendly Republican, or a progressive primaries a friendly Democrat over something unrelated like Israel policy? Each scenario rewrites who the industry has to court.
And here’s the part that should worry the AI lobby most. Voters can now draw a straight line from those inauguration-day photos of Big Tech CEOs standing behind Trump to the AI that keeps showing up, often unwanted, in their daily lives. That’s an easy story to tell on a doorstep. Voters complain to representatives. Representatives respond, or they get voted out.
Why this matters now
The industry’s own visibility is becoming a liability. A gold statue from Tim Cook, a tech-funded ballroom, CEOs in the front row. These were meant to buy access. They may instead become campaign attack material in 2026.
The Verge AI flags a tool worth watching: journalist Molly White’s new Tech Influence Watch, which tracks AI industry political spending heading into the midterms. White built it first to follow crypto money in 2024, then expanded it once she found crypto and AI politics were run by overlapping donors and strategists driving the same super PACs. If you want to see where AI’s political money is actually flowing, that’s the ledger.
Takeaways for practitioners and businesses
- Don’t treat federal AI policy as stable. An order can flip three times in two weeks. Build compliance plans that survive a 30-day review board and a reversal.
- Watch the money, not the speeches. Tools like Tech Influence Watch show real industry intent better than press releases do.
- Reputation is now regulatory risk. Public alignment with any one political figure can cost you when power shifts.
The AI industry spent this cycle buying access to one administration. The bill for that bet comes due in November. You can find the full reporting at The Verge AI’s Regulator newsletter.