The artificial intelligence industry’s push for tech-friendly federal legislation is foundering in Washington. So OpenAI’s top lobbyist and political strategist is pursuing a backup strategy — setting national AI policy by waging a state-by-state campaign.
Chris Lehane calls the plan “reverse federalism”: With Capitol Hill deadlocked, the company behind ChatGPT is increasingly spending its time lobbying for state legislatures to pass laws on AI safety that the industry can live with. OpenAI’s quest to shape policies in a “critical mass” of states has already found success in California and New York, he said — with Illinois as its next target.
“What we’re basically trying to do here is use a bunch of the big states to come together and mirror each other to de facto create a national standard,” Lehane — a former longtime Democratic political strategist now serving as OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer — said in an exclusive interview with POLITICO.
OpenAI’s effort comes after nearly a year in which the tech lobby has pressured Congress to block states from passing AI laws, warning it would create a conflicting “patchwork” of rules. In state capitals, meanwhile, legislators have introduced hundreds of new AI bills and signed dozens into law.
Now Lehane is pursuing a deceptively simple play: If you can’t beat the state AI “patchwork,” co-opt it.
Lehane said his state-by-state push seeks to cobble together a single national standard to address catastrophic AI risks. Worries about those risks are escalating as OpenAI, Anthropic and other leading tech companies release cutting-edge models capable of fueling destructive cyberattacks.
The state laws favored by Lehane and OpenAI are generally more permissive than the ideal set of rules that AI safety advocates support. Centered on a slate of transparency and reporting requirements for developers of advanced AI, they would lock in a stable legal framework for OpenAI while exposing the tech giant to relatively few regulatory teeth and little in the way of new liability for catastrophic harms. The burgeoning effort comes as PACs funded by the AI industry pour millions of dollars into state-level political races across the country.
After substantial input from OpenAI lobbyists, California and New York passed rules for AI developers late last year that largely reflect the company’s preferred policies. Lehane is now turning to Illinois, where lawmakers are about to advance legislation, endorsed last week by OpenAI, that emulates the new laws out of Sacramento and Albany. Those laws impose new transparency requirements for advanced AI developers while steering away from new legal liabilities or massive financial penalties.
While noting it would be great to “wave a magic wand” and pass a federal law, Lehane said California, New York and Illinois weren’t waiting on a green light from Washington to regulate AI.
“It was pretty clear that those states — because they’re deep blue states that tend to be more regulatory-oriented, California in particular — I don’t think this was a question of whether regulations were going to happen or not. It was what kind,” Lehane said. “And so for us, there was the opportunity to see if we can get these states to begin to mirror [and] replicate each other, and in effect create the standards that we originally called for at the federal level.”
Lehane said his plan is explicitly modeled off of the tech industry’s recent successes on data privacy, where lobbyists worked to secure near-identical laws in statehouses across the country while Washington dithered on — and never passed — a federal privacy law.
Privacy advocates widely viewed those state laws as giveaways to the tech industry, particularly because they prevented people from suing over violations. But Lehane said that in this case, OpenAI is asking states to pass relatively strong safety rules that can help halt or reverse growing public opposition to AI.
“We do fundamentally believe that the government has a really important role to play here, and the government playing that role also gives confidence to the public about the nature of this technology,” Lehane said.
Not everyone is convinced. Nathan Calvin, general counsel and vice president of state affairs at AI safety group Encode AI, has clashed with OpenAI over the company’s state lobbying efforts. Last year, OpenAI subpoenaed him over his work on California’s new AI safety law.
Calvin said OpenAI has worked consistently to weaken both that law and its stricter predecessor — a 2024 bill vetoed by Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, in part at the urging of OpenAI lobbyists. He said OpenAI also successfully watered down New York’s AI safety law, largely by pressuring Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul to align it closely to California’s framework. And a pro-AI super PAC network called Leading the Future, funded in part by OpenAI President Greg Brockman, has spent well over $1 million to derail the House candidacy of the lead sponsor of New York’s AI law.
Other tech super PACs, backed by Meta and Google, have spent a collective $10.7 million in 10 California state Assembly and Senate races, as POLITICO reported last week.
But even Calvin said he is pleasantly surprised by OpenAI’s endorsement of Illinois’ approach, which includes mandatory third-party audits of AI developers on top of California and New York’s transparency and reporting requirements.
“What I would have predicted of what their engagement would have looked like in Illinois would have been for them to push for making Illinois the same as New York and California, without audits,” Calvin said. “There’s some kind of complexity here that is genuinely tricky.”
“Everything up until Illinois looked extremely reactive and haphazard, to be honest,” Calvin said. “Illinois actually does look more like a deliberate reset and approach [for OpenAI], after maybe realizing that some stuff was not working.”
Lehane said he and other OpenAI lobbyists had particular success in shaping California and New York’s AI laws through their governors, who he called “incredibly important.”
“We’re in a day and age where you have a lot of stuff that moves through the legislature, but the governor’s offices end up being where the proverbial buck stops,” he said. Lehane explained that Newsom and Hochul were particularly sensitive to how an overly-strict law could impair their states’ ability to cash in on the AI economy.
Newsom spokesperson Tara Gallegos said the governor’s decisions on AI policy “are not engineered by any one stakeholder — and any suggestion otherwise is not only false, but a slap in the face to the many people who helped create California’s nation-leading commonsense laws that protect public safety while also fostering innovation. There is no one with an outsized seat at this table.” Spokespeople for Hochul did not respond to a request for comment.
Illinois’ legislative session runs until May 31, at which point Lehane expects his preferred bill will land on Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker’s desk. Assuming Pritzker approves the law, the OpenAI lobbyist said there will then be three powerful blue states whose AI safety rules can serve as templates for other Democratic-led regions.
But it will be tough, if not impossible, for OpenAI to shape the growing patchwork of AI safety laws without working with Republicans. And it remains to be seen whether Lehane, given his Democratic background, will have significant sway with Republican legislators or governors.
While GOP legislators are traditionally more hesitant to regulate industry than their Democratic counterparts, Republican voters have also expressed major concerns about the impact of AI — particularly how chatbots harm the mental health of children. Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who is widely expected to win her race to become governor of Tennessee later this year, has placed regulating AI and protecting kids online among her top priorities before she leaves Congress.
Lehane noted that OpenAI also recently endorsed the Kids Online Safety Act, a bill introduced by Blackburn that would put new requirements on social media platforms to protect kids. And he suggested emerging AI safety laws in red states may put a greater emphasis on kids’ safety than the laws he’s so far shepherded through blue states.