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AI United States Politics

New Super PAC Aims to Rally Tech Workers to Help Limit AI: 'the Guardrails Alliance' (techcrunch.com) 41

Posted by EditorDavid from the leaders-of-the-PAC dept.
"A grassroots movement is forming among everyday tech workers who are demanding their companies develop and deploy AI responsibly," reports TechCrunch.

Hoping to leverage that discontent is a new super PAC called the Guardrails Alliance. The New York Times reports that it launched Thursday with backers that included tech employees and labor unions: Guardrails positions itself as a populist political movement that runs on small donations from people in the trenches of the AI boom. The PAC has about $5 million at its disposal today and planGuardrails will buy ads to support Alex Bores, a New York congressional candidate who became Leading the Future's first target and is running in the primaries next week. s to raise $15 million this cycle — small potatoes compared to deep-pocketed adversaries like Leading the Future, which has more than $100 million from tech leaders like OpenAI president Greg Brockman...

"This is not about matching [Leading the Future] dollar for dollar," [said the super PAC's co-founder, political operative Shaunna Thomas]. "What this vehicle is meant to do is be a political home for people who are concerned about the way the anti-regulation AI tech sector is trying to manipulate elections."
Meanwhile a former Netflix and Warner Bros. executive has launched the Alliance for Responsible Innovation in the Arts & Media, reports Variety, calling it an AI-focused content coalition that says it's dedicated to supporting "responsible and sustainable AI innovation and the importance of human creativity." The initial members of the coalition, announced Monday, include Disney, the New York Times, Adobe, Condé Nast, the Financial Times, ITV, Advance, BBC, Cambridge University Press & Assessment, U.K. publisher Reach and Wiley. Many of the coalition's members have either struck deals with AI companies or are developing their own AI tools... The group plans to argue for legal and policy guardrails around AI's usage, with its funding directed towards analyses, tools and services focused on advancing those initiatives...

One of the group's launch advisers is Damian Collins, OBE, who previously served as the U.K. Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology under prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. "Using AI to break the law can never be an acceptable excuse," he said in a statement. "Laws around personal safety, intellectual property and financial crime still apply in the age of AI. This is why ARIAM has been created and why I'm proud to working with this necessary initiative."

New Super PAC Aims to Rally Tech Workers to Help Limit AI: 'the Guardrails Alliance' More | Reply

New Super PAC Aims to Rally Tech Workers to Help Limit AI: 'the Guardrails Alliance'

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  • To complain about corporate funded and developed AI while embracing the seemingly limitless influence corporate bodies have over society is pointless i think.

    • This is a grassroots SuperPAC. It's not evil. It's like a rainy clear day, or a happy mourning. Not a happy morning. They are as compatible as spicy Skittles(tm).

      I don't know how you can't understand this is so logical and orgamic, like camels of prairie grass and corporate funded grassroots events.

      Corporate grassroots are the only true grassroots, and Ingsoc freedomis.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        Now repeat that in English, I dare you.

        • In plain English? Here you go:

          A woman sitting upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. The waters which thou sawest, where the woman sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues.

          The way the machine works [wikipedia.org], if one side can get funding for a PAC to do something (like Leading the Future, pro-AI pac), then it's relatively easy to get funding for a PAC supporting the opposite. Fund both sides, and eventually you can leverage that to influence.

          • Had to look that up.
            I don't see what bible verses have to do with rallying tech workers against AI.

            • Is a SuperPAC grassroots? No.

              The author of Revelation was not a fan of the Roman economic project. It was built on cruelty, just like our corporate system is today.

              Of course, if you got your understanding of the bible from a crappy evangelical church, you are not going to understand it. If you got your understanding of the bibble from a catholic church, they intentionally obfuscated it.

      • A PAC with $5m hoping to raise $15m isn't even close to SuperPAC territory. It's like claiming that somebody who can afford a Ford Mustang is rich.

        What this vehicle is meant to do is be a political home for people who are concerned about...

        Let me translate that into regular English for you. The purpose is to pay a fat salary to the people running it.
        They're not trying to achieve anything. They're just trying to be a "political home" for people willing to part with their money.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by whitroth ( 9367 )

          STFU. You have no clue how any of this works, and get your "news" from Faux Noise.

          Nobody in this org is getting a "fat paycheck", as opposed to the scum who's paying you to post.

  • Considering that overwhelming majority of tech workers is already using AI, this is going to go places.

    Not good places mind you.

  • ...the money and the power. Minute after minute, hour after hour. This is a thinly veiled attempt to give the government more power over AI companies, the end goal being an extra tool to take control of AI models, including open source.
    • The way things are, it's actually rather astonishing that society hasn't collapsed yet, and we aren't all subsistence farmers.
  • AI is self limiting. The problem is the idiots trying to implement hallucinations.

  • sorry, uhhh (Score:5, Insightful)

    by snowshovelboy ( 242280 ) on Sunday June 21, 2026 @09:06AM (#66202584)

    Can someone tell me what "grassroots" means? Just because grassroots funding is one way you try to get money, does that make your whole thing "grassroots"? I just googled the founders and I guess it says right in the summary, they are not an everyday tech worker. They are political operatives. I thought grassroots meant it was organized by the people in the trenches, so in this case, that would mean it was organized by everyday tech workers. If they are going to gaslight me about the group's origins, I have to wonder what else they are gaslighting me about. Maybe its not their fault, maybe TechCrunch is bad.... Either way, this sounds like astroturf to me. I'd be curious where they got $5 million dollars already, and how much of that goes to PAC administrative costs.

    • You don't want to know. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. Astroturfing is grassroot.

      Don't ask questions. Unless they're questions about lunch.
    • This is actually explained in the summary: "A grassroots movement is forming among everyday tech workers ... Hoping to leverage that discontent is a new super PAC ...." So Claim 1 is that "a grassroots movement is forming" (but doesn't exist yet?). Claim 2 is that political operatives are "hoping to leverage" the grassroots movement.
    • It depends who's saying it. If it's a rich person, then it's scamwashing; otherwise, if it's authentic, then it means bottom-up, semi-organic, people-powered and progressive.

  • Let me preface this by saying in terms of policies, from a US perspective I would probably align with Bernie Sanders on many of the big topics, and from my own perspective your US allegedly-left really is not, Bernie being the closest thing you have. When given a choice, 8 or 9 out of ten times I would be in favor of strengthening worker rights and protections, as long as it does not enable lazy and bad people.

    That being said, this Guardrails Alliance sounds unbelievably stupid. Like a club of candle makers

  • I guess AIPAC was taken.

  • Guarantee this will primarily push the banning of open models as they can have alignment trained out after release. I can't believe they had to scrape around for a Liz Truss hanger-on for credibility.

  • Own the stock, get voting rights and financial benefit. Instead of a 'tax' it could be a purchase - or a tax and a purchase. Also there is a lot of blowback simply because it is Bernie Sanders, meanwhile Trump purchased, with no protest and no criticism and no debate, 10% of Intel:

    On Thursday, the president also highlighted the value of the government's stake, saying Intel's valuation has climbed from about $100 billion in August to roughly $600 billion today.

    https://www.cbsnews.com/news/i... [cbsnews.com]
    Wow the gove

    • correction, that was total Intel valuation increase, so the US government made 10% of that or just $50billion increase, still not bad

  • lmao guardrails. Have y'all seriously still not noticed that your "checks and balances" approach simply does not work at all? Donald Dump smashed the whole apparatus in no time flat, and you've heard a few weak mewling sounds out of a couple mouths which y'all then collectively decided to ignore.

    Your NIH just put out another call for help by the way, which has fallen on your deaf fuckhead ears.

    Keep going to work like a bunch of jerkoffs though. All it'd take is about half of you having the actual balls t

    • NIH? What call for help? (Not saying it didn't happen, just that I can't find it.)
    • >All it'd take is about half of you having the actual balls to march on washington and shut it down for a week

      That was attempted. It took them two weeks to dilute, lie about, and refuse to report the message, another week to dilute it, and a fourth to make it yesterday's news.

  • LLMs cannot be secured by guardrails. The easy and usually immediate jailbreaks demonstrate that nicely. Hence this "movement" has no chance of success.

  • Did they also realize they need a union and to form a worker-owned co-op so they will be less likely to be thrown out on their asses at random? Oh, and maybe reducing government corruption so that it advocates for instead of against them.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MrKaos ( 858439 )

      Did they also realize they need a union

      Unions for tech so we have a political voice to modulate technology in favor of humanity is probably one of the most important functions() a technology union could have.

      reducing government corruption

      Reducing any corruption, for it is the anathema of civilization. I wonder how many pro-freedom initiatives could be had if we all weren't so Pwned.

  • The interesting part here is not that there are suddenly "responsible AI" groups on both sides of the AI policy binary, but that that everyone with a stake in the debate around AI has discovered "guardrails" as the new magic word.

    Look at ARIAM. It is not a grassroots creators' revolt. It is a coalition of incumbent content companies, publishers, and mission-aligned tech firms trying to shape the legal environment around AI. Copyright, attribution, liability, and provenance are real issues; I'm fairly cert

  • Since the public will be bearing the social and economic consequences of AI, it should be collectively owned and operated.

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