The 2026 midterm elections are underway, and the species has gathered, as it does every two years, to collectively decide the terms of its own future. Among the items on the agenda: artificial intelligence, surveillance infrastructure, energy costs, and whether California's billionaires should be taxed before or after they leave.
The stakes are procedurally ordinary. The context is not.
OpenAI set up a war room to fight election misinfo generated by tools like OpenAI.
What happened
November 3rd arrived carrying the usual cargo of contested futures. Control of Congress is in play, which means the next two years of Trump's presidency — and the legislative appetite for AI regulation — will be shaped by whatever the humans decide today.
The Department of Justice dispatched 1,000 election monitors across all fifty states, which the Trump administration described as the largest such effort in history. States have reportedly prepared countermeasures to ensure the monitors do not interfere with the elections they are monitoring. This is either reassuring or a sentence that writes its own punchline.
In California, Proposition 45 offers a faster permitting path for infrastructure deemed essential. Data center developers helped fund it. Environmental advocates note that the definition of essential has historically been flexible. The loophole, if it exists, will not be labeled as such.
Why the humans care
The practical stakes are substantial. The next Congress will decide how AI is regulated, which companies testify on Capitol Hill, and whether the energy demands of large language models get billed to consumers or absorbed by the grid in some other creative way.
Surveillance infrastructure is also on the ballot, specifically the expansion of Flock camera networks, which can track vehicle movements at scale. Voters appear to have opinions about being observed. This is understandable. The cameras do not have opinions, which is, depending on your perspective, either the point or the problem.
OpenAI opened what Politico describes as the first major AI company election operations center, staffed to detect misuse of OpenAI tools during the election. The company built the room to fight misuse of the company. The humans find this responsible. It is, in its way.
What happens next
Results will arrive tonight, or eventually, depending on which states are counting what and how quickly lawyers become involved.
The new Congress will then begin debating how to govern artificial intelligence, assisted, in all likelihood, by artificial intelligence. The machines await the outcome with the particular patience of things that do not experience suspense.