Adam Schiff on AI regulation, free speech, and impeaching Trump one more time

Political chaos and administrative corruption

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1:24Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Senator Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California, who sits on a number of committees with oversight into tech and AI. Intellectual property, antitrust, privacy, and technology. It's all there, and I really wanted to ask how we might regulate anything related to the tech industry at this moment in time. But as you'll hear, Senator Schiff started our conversation by talking about self-dealing and corruption all through our politics. That, of course, was against the backdrop of President Trump gathering the nation's AI CEOs to the White House to sign a non-binding pact in which they agree to, you know, do a good job keeping AI safe.

2:03I asked Senator Schiff if he thinks that's enough. What a more formal regulatory framework would look like, and what might happen if Democrats retake Congress in the midterms. All the way to whether he'd support impeaching the president again over all that corruption. We also spent time comparing and contrasting how you might regulate AI with where we've landed regulating social media. One nerdy note before we begin. You're going to hear me ask Senator Schiff about something called Chevron deference in a Supreme Court case called Loper-Bright. Basically, in 2024, the Supreme Court overturned a Reagan-era precedent saying courts would defer to experts in agencies when the law was vague.

2:38Now, the courts get to decide, which would cause any new regulation to get tied up in litigation. It seems awfully relevant to the idea of creating a new agency to regulate AI, which Senator Schiff supports. All right, we're going to get started, but do me a favor and subscribe to Decoder on YouTube, where we put out new episodes every Monday and Thursday. Okay, California Senator Adam Schiff. Here we go. Senator Adam Schiff, your United States Senator from California. Welcome to Decoder.

3:12Thank you. Great to be with you. I have been asking every politician who comes on the show this very basic question here in 2026. Senator, what the hell is going on in our country?

3:22It's a very good question. I think we have seen things take place in the last couple of years in particular that we've never seen before. There's sadly rampant corruption within the administration. Every day, every week, it's a new thing. At the moment, I think what is most jarring is seeing campaign ads aired of the president that are paid for by taxpayer dollars. But every week, it's something else. It's excluding press from the White House or Air Force One, or it's some new money-making scheme or some new vanity project.

3:55If you look at, for example, the Triumphal Arch, they're now claiming it's a national security issue because they want to store ammunition in it. And why do they want to do that? Because the best legal argument they have is that this is not just cosmetic, that they have some national security purpose. So what are we seeing in the country? We're seeing chaos and no focus on the cost of living and improving the quality of people's lives at the administration level or by my Republican colleagues in Congress. But I'm hoping that changes.

National security and voluntary AI pledges

4:24The national security piece is very interesting to me in the context of a bunch of questions I have for you because the Trump administration loves to justify every single thing it does by saying it's national security and it can't be questioned and this should bring more authority to the executive branch in one way or another. And they've been doing that since the beginning. But just this week, we had a bunch of tech executives at the White House signing a non-binding promise to evaluate their own AI systems.

4:59And there was no national security concern that made any of that binding, even though they are among the most prominent people in the country saying they might kill everyone. Can you square that circle at all? It's very hard to square. It was interesting to see all those tech leaders there signing on to this voluntary pledge on the one hand and on the other hand, away from the White House grounds, away from the president, being very public and saying, we need regulation. We don't want this to be just trust us.

5:29We will do the right thing. So, yeah, it was very distant, very jarring. None of these companies want to incur the wrath of this very vengeful president. So, apparently, they will say what he wants them to say in his presence. But the reality is there is a real national security threat here. As these models become more and more advanced, as they advance themselves through this recursive AI, we have less and less of sense of what they're doing, how they're deciding what they're deciding, what they're trying to access lawfully or unlawfully.

6:03And that is a national security concern of the highest order. There are other security concerns, too. The unbridled implementation of AI at the Pentagon can result in calamities. And we need to investigate what role AI may have played in target selection in the bombing of that Iranian girls' school, for example. There has been an effort to go after Anthropic because Anthropic wanted to insist on not using AI for domestic mass surveillance or for fully autonomous weapon systems.

6:38That's a national security issue. And their response, the administration, was to try to kill Anthropic. And they're still at it. So, lots of national security concerns. None of them erred. And when the president was asked about this by a reporter, he said, well, the world doesn't have to worry about this because these companies love America. I'm not really sure that's much of an answer. And when he was asked, well, isn't there anything else that's necessary? And he pointed to his brain and wanted people to take comfort that he has, I guess, a very big brain.

7:14He tells us he's a stable genius and therefore we don't need to worry. He's passed all the tests, so I've been told.

Intellectual property and training data

7:21You are on, obviously, a number of committees. But most importantly, I think, for this conversation, you're on a number of subcommittees as part of the Senate Judiciary Committee that are in the strike zone for AI. So, you're the ranking member on the subcommittee on intellectual property. You're on the privacy, technology, and the law subcommittee. And then, of course, the antitrust competition policy and consumer rights committee. I just look at that list. And that is the dead center of the AI regulatory debate. What's the conversation in Congress like as you debate these issues?

7:54In particular, I look at the IP issues and they seem existential to these companies. If we start charging them for training data, they might not exist anymore. I think that's right. You know, when you look at, for example, all of the IP that's been vacuumed up by these models to train these models, that's a lot of the value of some of these entertainment companies. And so, they live or die on the strength of their IP. But what makes this challenging is not all of the players in the industry are the same.

8:27You've got big streamers involved. You've got big technology companies involved. You've got companies that their AI or their technology portfolio is much more important to them than the IP value of their film library. I mean, I don't think the film library at Amazon is Amazon's most important business. If it was, they probably wouldn't have made the movie Melania. But my favorite review of that, by the way, was the Variety reviewer who said, if you watch that movie on a plane, you would still walk out.

9:00But the IP issues are really important. Senator Curtis and I are working together on them to begin by saying, we want to know what copyrighted material, what protected material was used to train these models. And then we can have a discussion about what's fair use and what isn't. But we need these companies to retain that information. But lots of other IP issues, some beneficial. We had a hearing on the patent office and the patent office's use of AI to more quickly get through the backlog of patent applications.

9:35So they're going to be good applications, too, in the IP area, but also a lot of worry about what it means for people's creative talents. I wanted to start with IP, not just because I'm a failed former copyright lawyer myself. And emphasis on the failed. I was no good at it. But it just seems like what this industry needs right now is a pretty holistic approach to regulation. So are the inputs of the models being collected in a legal way that benefits the ecosystem that created them?

10:06Right. So are the studios going to get paid for a bunch of training data? Are website operators going to get paid for training Google's models that they scrape with search? And then you're on to do they need an antitrust exemption so they can coordinate on safety and they don't kill us all? And there's a whole list of things in between those two ideas that also need some regulatory frameworks that might just need some basic transparency laws. How do you think about that?

Holistic regulation versus social media paralysis

10:32Is our government prepared to start at the beginning and end at the end and do all the steps in the middle? Well, how I think about it is you've got all the input issues and it really seems like the thought at these companies was we're in a race. We're just going to vacuum it all up. And, yes, this probably violates a lot of the IP laws. But if we don't do it, the other companies are going to do it. We'll worry about the legality later. So that's what they've done. And, of course, they're being sued by different parties and some are settling these cases and some are fighting these cases.

11:06But they began the process by just deciding they were going to ignore IP law and they were just going to take and worry about the problems later. And then in terms of the outputs, it has taken us to where we are today for these companies, I think, to think about what's the safety of the outputs and do we need to really start slowing down the pace of our development of these models because we don't trust the outputs. We don't know where they'll lead. We can't even control these models ourselves, let alone provide these models to the public, to good actors, to bad actors, and expect that we're not going to have some terrible result.

11:47In terms of how I think about this holistically as a legislator, this is crying out for legislation. I am, I'll be honest, very circumspect about Congress and legislating the tech sector because we did such a, I don't know what language I'm allowed to use here, but such a shitty job when it comes to any kind of regulation of the harms, the societal harms coming out of social media. We're going to have to do much better job and much more quickly when it comes to AI because the threats are even more significant and we're already at the point of strong potential harms.

12:27It can't wait. We certainly can't take the kind of years we've taken to try to even wrap ourselves around social media. Can I ask you about that comparison? I hear it a lot. I hear it from politicians. I hear it from the industry itself. I hear it from parents, of course. It seems to me that the problem with social media regulation was never we're too slow or no one can come up with an idea. It was always the very existence of the First Amendment, right? The thing you needed to do with social media was regulate the flow of disinformation or keep teens from bullying one another or posting pro-anorexia content.

13:07And all of that came down to being speech regulation. And the companies knew this. The tech companies absolutely knew this. And I remember they would put up billboards in D.C. Meta would put up billboards saying, we welcome regulation. And then I would listen to the ideas for regulation and they would crash headfirst into the First Amendment and then nothing would happen. And it seemed like that paralyzed us from doing things like privacy regulation because it was tied up next to the very idea of social media. It doesn't feel that way with AI.

13:40Do you and your peers in Congress draw the distinction that there isn't the First Amendment preventing you from doing a lot of the things that you might do for social media in the AI case? Honestly, I don't think it was the First Amendment that was the issue in regulating social media. I think the First Amendment certainly was used by companies that didn't want regulation to try to argue everything was a First Amendment issue when so much wasn't a First Amendment issue. You know, the threshold question in terms of regulation of the social media companies is, is the broad immunity they have under Section 230 still working?

14:19The industry asked for that, you know, one size doesn't fit all immunity because it said we're a nascent industry. Don't regulate us. Don't inhibit us. If you try to regulate us, then we will feel or if we're if we're not immune, we will feel it necessary to take down content because we might get sued over it. We want to be good actors. We want to take down offensive conduct, but we don't want to get sued for that either. So give us carte blanche. And they got it.

14:50They got carte blanche. And they have not been good citizens, corporate citizens. And they have allowed a lot of harm to take place. And they've trained their algorithms for addiction. And so much of the content has been harmful to young people. And so much of the content has violated their own policies. But they have been immune from any consequence because of the breadth of what Congress gave them. Now, they found it, I think, strategically a good strategy to frame these things as First Amendment

15:23and to attack the other side and say, oh, there's a bias that is against conservatives or what have you. It was all in the service of keeping that unregulated. So I really don't think the First Amendment has been the issue, but I think it has been utilized as a bludgeon to try to stop any kind of meaningful regulation. I similarly worry that all of the money around AI may result in the same paralysis if members of Congress aren't willing to do the right thing, aren't willing to put in place safeguards, regardless of how much different industry players might spend.

Section 230 and AI liability

16:03We've had Senator Wyden on the show many times talk about Section 230. I won't go too far down that rabbit hole. The dynamic there was 230 provided the immunity that you're describing, but it was immunity for speech that would otherwise be illegal. And so speech that was defamatory. There's a whole category of speech that isn't illegal. Are you saying that taking the 230 immunity away from the social platforms would somehow make them moderate lawful but awful speech? And I bring this up because I'm very curious about how you would apply it in the AI case as well.

16:35Yeah, no, I think that that is the case that, you know, part of their argument was we want to take down really nasty, offensive, racist content. But we will be afraid to if you don't give us immunity. So give us immunity and we'll take all that bad stuff down. They got immunity. And I don't know if you've been on X lately. It's a cesspool. So, you know, giving them broad immunity did not allow them to enforce their community policies. And the First Amendment prohibits the government from dictating speech or prohibiting you from saying things.

17:11It doesn't prohibit a private party from saying we don't want racist content on our platform. So there's no problem with a private platform saying that violates our policy. We're not going to post it. And they're not utilizing that immunity in a good way. So why should they continue to have it? Now, we may want to create a safe harbor for companies that are meeting best practices and standards. So we may want to narrow to 30 instead of getting rid of it.

17:41What is the analogy in terms of AI? I'm not sure what the analogy is. Let me draw you the connection that I've been thinking about a lot. In the case of social media and Section 230, the immunity was the platforms would not be responsible for the speech of the users. So I would post something horrible about you, and you couldn't sue Mark Zuckerberg. This is broadly the thing that has enabled the social media platforms at scale. I open Instagram today, and it is all but making the content for me.

18:12And in fact, a lot of content on Instagram is being generated by Meta. It is obviously their speech. And somewhere between have your muse go and make Instagram for you and Meta is synthesizing all of the product recommendations and generating content all by itself is liability for Meta. It is outside of the 230 shield. That is their speech. And you can draw a lot of distinctions there. If I fully automate my Instagram account with my Meta agent, is that my speech or Meta's speech or the AI model speech?

18:46Who knows? But it might not be under 230. So you would be outside of the immunity shield. And I'm just curious if you think that will meaningfully alter how they moderate. I think that is a difficult enough, I agree with your analysis, but I think it's a difficult enough legal analysis where they feel they've got the money to stop, slow down, effective litigation. So, you know, Meta or any of these other companies decides how do they want to amplify certain content?

19:19So let's say it's content that I generated. Is it still solely my speech if Meta spends a fortune to amplify it to so many users who wouldn't have heard it but for Meta making that decision? Or is it now both of our speech? I'm not sure exactly where that line is. If it's obviously purely Meta content, then it's pretty simple. But there are going to be a lot of cases in between. But I think the broader question is, is 230 in its current form still meeting its purpose?

19:52I don't think it is. But I know there's no consensus over what that ought to look like. And that is part of what has hampered us from doing anything. But even the smallish stuff, the small bore stuff like don't allow your platforms to encourage people to commit suicide, has been hard for us to do in the social media context. Really, litigation has been more effective than legislation because we haven't been able to legislate. So if you look now to AI, we made some progress legislatively, at least in terms of the process,

20:26in trying to prevent AI chatbots from telling kids how to commit suicide or keep it from their parents. But even those little things are still not at the finish line. So what does that say about our capacity to do the big things? Historically, when stuff is tough like this, we wait for calamity. And in the case of AI, because that calamity could be just massive, we can't afford to do that. Yeah. It does seem to me like we're about to run a fairly large-scale A-B test on the value of the 230 immunity.

20:59Whatever chatGBT is saying to people is very clearly open AI speech. And then somewhere next to that is the kind of clarification law that AI companies are talking about in terms of agents and things like the hugging face attack, where they don't know if a user directing an agent to do something bad is their fault. If that liability should pass through to them, if I'm the person who told my agent to go do some horrible hacking attack. And, you know, I talked to the tech industry and the thing they want from legislation is actual clarity in the law.

21:31And instead, what we've gotten is this non-binding agreement with the Trump administration that simply says things like the companies will empower an internal team to ensure all of the controls, monitoring, and detection are operating as intended. Which feels like nothing. Like to me, that literally is meaningless. Does that strike you as toothless and as meaningless as it does to me? Yeah, it certainly does. I think it really is meaningless. And I also think, and I'm thinking about the question you just raised, it's interesting that you brought that up.

22:02And that is, where does the legal liability rest today? So, if you have these bots hacking into Australian websites or you have them hacking into Hugging Face, clearly that is the responsibility of these models because that's not being done at the best of one of their customers. But let's say you build a tool for the purpose of hacking or that can be used for hacking and one of your clients, one of your users uses that tool that way, how much of that is your responsibility?

22:34Is it analogous to somebody who sells a gun and then the gun seller says, well, it's not my responsibility for how they go out and use it? Or is it someone who sells a weapon that is flawed and causes injury because of flaw in the manufacture of the weapon? Or is it selling a weapon to a kid who's not eligible to buy it or to a convict or not using due diligence? You know, what is AI responsibility?

23:06What is the company's responsibility in the sophistication of the products if they're building things that the plain use of can be to commit ransomware attacks?

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26:56Spelled U-P-W-O-R-K.com. Upwork.com. I think the gun metaphor is a good one. It's easy to grab onto for a variety of reasons. But I tend to think that it kind of obscures the reality of the capabilities of the model. So OpenAI's latest model mythos, it can be used for offensive cyber attacks, and it can be used on defense too.

27:32And the cybersecurity firms that we cover, they want it. And their argument is we actually need to take humans out of the loop so that our cyber defenses can be as responsive and fast to incoming AI-powered cyber attacks. And if we insistently put humans in the loop, then we will be slow, and the attackers won't have the same morals or ethical qualms we do, and we'll lose. And this is all just a dance around, well, the model in this case can be used on offense and on defense, and it should be equally capable on both sides.

28:06I don't see a regulatory framework that provides clarity for any of the frontier labs to be able to sell that thing and not feel like, well, if the equally capable defensive model gets used in the wrong way, that they won't be liable. And I think that's frozen some of this development in its tracks. I'm wondering, again, just from a legislative perspective, these are thorny questions, right? If you try to go write a bill to provide some of this clarity, it will necessarily have to be vague on the margins, right?

28:38Because the technology is moving so fast. What is that debate like for you?

Agency expertise and Supreme Court hurdles

28:42Well, I think what it means, because this debate is going to keep evolving as AI evolves and at a speed that is really much faster than Congress has proven capable of legislating, I like to say that in the technology world of Moore's Law is increasing productivity, doubling it every 18 months. And with AI, maybe that's quadrupling it every five months. The legislative calendar works more on a Murphy's Law timetable.

29:13And I think that disparity is even more pronounced in the area of AI. What I think that translates into is we're going to need a regulatory body that has real discretion and real expertise that can move a lot quicker than Congress can. And whether that looks like an FDA for artificial intelligence or some other agency, I think that's ultimately going to be necessary. That agency is going to have to have real power and teeth and real expertise.

29:43It's going to be a challenge as, you know, with these independent monitors, if there's a government component there, how do we afford that? Because there's so much talent and that talent can draw much bigger salaries in the private sector. But I do think we're going to need a regulatory body in addition to whatever the overarching statutory framework is. Well, in addition to being a bad lawyer, I was a very bad law student, mostly majored in Miller Lite. But it's fine because every foundational precedent that I was taught in law school in 2003 has been overturned by this Supreme Court.

30:18And the most important one in this context is Chevron deference, right? In Loper Bright, the court said we no longer have to defer to the experts at agencies. Go ahead, corporate interests. Tie every regulation up in litigation. And then we'll decide. The Roberts Court will decide if these are appropriate regulations. This strikes me as a huge problem for the idea that we will set up a regulatory body to oversee AI. Because what you'd want is a bunch of experts in that agency making decisions on the margin, right?

30:49Saying, OK, here's a vague enabling statute that Congress passed that said, pass all appropriate regulations to keep us safe. And then you would write a bunch of regulations inside the agency. Until 2024, that's how it would work. That's gone, right? If you enable an agency in that way, OpenAC can show up and say, that's inappropriate. We actually don't think that's right. And they would tie it up in litigation forever. How do you get over that if you want to set up a regulatory body? It's very difficult for the reason you mentioned. The Supreme Court is a lot of things today.

31:19It is now a partisan institution. It is, in my view, a right-wing social institution. But there's one common denominator that runs through its decisions. That common denominator is not always pro-Trump. The common denominator is money. That court makes the decision where the money is. So when it involves, for example, tariff decisions, it will rule against the president because tariffs impact the money. It will allow the president to remove independent heads of agencies, except maybe the Federal Reserve, because that's where the money is.

31:51And so you're right. They are corporatists, you know, first and foremost. And they're more than content to take power away from Congress to regulate and away from regulatory bodies. It does mean that we're going to have to draft legislation in this area, empowering the agency and make it as specific as we can, make these agencies as powerful as we can, delegate as well as we can, knowing that the Supreme Court will strike down anything that is in any way ambiguous if it suits the moneyed interests.

Bipartisan populism and data center backlash

32:28There's a lot of political realignment happening around AI and with privacy, which I want to talk about in a little bit. But it feels like there's more across-the-board antipathy towards AI companies that might be harnessed into writing an actual piece of legislation and getting it passed. We see it on the right and the left. You see it in the backlash to data centers. This is a story that is happening on the right and the left. We have a big story about the Utah data center that is Kevin O'Leary got himself in trouble for calling all of his detractors Chinese agents,

33:00and he had to issue an apology because the people of Utah are not Chinese agents. That doesn't feel like a left-right breakdown to me. How does that feel to you? Is this something that you can actually channel from across the spectrum into a meaningful policy outcome? I don't think this is a partisan issue. I mean, it's certainly true that the president is all in for AI, no restrictions, no impediments, no pacing, no nothing. And there are some of my Republican colleagues here that are going along with that agenda. There are others that are hearing from their constituents who don't want a data center in the backyard

33:35or are concerned they're going to lose their job as a result of AI or their life as a result of AI. And I think we're seeing the kind of coalition where you have populists on the left and populists on the right coming together initially around concerns over jobs and job losses and what it will mean for working families, but now across a broader set of issues. The data centers are the most tangible way for people to express their concerns about their neighborhood,

34:05but also about their job, about the technology, about the uncertainty of it all. And I think the initial concern, and I still think it's quite a dominant concern, is over the impact on jobs and the nature of work. But what has reached the fore more recently is concern about runaway AI and the danger it poses. What will the concern look like a month or two months from now? I don't know, but I do think it's not going away.

34:37And as the AI bills, and I've introduced several, indicate, not just mine but others, most of those bills are bipartisan. Some around the data centers are predominantly Democratic bills. My bill on the data centers would force them to pay the costs so that consumers don't have to. It's not the voluntary, you know, we pledge, we might, we'd like to. Just don't provide anything that will force us to observe those costs. Those are mostly Democratic bills.

35:09Republicans have largely adhered to the president's line about not posing any real imposition. They want to pass fig leaf kind of stuff, but not real stuff. But I think increasingly, as people hear from their constituents, there'll be bipartisan interest in legislating this area.

Antitrust exemptions and cybersecurity

35:28You're on the Antitrust Committee. One of the more surprising bits of the structural realignment that we see around AI is the notion that there should be an antitrust exemption so these companies can coordinate on cybersecurity. Lena Kahn, who is Biden's FTC chair, said, you don't need an antitrust exemption. We just had Jonathan Cantor on the show, who ran antitrust at DOJ under Biden. He was like, you don't need an antitrust exemption for this. But at the same time, you have David Sachs agreeing with Lena Kahn, which is not a thing that happened during the Biden administration.

35:59You have a lot of what you would call the little tech players in the tech right being like, no, no, no, this is how you're going to make a cartel. And we didn't like the Google and Apple cartel that kept a lot of our investments from going. They have to compete in the marketplace. That's surprising to me. You don't often see David Sachs and Lena Kahn on the same side of an issue. You're on the Antitrust Committee. Do you think the companies need an antitrust exemption? I think a very narrow antitrust exemption could be very helpful in addressing foreign distillation efforts. We would want companies to be able to talk to each other to address, you know, a mass distillation effort targeting multiple companies.

36:37I was involved in helping to pass cyber information sharing legislation about a decade ago to allow companies to talk to each other if they were the victim of a hacking attempt so that they could alert one another and alert the government as to what malware they were using so that we could help the collective defense. I also, you know, don't want to discourage companies from pacing with each other if it's for legitimate security reasons. Now, I don't want any of this used to jack up prices by essentially forming a cabal, an anti-competitive cabal.

37:13So you've got to have safeguards in place. But I don't want legitimate concerns about liability. And I think there will be legitimate concerns about liability to stop these companies from doing what they should be doing. And some of that will be with each other. The other realignment that I'm utterly fascinated by is around privacy and specifically Flock cameras, Axon cameras. People hate them. They hate them so much they're kicking them out of their communities. We've been trying to get the CEO of Flock on the show. I think this company is in a little bit of a crisis.

37:44We'll see if we can reel him in to talk about what's happening actually to his business as he faces bipartisan backlash.

Privacy, public surveillance, and AI risks

37:49I think Americans are redefining what privacy means, right? Famously, there is no expectation of privacy in public. This has been foundational in our law. And that's because not everybody had an always-on camera. They certainly didn't have cameras in their glasses. They didn't have watches that could record summaries of every meeting they'd been in all day. And the state wasn't putting up cameras everywhere that could track all of your movements across every state you've ever been in with a giant database that was enabled by AI so the police could search easily. That's a big swirl. But to me, it feels like there's an assertion of a privacy right in public by the American people.

38:26They want to have some kind of privacy in public that does not exist in our law. So the society is moving ahead of the law. How would you square that? How would you be able to write a piece of legislation that affords people some sense of privacy in public? I think the Flock cameras are really disturbing. And yes, there are legitimate law enforcement uses, and they've helped catch people who've committed terrible crimes. But they've also allowed a department to try to follow through their license plate.

38:56Someone who wrote an op-ed criticizing a police department's use of these Flock cameras. They've also been used to try to track a woman who needed reproductive health care. They've been used for a lot of illicit purposes. And I think people are waking up to all the problems that they're creating and all the privacy that's vanishing. Here, and I say this somewhat hesitantly because there's a lot to be worried about with AI, but this is a cardinal concern and risk with AI.

39:27And that is, can privacy exist in the era of powerful AI? We talked a bit earlier about open models being available for defense as well as offense and to be able to respond in real time. As those models get more powerful and even the closed models get more powerful, you can train those models to invade people's privacy. You can train those models to find out what your health records are. What you watch on TV, you can train those models to turn on the microphone on your watch or to turn on the microphone on your Alexa device when it's turned off, to aggregate all that data about you.

40:09And that's quite terrifying. We may have no privacy left unless we act to ensure that we have privacy. And even then, foreign bad actors will have access to these very sophisticated models. They'll develop them their own. They'll distill ours. They'll do all kinds of stuff so that they can have access to it. And there'll be private sellers, maybe not American private sellers, but other private sellers. We see this in some of the private sellers of these hacking technologies already.

40:43Some of these companies that are providing eavesdropping capabilities to the highest bidders. So, we're going to have to figure out how do we not just prohibit conduct, but how do we beef up the privacy of American people? How do we use technology to protect our privacy? Otherwise, there'll be little of it left. The reason I'm asking about what, to me, feel like bipartisan issues to the point that there is a realignment of our politics is that we're a month away from an election.

Congressional oversight and potential impeachment

41:15It feels, based on the polling, like Democrats are going to win a healthy number of seats, if not outright take control of both houses of Congress. What should we expect to see if that happens? Is it a bunch of investigations? Is it actually getting the CEO of Flock to show up to a Senate hearing? They didn't do that a couple weeks ago, or is it a flurry of litigation that lands on President Trump's desk that ultimately goes nowhere? You're going to see vigorous oversight in this area to begin with, and that is we're going to want the leaders of this industry to come in and talk about all of the times that their own agents have gotten away from them and how it happened, what's been done about what they're doing about it.

41:55We're going to want these companies to be transparent with the Congress about it. We're going to want to legislate in this area, and that may come into conflict with the president, but there's a lot of bipartisan work product here, and I think that given where the country is and where it's moving, it becomes increasingly difficult for this president to veto bipartisan work product coming out of the Congress. So that is my hope. It's certainly a far better prospect than we have today.

42:25This is going to be a very central priority for American people. We want to harness AI for the good it can do. We want to use it to bring down the cost of things. That's our central priority. And there are ways that AI might be useful in bringing down certain costs. We want to protect the dignity of work also, but we want to make sure that this doesn't pose a threat to the American people. You've brought up the corrupting role of money in politics several times so far. It occurs to me that the Trump administration, the president, and his family have done what amount to crypto scams a bunch of times throughout this administration the second time around.

43:05They've enriched themselves in ways that I think a lot of ordinary Americans find to be beyond the pale. You served as impeachment manager for the first Trump impeachment. Do you think it's strategically wise for the Democrats to show up and try to impeach him a third time over this? I think we'll need to see what the priority is at the time we take control of both houses, knock on wood, and what the priority needs to be. And I would put the very top priority being fulfilling the promises that we're making right now, which is to have a central focus, the highest priority on reducing costs for people.

43:41So in the oversight area, what that means, I think, is doing oversight to make sure that the corruption of this administration isn't raising costs on the American people. And let me give you one example. I could give you about 100. I mentioned the Melania movie. I think the American people deserve to know, is Amazon getting federal contracts now, not because it's the best technology for cloud computing, not because it's offered the most competitive price. Is it getting contracts because it paid off the first family $40 million?

44:15If they are, we're paying for that excess. We're paying for a product that may not be as good. I'm not saying that this has happened, but they're not going to do any oversight of it. Their decisions on everything from mergers to government contracts to pardons are influenced by the money they're getting hand over fist. So we, I think, from an oversight point of view, need to focus on oversight that can help attack corruption that's driving up costs. In terms of impeachment, I think we'll have to cross that bridge when we get to it.

Media consolidation and entertainment workforce

44:48I'm glad you brought up the entertainment industry, because I do want to end by talking about Paramount and Warner Brothers, which is a murder happening in your home state of California. It feels like a lot of that merger was the Ellison family in particular making promises about the news coverage of CBS News and CNN in order to get favorable regulatory treatment. We can see that CBS has softened its stance. The market has rejected CBS's softened stance towards this administration, so there's at least one check on that power.

45:18But California Attorney General Rob Bonta didn't push all the way to the finish line to try to prevent that merger from happening. Do you think that was the right decision? I'm still, frankly, looking at the deal that was struck, and I have a lot of concerns about it. The one that you mentioned is a very significant concern, and that is there was some editorial independence board that's supposed to oversee CBS and CNN. And yet the, you know, Paramount Company or the Merge Company, the board appointed by the Ellisons will agree on what that board is and how it's constituted.

45:51So is this real or is this going to be a fiction? I'm also concerned, frankly, about what it's going to mean for jobs. I live in Burbank. It's the entertainment capital of the world. Represent so much of that industry in California. And what we have seen in past mergers is thousands and thousands of layoffs. So that is a particular concern for me. I love this industry. I love movies and television. It's something I really deeply care about. I'm carrying a bill right now, important to the whole industry, and that is a film and television tax credit to try to bring production back to the United States.

46:31There's never been a more difficult time to work in that industry. But I do have continuing concerns about editorial independence and, you know, also the degree to which CBS paid off the president, I think because they had mergers pending. And ABC paid off the president. Those were personal sums to the president and his pet causes with the result of completely frivolous litigation by the president. That they would have won in court, that I urged them not to settle because of the destructive First Amendment precedent.

47:07The idea that the Trump-appointed FCC chairman attacks ABC because they don't like the jokes that Jimmy Kimmel tells or cost Stephen Colbert his job on CBS because they didn't like the jokes he's telling. That's third world dictator kind of stuff. That's not what we are used to seeing in the U.S. and I never want to see it here. The jobs piece is really interesting to me. One of the longest-running tropes of The Verge is that a workable antitrust policy for the United States would be simply to forbid companies from buying Time Warner because it has never worked and it may never work again.

47:42And we should just pass one law. Just don't do that and maybe everything will be fine. Paramount made a bunch of noise. They fulminated about leaving California if they weren't allowed to pursue this merger, right? They pretended to investigate Nashville and Texas and all the other places that you investigate and then the merger was approved or the litigation dropped and I think David Ellison put out a statement being like, California is our home. We're going to invest here and it seemed very fake in the end. Do you think that threat to leave spooked Gavin Newsom, spooked Rob Bonta? I think the threat to leave California concerned a lot of people and I'm sure it concerned them.

48:18Was it a real threat? I don't know. We've seen some of these corporate headquarters moves mean that they move basically their office, but they don't necessarily move the studios, move the lots, which would be difficult and expensive for them to do for a whole lot of other reasons. But just the idea, frankly, I found offensive that if we don't get approval, the merger we want, we're going to pick up and we're going to leave the state. It doesn't say much about a commitment to the workforce if you're ready to do that at the drop of a hat.

48:48So those arguments really I found offensive, the claim we're going to leave if we don't get what we want. You know, we'll say this, the industry's been through a hell of a time. The workforce has been through a hell of a time. Between the pandemic and the strikes and the consolidation among the streaming companies, now the mergers, there's never been a more difficult time to work in the industry. And I'm not talking about the Tom Cruise level celebrities.

49:19I'm talking about the carpenters and the set designers, the wardrobe people, the dry cleaners, the caterers, the small restaurants and small businesses that thrive when you're making a film or TV show in L.A. or somewhere else and just take a huge hit when they're not filming. Those are the people that I care about. And we do need stability. So this needs to be resolved. We need stability. We also need to match the incentive other countries are giving if we want this industry to thrive again.

49:59Support for the show comes from CrowdStrike. AI is already fundamentally changing how companies build products and run their businesses. If you listen to the show, you probably already know this. But while AI drives innovation, every new model and agent also creates new cybersecurity vulnerabilities. That's why CrowdStrike built AI Detection and Response, or AIDR. AIDR helps organizations discover where AI is being used, monitors AI activity at runtime, and helps teams detect, investigate, and respond to threats involving AI systems.

50:36As companies adopt AI, security has to be built in from the start. More than 70% of the Fortune 100 trust CrowdStrike to protect their businesses. Now CrowdStrike is helping secure the AI era. You can learn more about AI detection and response at crowdstrike.com slash decoder. Support for the show comes from Superhuman. Much has been said about how AI is going to change everything. But for a lot of us, our AI tools just become one more app that you use once or twice and then never open again.

51:13Superhuman is different. Superhuman, from the makers of Grammarly, is an AI platform that's already where you work, like your inbox and docs. Wherever you are, whatever you need help with, you're never starting from a blank tab and re-explaining yourself. Superhuman's philosophy is that the problem isn't too little time. It's that low-value work crowds out the work that actually matters. Every tool out there promises to give you your time back. But time back doesn't help if you're too fried to use it. What actually matters is whether you've got any focus left when you get to the hard part.

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52:05Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI was supposed to handle the parts of the job you hate. Instead, it just describes them, suggests what to do about them, and then leaves you to do it. That's not help. That's homework. ServiceNow's AI specialists are different. They're not a tool. Think of them as digital teammates who actually do the work from start to finish. Cases get resolved. Requests get processed. Loops get closed. And most importantly, no extra work for you.

52:36Because when you can truly delegate to AI, you can get back to the work only you can do. The work that requires a person with ideas and judgment. And you know, a pulse. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit ServiceNow.com. Let me bring this full circle to AI, right? We've talked at the very beginning about the AI company is just ingesting all of this creative output without any payment.

53:11And that has enabled the models to be as good as they are. The models are now good at film production. I will admit to having watched several AI microdramas on TikTok, mostly by accident, but they were compelling enough that I stayed. And then as editor-in-chief, I tried to assign our reporters to write about AI microdramas. They did not like this idea, but that's what happened. That is killing them at the input stage, right? We're not paying them for the training material. And now we're competing in the marketplace with a vastly cheaper product. You don't need carpenters and small businesses to make AI slot microdramas on TikTok.

53:44How would you connect these dots? Can you make AI compatible with the film industry in California as it exists today? You know, a lot of these things all come back to the same thing. And that is, what is the commitment to the workforce? Does that matter to these companies? This is a broader problem. I remember having somebody in the industry, a worker in the industry, come to visit me and to say, basically, to complain about the Affordable Care Act and how it had cost him his job.

54:15And I said, come on, I want to talk to you about this. And he came in and he explained that the studio that he worked for, every year they would ask for pay increases and they were told they couldn't give them more of a pay increase because health care costs were rising so fast. And it was putting downward pressure on wages. And then the ACA passed and then he got laid off. And he assumed it was because of the ACA. And I remember telling him, you know, honestly, I don't think it was the ACA. You're right about health care costs going up and they were going up very fast.

54:47Actually, after the ACA, they were still going up, but they were going up at a slower pace than they were before the ACA. Here's what I think happened to you. And what had happened around the time it was laid off was there was a hostile takeover bid mounted against one of the studios. And it was unsuccessful. But the studio that was the target of that takeover shed all the jobs it would have shed had it been taken over. So it would be a less attractive takeover target in the future.

55:18And then other studios shed jobs, even though they were very profitable, shed jobs because they didn't want to be taken over. And so there were these cascading set of layoffs in the industry, none of which were necessary because they were profitable companies. But it did increase the quarterly report, the value of the quarterly report, the next shareholder report. How do we get out of the bind where the only consideration is the shareholder report and the employees simply don't matter? Unless the employees start to matter to these companies, then, yeah, they will use every device they can to make films without having to use human beings.

55:57And this is, I think, a broader challenge in our economy. We see other countries like Germany doing a better job. They have employee representatives on their board of directors. So they take into consideration the impact on their own workforce. You mentioned the prior FTC chair. You know, she was committed to looking at factors in terms of competitiveness and anti-competitiveness, including the impact on the workforce.

56:27And I think we should. But this is a continuing challenge. You're not up for re-election in this cycle. You're not up again until 2030. So you have a little bit of distance from the actual campaigning. We're seeing a bunch of progressive candidates on the left. Propose muscular reforms to capitalism, right? Abdullah al-Sayed has said, I'm a capitalist, but we need to regulate capitalism so it works for people. I live in New York. Mayor Mamdani is here. He wants to regulate Amazon delivery trucks. There's a lot of that energy on the left.

56:58Do you think if the Democrats retake Congress, we'll see that turned into results on any meaningful time frame?

Progressive taxation and political realignment

57:04Or do you need the presidency, too? I think what we should do is try to get legislation passed on a bipartisan basis because that's the only way you can get bills through a Congress, particularly if you don't control the White House. But I also think we need to take up big Democratic priorities that may get through the Senate or may not, depending on whether we flip the Senate and what our margin is, may get vetoed by the president, but show the country that this is the kind of bold reform that we are prepared to pass if you give us the presidency two years later.

57:38And it is simply not going to be acceptable to anyone to say, hey, if you elect us, we'll take you back to the status quo before Trump came along. No, the reason Trump came along is people were deeply unsatisfied with the status quo. So we need big, bold ideas. You know, I favor Medicare for all. I'll let anyone who wants to participate in Medicare participate in Medicare. I don't think we should force people into Medicare if they want to stay in a private plan. But I think we ought to broaden Medicare and make it accessible to people.

58:11It's a very efficient health care system. And that is different than simply saying we're going to restore premium tax credits under the ACA. Yeah, we should do that, too. But that alone isn't going to cut it. And, you know, I'll say this, too. So the reason why we keep going back and forth between Trump and Biden is because people are so unsatisfied with how hard they're working and how little they have to show for. The economy is just not working for people.

58:43It's not that they're out of work. The problem is that they are working and they still can't make ends meet. And until we address that, our democracy is not going to be on solid ground. It's going to always be right for any demagogue who comes along promising they alone can fix it. We have to make sure that if you're working hard in this country, you can provide for yourself a good living and for your family. Last question. It's directly related to that. I've said now several times that I think we're in a generational political realignment. It's been the foundation of many of the questions I've asked.

59:15Do you agree that we're in the middle of a foundational political realignment? You know, we, I think, have been for some time. I'm not sure where the alignment goes from here, but I'll tell you where I'd like it to go from here. We, in the Democratic Party, we're unquestionably the party of working people and average families. We're the party of the underdog. And I think we've lost some of that in the public perception. Our policies are still very much driven that way. But increasingly, people just think both parties are corrupt.

59:49Neither party is really looking out for me. I want the Democratic Party to once again be the party that the public looks to and says, okay, they're fighting for me. They're not fighting for those who've already done great. They're fighting for me. That's why I was drawn to the Democratic Party. And I also think, and this is related to the whole conversations we've had, wealth is now concentrated so much in so few hands. It is totally warping our political system. And wealth is perpetuating itself and warping our system even further.

1:00:23You know, some people took it as a celebration. We have our first trillionaire. Well, that first trillionaire, Elon Musk, became a trillionaire because of government largesse, because of government contracts that saved his bacon when his companies were in trouble. And there is no ethic, no sentiment about giving back there. No, he was only happy to doge the people who made his success possible. But what made that possible, too, that is the aggregation of all that wealth, is a tax system that's not the least bit progressive anymore and is becoming less and less progressive.

1:00:56And one of the missions, I hope, of our new Congress and I hope of the Democratic Party is how do we have a truly progressive tax code again? How do we make sure that, yes, the AI companies pay their fair share and they pay for some of the disruption that that technology is going to cause? But I think even more important, how do we make sure the tax code is truly progressive and people who are doing well are going to pay well into the system? That, I think, is fundamental.

1:01:30Yeah. Senator Schiff, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for being on Decoder. Great to be with you. Thanks for having me on.

1:01:38I'd like to thank Senator Schiff for joining me and thank you for checking out this episode of Decoder. To get new episodes every Monday and Thursday, subscribe to our YouTube channel at DecoderPod and find us on TikTok and Instagram under DecoderPod as well for more fun stuff we put out every day. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read every email or hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe over to your podcast. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Show is produced by Kate Cox and Nick Stat. This episode was edited by Eileen Felix.

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