Quick Hits - Bribery, AI, and 9/11
This week’s thoughts on the topics – not necessarily related
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While these three topics may not be tightly aligned, these happen to be top of mind for me this week. So here we go…
Bribery
The 2026 general elections are coming, and we see that powerful Republican personalities are trying a new election strategy - a flavor of bribery.
This past week, President Trump spoke at a Republican National Committee mid-year convention – dubbed by some as a “Trump-a-palooza” – and was dominated by what NPR described as “empty seats, socialism, and Trump.” [1]
But the Republican Party's chances in November are less optimistic, as Trump faces record low approval ratings, an unpopular war in Iran, rising gas prices and the historic expectation that the party in power loses.
The two day party at the American Airlines Center in Dallas highlighted the GOP's biggest asset in getting out the vote — Trump — and its greatest obstacle in convincing voters to keep Republicans in power — also Trump.
Throughout the convention, members of the administration and candidates locked in tight races offered little distance from the president and his vision of the future.
President Trump also offered a public inducement to Americans to vote Republican and protect his Congressional majorities: [2]
In his keynote address Wednesday, Trump made headlines for an impossible promise to give American adults $5,000 if Republicans retain control of the House and Senate, and reiterated the GOP's messaging that paints November as a choice between "common sense versus crazy."
According to PBS News, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates there are about 245 million U.S. citizen adults. Giving each of them a $5,000 check would cost about $1.2 trillion, [3] just as the national debt broached $40 trillion last month. [4]
It’s incredibly irresponsible, if not an “impossible promise,” as NPR put it. [5]
To me, this is a gross and desperate display of bribery (or more accurately, offering to pay people for their votes) – however, there may not be much here: Someone for whom I immense respect - UCLA law professor Rich Hasan - believes Trump may “have a strong First Amendment defense” based on Supreme Court precedent [6], but my sense is that, given Trump’s history of stiffing contractors [7] and general lying [8], the promise is pretty unreliable.
Of course, this isn’t new for this latest Republican election strategy. In the 2025 Wisconsin State Supreme Court elections, Elon Musk offered $1 million checks to Wisconsin voters, and Wisconsin officials believe this may have violated election bribery laws: [9]
Billionaire Elon Musk likely broke Wisconsin law when he promised to hand out $1 million checks to voters in the 2025 state Supreme Court election, a bipartisan panel has found.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission last week referred two complaints to the Brown County district attorney's office, which can choose to bring criminal charges over violating the state law against election bribery. Prosecutors have 40 days to report back to the commission.
Musk, the founder of SpaceX and CEO of Tesla, was deeply involved in the effort to flip majority control of the highest court in battleground Wisconsin.
The tech titan and groups he supported spent at least $20 million on the candidate backed by Republicans, Brad Schimel. However, he lost by 10 percentage points to Democratic-backed candidate Susan Crawford.
AI
Dario Amodei – CEO of Anthropic, the makers of Claude – recently published an essay recommending that “a slower pace [in the development and delivery of AI technologies that] would let companies focus and devote even more resources” in the areas of operational excellence, alignment, interpretability, and testing and evaluation. [10][11]
Given recent security failures (see the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident, where OpenAI agents coordinated a multi-day hack of Hugging Face on a shared unsanctioned “message board.” [12]), there is public pressure to ensure AI companies are more responsible for the technologies they are deploying.
Amodei once lead the AI safety research function at OpenAI and eventually left to form Anthropic. [13] However, Amodei also penned an essay two years prior, about what the future could hold with the widespread deployment of AI: [14]
It could be a capitalist economy of AI systems, which then give out resources (huge amounts of them, since the overall economic pie will be gigantic) to humans based on some secondary economy of what the AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans (based on some judgment ultimately derived from human values)... Or perhaps humans will continue to be economically valuable after all, in some way not anticipated by the usual economic models.
Nice – but I’d prefer not to have to rely on AI to “give out resources… to humans based on… what the AI systems think makes sense to reward in humans,” and I’d expect that our fellow humans developing AI believe that “humans will continue to be economically valuable after all…”
I don’t know if this pacing stance is genuine or just pre-IPO positioning – making Anthropic appear to be more concerned about the risks of AI than the rival company also looking to strike it big in an IPO, OpenAI. [15][16] We’ll see…
9/11 – 25 Years Later
This Friday came a quarter-century of remembrance since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
As some of you might know, I lost a dear friend of mine (Max Hammond) on 9/11 and found myself stranded on the East Coast when the transportation system shut down in the subsequent days. The Thousand Oaks Acorn recently spoke with me about those experiences, [17] and I’ve written about this in a previous post, which you can read here. [18]
Max stays pretty close in our memories. We visit the 9/11 memorial each year when my wife, daughter, and I vacation in New York City over the Thanksgiving week; we’ll do the same again this year.
Each year’s anniversary is a little tough. Although, this year’s hits a little harder because of the visibility a quarter-century later. But, of course, Max was worth remembering. He and the others we lost on September 11, 2001, will never be forgotten - at least by me…
Notes and Sources
[1] Stephen Fowler, “Empty seats, socialism and Trump dominate the Republican midterm convention,” NPR, September 11, 2026, https://www.npr.org/2026/09/11/nx-s1-5962848/republican-convention-trump-dividend-vance-midterms
[2] Ibid.
[3] Maria Ramirez Uribe, “Trump promised $5,000 checks if Republicans win the midterms. How would that work?” PBS News, September 10, 2026, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-promised-5000-checks-if-republicans-win-the-midterms-how-would-that-work
[4] Lauren Aratani, “US gross national debt tops $40tn for first time,” The Guardian, August 19, 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/19/us-debt-40-trillion
[5] Fowler, “Empty seats,” NPR, September 11, 2026.
[6] Rich Hasan, “Trump’s (Hard to Believe) Pledge to Give Every American Adult $5,000 If Republicans Win Control of House and Senate is Almost Certainly Protected by the First Amendment Against Bribery or Vote Buying Charges,” Election Law Blog, September 10, 2026, https://electionlawblog.org/2026/trumps-hard-to-believe-pledge-to-give-every-american-adult-5000-if-republicans-win-control-of-house-and-senate-is-almost-certainly-protected-by-the-first-amendment-against-bribery-or-vote-buying/
[7] Steve Reilly, “USA TODAY exclusive: Hundreds allege Donald Trump doesn’t pay his bills,” USA Today, June 9, 2016, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/06/09/donald-trump-unpaid-bills-republican-president-laswuits/85297274/
[8] Glenn Kessler, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly, “Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years,” Washington Post, January 24, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/
[9] Scott Bauer, “Elon Musk likely broke the law by promising voters $1 million payouts, Wisconsin board says,” ABC News, July 15, 2026, https://abc7.com/story/elon-musk-broke-law-promising-voters-1-million-payouts-wisconsin-board-says/19515645/
[10] Dario Amodei, “We Must Pact the Frontier,” September 2026, https://darioamodei.com/post/we-must-pace-the-frontier
[11] “Pacing the Frontier: A statement from 1,386 employees of frontier AI companies,” July 2026, https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/
[12] Ryan Greenblatt, Ajeya Cotra, and Hjalmar Wijk, “Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident,” August 26, 2026, https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/
[13] Karen Hao, Empire of AI, Penguin Press, New York, p 57-58.
[14] Dario Amodei, “Machines of Loving Grace,” October 2024, https://darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace
[15] Echo Wang, “Anthropic IPO launch shifts toward mid-October, sources say,” Reuters, September 4, 2026, https://www.reuters.com/world/anthropic-ipo-launch-shifts-toward-mid-october-sources-say-2026-09-04/
[16] Jason Ma, “Sam Altman confirms OpenAI won’t go public this year, saying an IPO now would come at an ‘ill-advised moment’ given AI safety concerns,” Fortune, September 12, 2026, https://fortune.com/2026/09/12/sam-altman-openai-ipo-delay-ill-advised-moment-safety-concerns/
[17] Michael Montalvo, “A morning that changed everything: Local residents remember 9/11, 25 years later,” Thousand Oaks Acorn, September 11, 2026, https://www.toacorn.com/articles/a-morning-that-changed-everything-local-residents-remember-9-11-25-years-later/
[18] Mic Farris, “9/11. 20 Years Later,” September 11, 2021, https://www.micfarris.com/articles/9-11-20-years-later
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