Fighting for a Better Future

Announcing a new AI policy venture

Hello everyone,

You may have noticed that I haven’t been writing here much the past couple months. Or, perhaps, you didn’t notice at all—we writers always like to vainly imagine that our reading public is hanging on our every word and is as anguished by our silences as we are. Either way, though, I’m excited to share with you what I’ve been up to instead: the Alliance for a Better Future.

Over the past year I’ve found myself thrown headfirst into the shallow pool of conservative AI policy, a virtually non-existent domain until quite recently. That’s a recipe for a concussion, and I feel like I’ve suffered a few along the way, but thankfully the pool has been steadily deepening and widening along the way, and there’s now room for at least a couple dozen of us to start swimming around in it. A sizable share of that small cohort came together last summer on a Signal group, summoned to fight the outrageous proposal then making its way through Congress to pass an “AI moratorium”—a federal ban on states passing any laws regulating AI for a full decade, not to mention nullifying any such laws already on the books. Despite much gaslighting rhetoric about the need for a technology like AI to be regulated by “one national standard,” Congress didn’t have any positive proposal for how it would regulate the most powerful technology in human history instead. It would get back to us on that, it said. In the meantime, we should let the industry cook. After all, we didn’t want China to win, did we?

Thankfully, this absurd non-proposal, passed on party lines through the House, was defeated in one of the great 11th-hour political dramas of recent DC history at 2:30 AM on July 1, 2025, when a provision that looked at first ready to sail through the Senate as part of the President’s must-pass “One Big Beautiful Bill” instead went down in flames by a margin of 99-1. This was the result of an extraordinary coalition that mobilized across partisan lines, but a non-trivial role was played by the heroes within that Signal group.

This motley band of Davids was excited by what we’d achieved with slingshots alone, but if you’ve ever read 1 Samuel, you know that Philistines have an annoying knack of coming back for more, and it’s good to stock up your weapons when you can. Accordingly, our little Signal group stayed in touch over the summer, and gradually added new allies, until we convened a meeting of what I was then calling the “Conservative AI Policy Coalition” in early September to map out a battle plan for Round 2. From that meeting emerged an ambitious agenda to craft a shared statement of principles among conservative tech policy leaders and pro-family advocates and send a message to the administration and Congress that there could be “no preemption without protection”: that is to say, if Congress wants to “preempt” (that is, override or supersede) state laws governing AI, it can only do inasmuch as it passes its own robust protections for families, workers, and communities currently being turned upside-down by Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” mentality. And until Congress did so, conservatives should also send a message to Washington that we would “move fast and fix things,” seeking to advance legislation in the states on critical initiatives like age-gating access to destructive AI companions.

It soon became clear that to achieve these goals, we would need something a bit more institutionally robust than a Signal group. So we went to work with Tim Estes, a rock-ribbed conservative, veteran AI entrepreneur and a force of nature within the national kids online safety movement, to sketch out the blueprint for a new organization that could channel the talent and firepower of existing social conservative institutions into a new effort that would articulate an authentically conservative vision for tech policy. Till now, the national conversation around AI had seemed trapped within a sterile binary framing meant to discredit all opposition to the tech industry: “are you for or against innovation?” But this is not how good governance works. Regulation rarely if ever says a simple “yes” or “no” to a proposed technological innovation; it seeks to channel it. As I wrote last year in The New Atlantis:

We have been told for decades that “you can’t stand in the way of innovation.” Nor should we want to. But we are not facing a choice between libertarianism or Luddism. Markets, like rivers, will follow the path of least resistance. Left entirely to themselves they can wash away whole communities. Thus the makers of technology policy should take inspiration from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: you cannot stop a river from flowing, but you can stop it from catastrophically flooding. The trick is to channel it, to close off certain avenues of advance and then allow the river, of its own power, to forge and deepen an alternative path to the sea — a longer path, sometimes, but one more likely to serve as a force for life rather than death.

In the same way, the government can channel technology development in certain directions, toward human flourishing and strengthening of the family, and away from results that undermine these ends. When hacking the human person gets too easy, the state may have a role to say no, closing off harmful and lazy shortcuts.

This must be our posture for shaping the most powerful technology yet developed. Rather than throw up our hands and passively accept the inevitability of our new artificial overlords, we must assert human agency, both at the individual and at the political level. We must shape this technology toward human ends.

This is the vision for the Alliance for a Better Future, which launched publicly two weeks ago with an incredible leadership team after several months of behind-the-scenes institution-building and public policy work. I’d encourage you to check out the extraordinary website and launch video, which frames up the task before us starkly: America must choose between two futures: one truly dystopian, the other full of hope. ABF’s policy agenda is built around three pillars:

Protecting the American Family

Our families are our future. While technology can strengthen the family and aid in forming the next generation, too much of today’s AI is being designed to hack the human person for easy profit—dismembering families and depriving young people of the opportunity to develop real relationships and true competence. We will fight to hold the tech industry accountable to the families it affects, and put parents in the driver’s seat. We call on companies to design classroom technologies for real education, not engagement. Our children’s future depends on it.

Workforce & Economic Impact

Our founders knew that no free nation could endure without secure property rights and reliable contracts. Today those institutions are under assault: workers and creators are asked to train their own replacements, while Big Tech passes the costs of its ambitions onto the communities least able to bear them. We will fight to keep human creativity and ingenuity at the heart of our economy, and incentivize innovation that augments human labor, respects human dignity, and strengthens human skills, supporting workers who provide for their families and sustain their communities.

American AI the American Way

America must lead on AI, and lead the American way: democratically, transparently, and true to our Constitution. Will Americans remain self-governing citizens, or cede power to forces beyond democratic control? We must protect our digital borders from foreign adversaries, and prevent globetrotting billionaires from building AI that endangers our national security to line their pockets. We must align AI with Main Street values and govern through our time-tested traditions of federalism and subsidiarity, so that AI remains loyal to Americans, not hedge funds.

Our launch has been widely-covered in major media, including Axios, Fox News, The Daily Signal, and Politico—the last of which did a great interview with Tim and with our CEO Janet Kelly last weekend; I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Now that ABF is off to such a fantastic running start, I’m grateful to be able to step back and focus on my day job at American Compass, which has been very generous in its support of my work on this front. In my role going forward, I will be chairing the ABF Policy Council, a virtual who’s who of leaders in conservative tech policy who will be working together to build out this policy agenda.

And, if all goes well, that means I’ll get back to some regular Substacking on my ongoing theme of preserving human agency in an increasingly post-human world. Stay tuned!