California state senator Scott Wiener, author of AI safety bills SB 1047 and SB 53, just announced that he is running for Congress! I'm very excited about this.
It’s an uncanny, weird coincidence that the two biggest legislative champions for AI safety in the entire country announced their bids for Congress just two days apart. But here we are.*
In my opinion, Scott Wiener has done really amazing work on AI safety. SB 1047 is my absolute favorite AI safety bill, and SB 53 is the best AI safety bill that has passed anywhere in the country. He's been a dedicated AI safety champion who has spent a huge amount of political capital in his efforts to make us safer from advanced AI.
On Monday, I made the case that donating to Alex Bores -- author of the New York RAISE Act -- calling it a "once in every couple of years opportunity", but flagging that I was also really excited about Scott Wiener.
I plan to have a more detailed analysis posted soon, but my bottom line is that donating to Wiener today is about 75% as good as donating to Bores was on Monday, and that this is also an excellent opportunity that will come up very rarely. (The main reason that it looks less good than donating to Bores is that he's running for Nancy Pelosi's seat, and Pelosi hasn't decided whether she'll retire. If not for that, the two donation opportunities would look almost exactly equally good, by my estimates.)
(I think that donating now looks better than waiting for Pelosi to decide whether to retire; if you feel skeptical of this claim, I'll have more soon.)
I have donated $7,000 (the legal maximum) and encourage others to as well. If you're interested in donating, here's a link.
Caveats:
- If you haven't already donated to Bores, please read about the career implications of political donations before deciding to donate.
- If you are currently working on federal policy, or think that you might be in the near future, you should consider whether it makes sense to wait to donate to Wiener until Pelosi announces retirement, because backing a challenger to a powerful incumbent may hurt your career.
*So, just to be clear, I think it's unlikely (20%?) that there will be a political donation opportunity at least this good in the next few months.
In October, I wrote a post encouraging AI safety donors to donate to the Alex Bores campaign. Since then, I've spent a bunch of time thinking about the best donations for making the long-term future go well, and I still think that the Alex Bores campaign is the best donation opportunity for U.S. citizens/permanent residents. Under my views, donations to his campaign made this month are about 25x better than donations to standard AI safety 501(c)(3) organizations like LTFF.[1] I also think that donations made after December 31st are substantially almost 2 times less effective than donations made this month, because a lot of the value of donations to Bores comes from the value of signaling campaign strength and consolidating support, rather than from spending money on ads, and donations made in January won't become public until April. (See more discussion in my post.)
Some things has happened since then. The RAISE Act, Bores' AI safety legislation, was signed by the governor![2] Also, the big tech super PAC announced that Alex Bores would be their first target. I've been really impressed with how Bores has handled the situation -- see here for an interview with him about that. Bores also just went on Bloomberg's odd lots podcast; I haven't listened to it myself, but I heard that it was a good episode. I have generally been consistently impressed with Bores since the launch of his campaign.
If you're thinking about end-of-year donations, I strongly encourage you to consider donating to Bores. Here's a link to donate, though I recommend thinking about career considerations of political donations before deciding to donate. The maximum legal donation is $7,000.
(I think the second best donation opportunity is the Scott Wiener campaign -- here's a link to donate. Make sure to use this link rather than going to his website, because that'll let his team know that you're donating for AI safety reasons.)
In part, this is because of my bullishness on making the future go well conditioned on no AI takeover. I think Bores is particularly good from this perspective because he came across as particularly competent and high-integrity in a way that I expect to be important beyond AI takeover risk. For donors who only care about mitigating AI takeover, my guess is that donating to Bores is only around 10x better than e.g. LTFF.
Admittedly, in a weakened form, but I'm excited nonetheless.