The AI Wars Come to Ravenna

It seems likely that 2026 will be known as the year that AI broke through and became a mainstream political issue. Protests against data centers have swept the country, AI agents are launching cyberattacks against their own kind, and former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon became an overnight celebrity after quitting and warning the public that the technology “could kill us all by the end of the decade.” AI is also worming its way into seemingly every facet of everyday life, from restaurant ads to social media to online dating. Depending on who you ask, the technology could make white-collar labor obsolete, usher in a kind of golden age, be more important than fire or electricity, or turn all humans into paperclips. It’s also central to a state legislative race in North Seattle.

Perhaps you’ve seen the paper ads stapled to telephone poles in North Seattle portraying a tiny person being menaced by a giant robot. “ANXIOUS ABOUT AI?” it asks. “Have you been waiting for someone to do something about it? DON’T WAIT ANY LONGER.”

This is an ad for Will Dreher, who is challenging longtime incumbent Representative Gerry Pollet in the 46th Legislative District, which encompasses North Seattle. Though there have been plenty of races in Seattle and elsewhere featuring a fiery progressive running against a more moderate incumbent, this isn’t one of those races. Pollet is generally regarded as a fairly left-wing legislator (though urbanists oppose his views on housing). Rather, Dreher is running primarily because he doesn’t think the Washington State Legislature has moved quickly enough to regulate AI.

Dreher is a Harvard Law School grad who clerked for then-future Supreme Court justices Elena Kagan and Brett Kavanaugh. (The latter posting has become controversial in the election, with Dreher saying he didn’t get to choose who he clerked for; he denounced the conservative Kavanaugh after the judge was accused of sexual assault.) In 2019, he moved to Seattle and became a federal prosecutor, volunteering to work on the January 6 insurrection cases. But at the same time, he was reading about AI development and began to regard the technology as “on par with the development of nuclear power and nuclear weapons,” he says. Dreher thought pushing back against AI was more important than his work as a prosecutor, which helped motivate him to join the law firm Keller Rohrback, where he’s helping sue Apple’s AI business on behalf of authors who claim their copyrights have been violated.

Dreher doesn’t have many pointed critiques of Pollet in particular (he’s praised Pollet’s work on education funding), but thinks the Washington State Legislature as a whole has been slow to regulate AI. Lawmakers should have already passed legislation holding AI companies liable for untoward uses of their products, he argues, pointing to deepfake porn of minors as a particularly nasty application of the technology. He also wants the state to make it clear AI won’t replace certain government employees, like teachers, and enact job-protection measures more broadly. Other states like California and New York, Dreher points out, have passed a lot more AI-related bills, including some that try to address the “catastrophic risk” of the technology.

Pollet describes Dreher as a relative neophyte who is new to both the district and Washington politics writ large. “Will Dreher has never been involved for a minute in legislation,” Pollet says.

Despite his lack of experience, Dreher’s candidacy has caught the attention of people in the AI industry who would like the technology to be better regulated, and as a result, money has poured into his campaign—he’s raised over $304,000, compared to $214,000 for Pollet. Nearly 83 percent of Pollet’s donations come from in-state contributors, compared to just 20 percent for Dreher. As of publication time, about 36 percent of Dreher’s contributions, or over $112,000, come from people in the AI field, including researchers, engineers, and PhD students who have money to throw around and want to support pro-regulation candidates, even if those candidates are in low-profile races.

This is a trend nationwide, with cash-flush AI workers willing to fund obscure races in the name of pushing for greater AI regulation. OpenAI employees are even contributing to a PAC that is countering their executives’ spending. Individuals at these companies and others have funneled cash into a New York assembly race, a California Senate election, and a bid for governor of Alaska. All of those candidates have promoted strict AI regulations. This same dynamic is funneling money to Dreher.

“Will understands that the current AI regulatory regime is woefully inadequate, and that the largest AI companies need to be held to strong safety standards, to ensure that their products don’t pose a risk of catastrophic harm,” one of these out-of-state donors told The Stranger. “Many of my friends who work at AI companies are worried about existential risk from AI and have told me that they want their companies to be much more regulated, so that those risks don’t materialize. So, after chatting with Will, I decided to donate, and I encouraged some of my friends at AI companies to donate, too.”

The politics around AI regulation can get a little murky. Ian Mosher, the founder of a group called Ethical Tech Washington, says that some people concerned about AI are worried it could kill everyone, but others (including himself) view AI as a more normal technology that should be subject to a normal amount of government oversight. “This is a product that needs to have features that people need, that needs to be safe, that needs to be done in a way that is in alignment with our society,” Mosher says. “The people who are creating it need to be responsible stewards of that technology.”

Mosher recently wrote an op-ed for the Seattle Times that declared that “Washington is behind in the regulation of AI” and argued that the Legislature should pass bills ensuring AI companies would be liable for crimes committed by their systems and that these companies must get licenses to content used to train AIs. “Number of bills isn’t necessarily the best measure” for how well a state is regulating AI, Mosher told The Stranger. What he wants to see is “foundational AI legislation” that can protect consumers and the public from all sorts of potential harms. In his op-ed, he called for the Legislature to pass the People’s Privacy Act, first introduced in the State House in 2021, which would require companies to get opt-in permission from users to get access to their data. If that legislation was in place, he argues, it would be harder for corporations to create aggressive AI tools that take advantage of that data to, for example, set grocery store prices that vary by customer (a practice that just got banned in Seattle). Mosher isn’t endorsing either candidate in the 46th.

Pollet is no defender of the AI industry. He sponsored a bill regulating chatbots that passed this year. He’s also been a sponsor of the People’s Privacy Act, and blames opposition from the tech industry, which favors a weaker form of privacy protections (which he calls a “deepfake”), for its failure to pass. He also supports a moratorium on data center construction—as does Dreher and seemingly every other Democrat in town—and says he’s working with legislators in Oregon on an ambitious two-state proposal that would tax data centers in order to create a fund to help offset impacts from AI-related job losses. Oregon and Washington need to partner on this, he says, because “if you tax on one side of the [Columbia] River, they’ll just put the data center on the other side of the Columbia and get their electricity from across the river.” The Legislature hasn’t been ignoring AI issues, Pollet argues—the state just came out with a task force report recommending a slew of regulations, bills are being worked on, and progress is being made.

Win or lose, Dreher will likely give Pollet one of his toughest races since he took office in 2011. He typically wins with over 80 percent of the vote, but got 52 percent in the primary this summer, with Dreher claiming 31 percent and a third candidate, Ron Davis, earning 16. (Davis has since endorsed Pollet.) Pollet claims that Dreher’s AI industry donors will push him to back off taxing data centers. “When you’re funded by AI, and out-of-state people at that, they’re going to have access to you, that’s a reason for concern,” Pollet says. Dreher says that he has always supported a moratorium on data centers and that his AI-linked donors “have publicly called for many other regulations that would likewise hurt their companies’ bottom lines, like slowing or stopping AI development… So I have no reason to believe they oppose a data center moratorium.”

But whoever ends up representing the 46th, AI is going to loom over them—and everyone else in the Legislature. With the federal government’s unwillingness to regulate the new technology, tech-centric states like Washington have to step up.

“We have the opportunity to do things here in Washington,” says Mosher, with a legislature and governor’s mansion both controlled by Democrats who will have some motivation to address AI. “We have the right kind of constituency, the right kind of people to do it.”